**Author:** [[3. Resources/Authors/Michael Gungor|Michael Gungor]] # Book Overview ![[This - Becoming Free Visual.excalidraw]] ## About the Author Michael Gungor is a Grammy-nominated, Dove Award-winning musician who spent most of his life in the evangelical Christian music industry. He co-led the band Gungor with his wife Lisa, toured internationally, started a church called Bloom in Denver, and co-hosted The Liturgists Podcast. His spiritual journey took him from fundamentalist Christianity through atheism, mysticism, psychedelic experience, and eventually into a nondual understanding of reality drawing from Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, and contemplative Christianity. He studied with Ram Dass in Maui, who gave him the name Vishnu Dass. His first book was *The Crowd, the Critic, and the Muse*. ## Central Thesis The source of human suffering isn't external circumstances -- it's our attachment to wanting THIS (the present moment, reality as it is) to be THAT (some imagined better version of reality). Freedom comes not from finding the right beliefs, achieving the right goals, or becoming the right person, but from letting go of our clinging to stories, identities, and desires. The book structures this argument around the Buddha's Four Noble Truths: life is suffering, suffering comes from attachment to desire, the end of clinging is the end of suffering, and there's a way to practice this freedom. Gungor's central move is showing that all our beliefs, identities, and conceptual frameworks are stories -- useful but ultimately illusory -- and that direct experience of THIS moment, without grasping, is where freedom lives. ## Why This Book Matters Deconstruction memoirs are a dime a dozen. What makes this one different is that Gungor doesn't stop at tearing down his old faith. He goes further -- through atheism, through scientific materialism, through mysticism -- and comes out the other side with something constructive: a framework for understanding suffering and freedom that draws from multiple wisdom traditions without being beholden to any of them. The book is also unusually honest about the cost of this journey. Gungor lost his career, his community, his financial stability, and nearly his marriage. He doesn't pretend the path to freedom is painless. For anyone who's been through religious deconstruction, or who's wrestling with the gap between what they believe and how they feel, this book offers a map that doesn't require you to adopt any specific belief system. The only requirement is willingness to let go. --- # Chapter Summaries ## Intentions Gungor opens by addressing the reader as "beloved" and acknowledging that he's an unlikely spiritual guide -- unkempt hair, patchy beard, sci-fi enthusiast. He frames the book as a love letter aimed at reminding readers of who they really are underneath all their stories. The tone is set: personal, irreverent, and disarmingly sincere. ## Part 1: The First Noble Truth -- Life Is Suffering ### The Spa (Part 1, 2012) Gungor describes visiting a luxury spa while trapped in theological and existential angst. Despite having everything -- a loving wife, a daughter, a successful career in Christian music -- he's miserable. He knows his whole world is built on a lie but can't face it yet. The spa becomes the setting for his eventual loss of faith. ### Not Okay A meditation on suffering in the modern age. Despite our unprecedented comfort -- air conditioning, antibiotics, marijuana gummies -- most of us still aren't okay. Gungor argues there's an "endless not-okayness at our core" that no amount of material progress addresses. We walk past miracles every day on autopilot, numb to the wonder of existence. ### One Everything is interconnected. Gungor traces the chain of events required for a single period at the end of a sentence to exist -- 13.77 billion years of cosmic history, evolution, human civilization. He introduces the nondual view through the wave-and-ocean metaphor: waves aren't separate things from the ocean. They're the ocean waving. In the same way, you're not separate from the universe. You're the universe doing what the universe does. ### It's Not the Soap A deeply personal chapter about childhood shame. At five, Gungor's natural sexual curiosity during a playdate led to crushing embarrassment. He resolved to be a "good boy" and spent his teenage years in extreme evangelical piety -- fasting, praying, memorizing scripture, wearing a purity ring. He shares a journal entry revealing the anguish of his struggle with masturbation and the shame spiral it created. The more passionately he pursued purity, the more shame he felt for falling short. ### Broken (1999) Gungor's father, a megachurch pastor, has an affair and abandons the family. The foundation of Gungor's world -- God, church, family, moral certainty -- cracks. He plays worship songs on the white couch with his family and begs his father to come home. ### Bitter The church's response to his father's affair is brutal -- armed guards, permanent banishment, no path to reconciliation. Gungor becomes angry and self-righteous, convinced he's the only rational person in the room. He can't see how deeply his "objective" judgments