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.