Michael Alan Singer is a bestselling author, a meditation center founder, and a former software programmer. His two books, The Untethered Soul and The Surrender Experiment, were New York Times bestsellers. In 1975, he founded Temple of the Universe, a long-established yoga and meditation center for people of any religion or belief to experience inner peace. On the business side, Singer is a notable figure in the medical software industry. He created the Medical Manager, one of the very first programs that helped medical practitioners to digitize their medical records. Medical Manager is now a recognized achievement archived in the Smithsonian Institution. When Medical Manager was acquired by WebMD, a billion-dollar public company which focused on medical data management, Singer continued as executive VP, physician software strategies, and head of research and development and chief software architect of WebMD Practice Services. He resigned from WebMD in 2005 and focused on writing.
Publications
Singer has written four books, and all of them belong to the genre of religion/spirituality.
The Search for Truth is Singer's first book, which was written long before he became famous as a writer. According to Singer's account, this book was written as a request from his mentor in his university, as the latter insisted the former to “turn in something for him to read” after the young Singer refused to do a doctoral dissertation.
The Surrender Experiment is Singer's second bestselling book, which is in fact an autobiography. In this book, Singer describes his journey of how he became interested in meditation, how he started the Temple of the Universe and the Medical Manager Corporation, etc. The central theme of the book is his attempts at "surrendering yourself to Life itself", or not letting his personal ego intervene with the flow of life, and how he achieved amazing things as a result. He also identifies that The Three Pillars of Zen by Philip Kapleau and Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda were responsible for starting his lifelong exploration of Zen and spirituality. Like his first bestseller, this book also managed to become a New York Times bestseller.
During his time at WebMD, Singer was prosecuted by the Department of Justice along with other members of the top management for securities fraud. The charges were eventually dropped. According to Singer’s account, he was being framed by another top executive who invented the fraud story in order to "work a deal" with the FBI to reduce his own punishment.