are shaped by his emotional wounds. ### Church Boy Gungor and Lisa leave Tulsa for a Dutch Reformed megachurch in Michigan, then start their own church, Bloom, in Denver. Despite building the faith community he'd always wanted, the disillusionment deepens. The backstage reality of evangelical Christianity -- the ego, the manipulation, the gap between Jesus's teachings and institutional practice -- erodes his belief. ### The Altar (2009) Alone in a chapel basement, Gungor begs God for help. Nothing comes back. He describes the terrifying feeling of faith slipping away -- losing God would be worse than losing his life, because God was the reason for his life. ### Walking My Dog in the Rain (Part 1) A recurring parable. Fred is desperately trying to stop walking his dog in the rain, praying for willpower, feeling shame when he fails. The point, revealed later: he doesn't even have a dog. The "problem" he's trying to solve doesn't exist in the way he thinks it does. ### Meaningless No matter which political tribe you belong to, no matter what external changes you make, the not-okayness persists. Even getting everything you want wouldn't solve it -- you'd find new reasons to suffer. The futility of desiring THAT rather than loving THIS is the root of all suffering. ## Part 2: The Second Noble Truth -- Suffering Is the Attachment to Desire ### Suffering Two contrasting stories. In one, Gungor walks face-first into a glass wall after a sensory deprivation float, but feels no suffering because there's no ego present to suffer. In another, a relatively minor medical procedure causes intense suffering because of his emotional resistance. The point: pain and suffering aren't the same thing. Suffering is what happens when we desire something to be other than what it is. ### The Spa (Part 2, 2012) The climactic scene. In the spa's relaxation lounge, Gungor tries to pray, can't meditate, can't find any theological framework that works. Out of desperation, he tries Islamic prayer postures from a TV show. Something shifts -- he sees himself from outside, a hollow man desperately trying to hold onto beliefs. He imagines himself clutching a branch in a rushing river and asks: could this river be good? He lets go. The relief is immediate. Nobody is watching. Nobody is judging. He's just a guy in a bathrobe. He walks out, smiles at the receptionist, and means it. ### When God Is THIS A short poem. When God is THIS, God is here. When God is THAT, God is dead. ### Walking My Dog in the Rain (Part 2) Fred takes positive-thinking courses and visualizes not walking his dog in the rain. Things seem to be improving, but only because it's been sunny lately. ### To Catch the Fly We swallow the cat to catch the bird to catch the spider to catch the fly. Our "problems" are often solutions to deeper problems, which are solutions to even deeper ones. Gungor's theological wrestling was a solution for shame, which was a solution for daddy issues, which was a solution for the fundamental not-okayness at his core. Until you address the mechanism that keeps problems mounting, you're just scratching poison ivy. ## Part 3: The Third Noble Truth -- The End of Clinging Is the End of Suffering ### Myths All our beliefs -- religious, scientific, political -- are myths in the deepest sense: big stories that help us interpret reality and give us identity. Myths aren't false stories; they're meaning-making frameworks. Scientific materialism is a myth. Atheism is a myth. The key insight: how we inhabit our myths matters more than their specific content. You can be free within any belief system, as long as it doesn't become your prison. The most destructive acts come from fundamentalism -- taking beliefs too seriously. ### Let There Be / Light (2014) Gungor's daughter Lucette is born with Down syndrome. His initial reaction is fear, shame, and self-pity. He worries it's his fault. But as he and Lisa hold each other and pray over the baby, something breaks open. The experience becomes a catalyst for letting go of stories about what a "good" life looks like. Lucette turns out to be one of the most joyful, present people he knows -- a twerking, birthday-song-singing force of nature who taught him how closed-hearted and bigoted his assumptions were. ### Karma The aftermath of the spa, Lucette's birth, and coming out as a non-believer hits all at once. Career collapse, financial crisis, church drama, relationship strain. But suffering, at a certain point, takes the ability to cling right out of you. You lose the storyline. You just have to pour the Cheerios. Life keeps flowing -- a conversation with a friend, a transcendent sushi dinner, a meditation retreat. Attachment by attachment, the river washes things away. ### Shaman (2016) Gungor takes psilocybin mushrooms for the first time during a ceremony with a shaman. The experience dissolves his sense of being a separate observer in the universe. He wasn't someone wandering through a forest -- he was the forest itself. Not someone in the river choosing to flow -- he was the flow. He can't unsee what he's seen. From then on, his ego is taken off the throne. He still has questions, but he can see they're mechanisms of the ego wanting approval and safety. ### One