The Untethered Soul

The Untethered Soul was released in 2007, an important time in the United States for matters of spirituality and mindfulness. General interest in meditation practices as effective ways to reduce stress and increase quality of life, including scientific research undertaken to demonstrate these effects, was at a high point during this early 21st-century period. At the same time, the New Atheism movement took off with the publication of massively popular books like Sam Harris’s The End of Faith (2004) and Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion (2006) that savagely criticized mainstream spirituality, mostly in the form of organized religion. Finally, while “New Age” as a catch-all label for spiritually minded books and beliefs was on the decline by the dawn of the 21st century, “spirituality” became more mainstream than ever as indicated by celebrity culture, including Oprah’s controversial book club selection in 2008, Eckhart Tolle’s spiritual self-help bestseller A New Earth.

Writing at the very start of the 21st century, sociologist Wade Clark Roof opined that as this new century unfolds, “we can expect a society in which spiritual concerns are widely dispersed […] and individuals taking an active, and often largely independent, role in cultivating their own inner lives” (Roof, Wade Clark. Spiritual Seeking in the United States: Report on a Panel Study, 2000). This has turned out to be true; despite a rise in evangelical Christianity in the United States in the early 2000s associated with the George W. Bush presidency, the September 11 attacks, and the advent of the Iraq War in 2003, traditional religious traditions are increasingly giving way to personalized spiritual journeys drawing from various traditions. Spiritual self-help books, which tend to draw from a mixture of Eastern traditions, were mainstays of the early 2000s: Author Deepak Chopra had become a household name in the 1990s, and authors like Eckhart Tolle sold millions of books with celebrity endorsements throughout the decade. It becomes clear during this period that spirituality can be divorced from traditional religion and still be useful; Sam Harris, one of the poster boys of the New Atheist movement, went on to publish Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion in 2014 and now distributes a guided meditation app.

With the rise of spirituality and mindfulness literature and practices in the 21st century comes renewed criticism of these practices. Christian criticisms of “New Age” beliefs and even yoga trace back to before this century, but criticisms from the progressive left are new. These are summed up by Ronald Purser in his article “The mindfulness conspiracy” in The Guardian. Purser writes that “neoliberal mindfulness promotes an individualistic vision of human flourishing, enticing us to accept things as they are, mindfully enduring the ravages of capitalism” (14 Jun 2019). Purser’s concern is that while everybody is busy finding their own enlightenment, the state of our world will be left to disintegrate without any collective political organizing to fix things. Climate change, political corruption, and nuclear proliferation will be permitted to destroy the Earth while each of us in our spiritual silo will watch the destruction from the seat of pure consciousness. The Untethered Soul does not address these concerns directly, but they are relevant because of the consequences they imply.