After the Absolute

<p>Richard Rose was an unlikely Zen master: A rugged plainspoken ornery West Virginian he scraped out a living raising goats planting crops and painting houses. But Richard Rose had a secret: Having once vowed to find the Truth or die trying Rose experienced a cataclysmic spiritual awakening at age 30 that thrust him into Everything-ness and Nothing-ness or what he called the Absolute. The experience left him with only one earthly desire: to do anything for anyone on a similar quest for Truth.</p><p> </p><p>David Gold was an unlikely student: An arrogant ambitious and egotistical law-student Gold only agreed to meet the enlightened hillbilly in the hopes of showing him up. But when Rose turned the tables by seeing right through Gold and painting a devastatingly accurate picture of the fears and obsessions that ruled his life a humbled Gold found himself hungry to know more.</p><p> </p><p>Thus began a remarkable 15-year adventure-part spiritual odyssey part legal thriller-in which death threats corrupt politicians and life-threatening cancer run parallel to glimpses of the divine and extraordinary manifestations of timeless wisdom.</p><p> </p><p class=ql-align-justify>After the Absolute is one of the most gripping intensely interesting dramatic and indeed romantic-heroic-mythic yet poignantly human accounts I have ever read. It would make a fantastic if unbelievable film and is a profoundly important document. This book throws light on the perennial what-and-why enigma of our species reveals the makings of a new cosmology and surely gives glimpses into as-yet undeveloped potentials we humans hold within us. That all this is found in an utterly absorbing narrative proves the old adage that truth is stranger than fiction.</p><p class=ql-align-justify> </p><p class=ql-align-justify>-Joseph Chilton Pearce author of <em>The Crack in the Cosmic Egg</em> and <em>Magical Child</em>.</p><p><br></p>