Becomes Two A deeper exploration of nonduality. Story is what turns One into two. Story draws imaginary lines across an otherwise seamless reality. We need stories to function, but when we believe them too rigidly, we mistake the model for the thing itself. At the deepest level, before language and concept, there's only THIS -- ineffable, unquantifiable isness. The most we can say is neti, neti (not this, not that). ### Walking My Dog in the Rain (Part 3) The punchline. Fred sees a woman happily walking her dog in the rain and has two realizations: walking your dog in the rain isn't the end of the world, and -- more importantly -- he doesn't even have a dog. The "problem" was entirely constructed. ### Letting Go of Yourself The idealized version of yourself -- the one with perfect body fat percentage who never loses their temper -- is an illusion given to you by society. You can't become that person through willpower because the "you" doing the trying doesn't exist as a separate entity. The ego is a coping mechanism, a story told by the brain. The source of anxiety is precisely the desire to become free of anxiety. The only way off the wheel is to let go of the wheel altogether. ### I Am A short poem reminding the reader of their true identity beyond all stories. ## Part 4: The Fourth Noble Truth -- The Way ### Becoming Free Enlightenment isn't a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. It's not somewhere else or some future achievement. It's THIS, right here, right now. Gungor references Ken Wilber's framework: healthy spirituality requires waking up (nondual realization), growing up (mature worldview), cleaning up (shadow work), and showing up (compassion and activism). Waking up alone isn't enough -- an enlightened person can still carry unconscious racism, sexism, or other shadows. ### Practicing Being Spiritual practice is freedom, not a means to freedom. Gungor uses music improvisation as his primary metaphor. Beginners need scales -- rules about which notes are "correct." Masters have internalized the scales so deeply they don't think about them anymore. There are no wrong notes at that level. Religion works the same way: you start with commandments, practice for years, and eventually the rules become second nature. You don't need them posted on the wall because you don't want to steal. The great mystics from every tradition start sounding alike at depth. ### Telling Good Stories Some stories enliven and create new worlds; others imprison and destroy. Gungor explores three stories about the nature of THIS: THIS is God, THIS is Awareness, THIS is Love. He treats them as meaning-making frameworks to hold loosely, not dogmas to believe. ### THIS Is God Gungor reclaims the word "God" while stripping it of its usual baggage. He critiques Christianity's inherent egocentrism -- the entire cosmos revolving around human sin and salvation -- and finds value in Eastern traditions where there's no fundamental divide between creator and creation. His working definition: God is the nonduality beyond existence and nonexistence, the All in All, experienced through infinite names and pronouns. ### THIS Is Awareness (Maui, 2017) A chapter built around Gungor's retreat with Ram Dass in Maui. Ram Dass gives him the name Vishnu Dass and the mantra "I am loving awareness." Gungor walks a country lane repeating it until a pit bull charges him and he finds himself gripping a rock, ready to fight. He laughs, drops the stone, and whispers the mantra again. The chapter argues that if we are conscious, the universe is at least as conscious as we are, because we are the universe. ### THIS Is Love Love isn't the sentimental greeting-card version. It's messy, painful, and often involves accepting suffering. Gungor tells the story of encountering a homeless woman near the Santa Monica pier -- drunk, crying, frail -- and having to lay her down on damp grass to sleep with rats nearby because there's nothing else he can do. He argues that love is most powerful when loving you is loving myself -- when the separation dissolves. Christianity's insistence on fundamental separation between God and creation limits the depth of love it can offer. ### The Problem of Evil The problem of evil dissolves when God is no longer seen as separate from creation. If God is THIS -- the whole works, including suffering -- then asking "why does God allow evil?" becomes nonsensical. Good and evil are constructs born from the stories we tell. This doesn't minimize real suffering or justify oppression, but it reframes the question. ### Free to Suffer Freedom doesn't mean escaping suffering. It means being present to it without being imprisoned by it. Emotions come and go like breath. You don't cling to the in-breath when it's time for the out-breath. Freedom is knowing you're in a dream while still being fully engaged in it. ### Fairy Gardens The book closes with Gungor and his daughters building fairy gardens -- arranging rocks, sticks, and flowers into tiny worlds for imaginary fairies. It's a metaphor for everything in the book: we're all building worlds out of stories, and that's beautiful, as long as we don't forget that the fairies aren't real. Or, more precisely, the fairies