Authors Like Michael A. Singer

Tolle and Singer teach the same first step: notice the thinking mind and stop identifying with it. Tolle puts the emphasis on presence in the moment, Singer on letting go of the inner resistance the voice creates. Both reached their widest audience through Oprah Winfrey.

Both were American academics who turned away from the expected career toward an inner life: Alpert lost his post at Harvard, Singer never wrote his dissertation. Still Here, on ageing and illness, pairs well with The Surrender Experiment: both are about accepting what life brings.

Decades before Singer, Yogananda offered Western readers yoga and meditation as a path for people of any faith, the principle the Temple of the Universe is built on. Yogananda writes as a devotee recounting his teachers; Singer writes as a businessman reporting what happened to him.

Krishnamurti asks the question Singer answers: can you see your own conditioning without a method or a teacher? He is sterner and less consoling, and refuses the practical steps Singer gives.

The Wisdom of Insecurity addresses the same modern anxiety Singer writes about, more than half a century earlier, and The Book argues that the self is not a separate ego. Watts is the more playful writer, Singer the more practical.

Chödrön and Singer teach the same move in different words: when pain arises, do not close around it, relax and let it pass through. When Things Fall Apart is the book to read beside The Untethered Soul in a hard season.

Where Singer asks you to watch the mind, Thích Nhất Hạnh asks you to come back to the breath and the task in front of you. Both make a practice out of ordinary life rather than retreat; his books are gentler and more rooted in a tradition.

Kabat-Zinn takes the practice Singer describes out of the temple and into the hospital, with research to back it. Read him if The Untethered Soul appeals but you want the secular, clinical version.

Spira takes Singer’s idea of the witness further: not only are you not your thoughts, he argues, but awareness itself is all there is. Read You Are the Happiness You Seek if The Untethered Soul left you wanting the philosophy behind it.

Burkeman complicates the self-help promise that any book, Singer’s included, can deliver lasting peace. He shares Singer’s advice to stop fighting reality, but he is sceptical of transformation and writes as a journalist, not a teacher.