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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
"Thinking the Unthinkable" recounts Gold's adventures during his lifelong spiritual search, and the lessons he learned from some very unlikely spiritual "teachers"—a West Virginian hillbilly Zen Master, a corrupt Hare Krishna leader, and a Buddhist monk imprisoned for drug smuggling. Gold explores the nature of the student-teacher relationship, the creative tension between individualism and authority. He addresses questions such as, "How do you find a legitimate, trustworthy teacher, a good 'coach' whose advice you follow for your own good, even when you don't want to? And how do you know when to follow your intuition and be your own teacher?"
Gold has recounted his experiences in his book, After the Absolute. Joseph Chilton Pearce, world-renowned author of Crack in the Cosmic Egg and Magical Child, writes in his introduction to Absolute that Gold's story is "one of the most gripping, intensely dramatic…heroic-mythic yet poignantly human accounts I have ever read. [H]is account is not just a superb narrative but THE universal drama. [Gold is] an exceptional human, mature, kind, intelligent, responsible, the kind of citizen our society and earth need so badly."
Upon graduation from law school at Duquesne University in 1975, Gold founded Gold, Khourey, and Turak in Moundsville, WV. Though his peers considered setting up shop in the backwoods professional suicide, Gold did so in order to study with American Zen Master Richard Rose, whom he had met at the University of Pittsburgh. An ambitious young man, he had at first dismissed Rose, who to all appearances was a short, stocky, cantankerous hillbilly. He soon realized his mistake. "Rose knew something. I could tell that from the first time I spoke with him. He was awake in the truest sense of the word." Gold spent the next fifteen years as a student of Rose's and a successful trial attorney, his firm appearing in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and on The Today Show.
Just down the road from Rose's humble farm was a spiritual "teacher" of quite another sort. Kirtinanda Swami (a.k.a. Keith Hamm) was the leader of a Hare Krishna community who attracted thousands of devotees to his grandiose, gold-covered temple. Unlike Rose, Hamm was corrupt, his rampant misdeeds chronicled in Monkey on a Stick: Murder, Madness and the Hari Krishnas by John Hubner and Lindsay Gruson. After Gold sued on behalf of a former Krishna member and broke up Hamm's cult, Hamm put out a contract to have both Gold and Rose killed, and now is incarcerated in a federal penitentiary for racketeering. In his lecture, Gold contrasts the vast difference between the two spiritual teachers Rose and Hamm, and the lessons he learned from the experience.
Another colorful teacher Gold discusses is Buddhist monk Fleet Maull, who was sentenced to federal prison for drug smuggling. In prison Maull had to face his double life at last, and went on to atone for his mistake by starting the National Prison Hospice Association and The Prison Dharma Network. Gold heard his inspiring story in 1994 on National Public Radio's Fresh Air, and immediately contacted Maull. Mutually impressed, the two went on to produce a film called The Prison Sutras, which placed at the NC Independent Film Festival and was aired on public TV.
For the past seven years Gold has volunteered his time mentoring college students in the Self Knowledge Symposium alongside the SKS Foundation Executive Director, August Turak. His talk has won rave reviews from adults and students alike. Says Evan Harrison, UNC '03, "I thought I had all the pieces of my life nailed down and in neat order—Dave blew that all away during his talk. I left the talk thinking I've never been so scared and so excited."