are as real as we are -- patterns in the movement of THIS, waves in the ocean, stories within stories. --- # Key Themes and Highlights ## THIS vs. THAT The book's central framework. THIS is the present moment, reality as it is. THAT is whatever we think would make us okay -- the right beliefs, the right body, the right career, the right spiritual experience. Suffering is the gap between THIS and THAT. Freedom is collapsing that gap by fully embracing THIS. ## Stories All the Way Down Every framework for understanding reality -- Christian, atheist, scientific, mystical -- is a story. Stories aren't false; they're meaning-making tools. But when we forget they're stories and start believing them as literal, absolute truth, they become prisons. The way we inhabit our stories matters more than their specific content. ## The Wave and the Ocean Gungor's primary metaphor for nonduality. You can't separate a wave from the ocean. A wave isn't a thing; it's the ocean waving. Humans aren't separate things in the universe; we're the universe humaning. Trying to scoop a wave into a jar kills what makes it a wave. ## Ego as Illusion The ego -- our sense of being a separate self -- is a useful fiction, like a waterfall that appears solid but is made of constantly changing water molecules. The ego isn't a thing to be destroyed; it's a function to stop clinging to. Fred's dog doesn't exist. Neither does the separate self you're trying to improve. ## The Cost of Freedom Gungor doesn't sugarcoat what letting go costs. He lost his faith, his career, his community, his financial stability, and nearly his family. Freedom isn't free in the colloquial sense. But the alternative -- clinging to stories that no longer serve you -- is its own kind of prison. --- # Notable Quotes > "THIS is all there is. Yesterday and tomorrow are just wounds and stories." > "When God is THIS, God is here. When God is THAT, God is dead." > "Waves are the ocean waving." > "How we inhabit our myths is generally more important than the specific dogmas, language, and metaphors that these myths use." > "I am loving awareness." --- # Connections & Further Reading - [[The Power of Now]] by Eckhart Tolle -- Same territory of present-moment awareness, but Gungor's version is earthier, funnier, and less prescriptive. - [[Be Here Now]] by Ram Dass -- A direct influence. Gungor studied with Ram Dass and received the name Vishnu Dass. The mantra "I am loving awareness" comes from Ram Dass. - [[Falling Upward]] by Richard Rohr -- Rohr's framework of two halves of life maps directly onto Gungor's journey from certainty to mystery. Rohr is one of the Christian mystics Gungor explicitly draws from. - [[The Wisdom of Insecurity]] by Alan Watts -- Watts is a frequent reference point. His treatment of the "wiggly" nature of reality and the illusion of the separate self runs parallel to Gungor's argument. - [[The Untethered Soul]] by Michael Singer -- Similar territory on the observer vs. the observed, and the mechanics of letting go. - [[Faith After Doubt]] by Brian McLaren -- Another deconstruction narrative, but McLaren stays within Christianity. Gungor goes further out and doesn't come back to the same place. - [[The Religion of Tomorrow]] by Ken Wilber -- Gungor explicitly cites Wilber's framework of waking up, growing up, cleaning up, and showing up as essential to healthy spirituality. - [[When Things Fall Apart]] by Pema Chodron -- Buddhist perspective on the same territory: suffering as teacher, groundlessness as freedom. --- # Personal Reflection The book's most powerful move is the "Walking My Dog in the Rain" parable. Fred spends years agonizing over a problem that doesn't exist in the way he thinks it does. He doesn't have a dog. The thing he's fighting against -- the version of himself he's trying to fix or transcend -- isn't a real, separate entity. It's a story. That reframe is worth the entire book. What hits hardest is Gungor's honesty about the Lucette chapter. Most authors would present the birth of a child with Down syndrome as an immediate lesson in acceptance. Gungor admits his first thought was "Is this my fault?" and his second was hoping the surgery wouldn't work. That raw honesty is what makes the eventual transformation credible. He doesn't pretend he was a good person who learned a gentle lesson. He admits he was frightened, selfish, and bigoted in ways he didn't know he was -- and that the letting go happened not through willpower but through being broken open by life. The music-as-spiritual-practice chapter is the most original section. The analogy between learning scales and learning religious commandments -- both necessary scaffolding that eventually falls away when the practitioner matures enough to just play -- is genuinely illuminating. It explains why the great mystics from different traditions sound so similar: they've all transcended their individual scales and are just playing music. The book occasionally gets circular -- the THIS/THAT framework, once established, gets restated many times in slightly different language. But that may be the point. Letting go isn't a concept you understand once; it's a practice you return to again and again. The repetition mirrors the process.