06/10/2026
Introduction
My encounter with Albert Camus began in an Ethics classroom at the University of Delaware in 1974, where his book The Myth of Sisyphus first named something I hadn’t yet found words for — the Absurd, that collision between our hunger for meaning and the universe’s silence. Camus, Sartre and Heidegger tackled this in Existentialism.
The book lived on my shelf for decades, survived moves and milestones, and then was lost in a fire. Years later, passing through Portland Airport, Powell’s Books presented it to me again as if on cue. I bought it without hesitation. Some books find you twice.
Camus was already in my bones before I knew it, planted there by my friend Bob Hicks at University of Delaware, who would pontificate about Heidegger’s Being and Time with the intensity only undergraduates can sustain. That seed lay dormant until I came west to Oregon, where friends enrolled me in Werner Erhard’s est Training, and suddenly Heidegger was no longer dormant — he was alive in the room. I worked on Staff at est’s MIS Department in San Francisco which became Werner Erhard and Associates, where I did MIS computer operations, holding the nervous system of an organization that was rebuilding its airplane engine in flight, transforming est Training into the Landmark Forum.
I was fired — my brain injury, sustained in a car accident on New Year’s Eve 1977, quietly shaping everything I couldn’t yet see. That firing led to finding similar work at The Hunger Project, where I helped build the computer infrastructure for an organization that was itself a pure speech act: declaring commitment to the end of hunger and starvation as a possibility and enrolling the world in this possibility.
What I didn’t know then — what nobody told me, what the medicine of that era couldn’t yet articulate — was that I was living inside an acquired brain injury (ABI), a traumatic brain injury (TBI). The coma had lasted twelve days. I had returned to the world, resumed a life, held jobs, built relationships, and yet something fundamental had shifted in ways I lacked the language to name. This is the quiet truth that millions of ABI survivors carry: the injury is often invisible, to others and to ourselves. Cognition, memory, emotional regulation, the ability to track complexity — these can be profoundly affected while the face in the mirror looks unchanged. (Except for a cool pirate’s 🏴☠️ eyepatch.) For decades I navigated this without a map. Meditation practice became that map.
The practice of training the mind — sitting, returning, sitting again — turns out to be precisely what injured brains need and can use. Not despite the difficulty, but through it. Neuroplasticity, which science has only recently confirmed, is what contemplative traditions have always pointed toward: the mind can change, the patterns can loosen and be retrained, new ways of being are possible. For ABI survivors this is not an abstraction. It is oxygen.
The Gold Mind Meditation Project was founded on this possibility — that every person who has survived a brain injury, however long ago, however invisible their struggle, carries within them the capacity for transformation. The boulder can be met with awareness. The hill can be walked in community. Freedom from suffering is not a distant ideal. It is available, here, in this breath, in this moment, in this mind.
I didn’t take a job — I did a retreat with the Dalai Lama in 2008 at Lehigh University. I founded a project. The Hunger Project declared the end of hunger as a possibility and enrolled the world in it. Gold Mind declares freedom from suffering and neuroplasticity as a possibility and enrolls ABI survivors in it. Same architecture. The Buddha’s own awakening under the Bodhi tree was, in this sense, the original project — and we can bring it alive today.
