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.  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.  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.  "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. " -Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, and Magical Child.