Suzanne Segal (Collision With the Infinite)

[Reefs]

As promised, I am going to do a detailed book review of Suzanne Segal’s autobiography Collision with the Infinite: A Life Beyond the Personal Self. It is an interesting book that inspired and probably also bewildered many who were equally drawn to the teachings of non-duality like Suzanne herself.

I’ll go thru the book chapter by chapter and try to give a short summary with some quotes and also a short commentary. You are free and welcome to post your own commentary to what Suzanne has written as well to what I am writing here.

For those who don’t have the book, you can read it online for free here:

archive.org/details/collisionwithinf00sega

(You just need to create a free account and then you can borrow the book for an hour. When your time is up you can borrow it again.)

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Chapter 1 – Early Years


Suzanne begins her book with recalling a ‘game’ she used to play when she was a child, which seems to set the tone for what she was about to experience later, as a young adult, an early experience that seems to have become some sort of theme in her life. She writes:

I used to meditate on my name. As a child of seven or eight I would sit cross-legged, eyes closed, on the long white couch in my parent’s living room and say my name over and over to myself. The name would reverberate in my mind with each repetition, starting off solid and strong. My name, who I was. Then fainter, repeating, repeating, repeating, until a threshold was crossed and the identity as that name broke, like a ship released suddenly from its mooring to float untethered on the ocean waves. Vastness appeared. The name became a word only, a collection of sounds pulsing in a vast emptiness. There was no person to whom that name referred, no identity as that name. No one.

Then fear would arise, my heart would pound hard in my ears, and I would struggle for air, my lungs squeezed in fear’s iron grip. I would stop, get up from the couch, walk around, force myself back from the vastness and into the identity of that name. It was too frightening to bear for one so young. But later that day I would return to the couch, sit again, start the name.

Suzanne Segal, Collision With the Infinite, Chapter 1

She doesn’t go very deep into her family background. Her parents were immigrants who had suffered severe hardships during the war in Europe. Her father seemed to have found a way to cope with these experiences and later built a successful business. But her mother never seemed to be able to recover from the horrors she had witnessed. Suzanne describes her as exuding a “poignant melancholy” and “sadness”. And not just an atmosphere of sorrow, but also fear, which she seemed to have passed on to little Suzanne who was terrified every time her mother left the house.

When Suzanne was 15, her mother went on a trip back to Europe to visit some of the people who helped her escape to America. And during that trip her mother fell into deep depression and had to be hospitalized and never really recovered. Suzanne says that she took over as “acting mother” during that time and took care of her father and siblings as best as she could. Basically, she explains, she and her mother switched roles and never actually switched back.

So there seems to have been some early drama and trauma in her relationship with her mother which may have some relevance to the events happening told at the very end of the book.

Another theme that the reader will recognize thru-out the book is her fascination with what she calls ‘the vastness’ (or emptiness, or silence – we here would call it 'Source', or 'Self' or the 'Infinite', or '_____'). In fact, she says that silence was her first love, as she recalls a memorable scene that happened on a school trip in the wilderness:

I yearned to experience a vastness that I knew so intimately yet had never encountered in the world. I found it in those mountains. Each night, while everyone else in the group slept, I wandered the area around our campsite under the hugeness of the sky, moved beyond belief at the immensity of the night. It was in those mountains that I met silence again, never knowing when the first time had been yet needing no more than a moment of its presence to rejoice at our reunion. Silence was my first love.

Suzanne Segal, Collision With the Infinite, Chapter 1

At age 18, after just having entered college, her brother introduced her to Transcendental Meditation and she started meditating regularly. She joined a TM group, they gave her a mantra to meditate on and there it was again, she experienced silence again - and got hooked:

I kept repeating the mantra out loud until he instructed me to begin saying it more and more softly, then just silently to myself. I closed my eyes and started meditating. After a few minutes, I could feel myself settling down. Within a few more minutes, I knew I would meditate for the rest of my life. Sitting in that chair, repeating that Sanskrit word to myself in my mind, I was tenderly drawn into the embrace of my beloved silence.

Suzanne Segal, Collision With the Infinite, Chapter 1

TM became her new focus in life.

[Reefs]

Chapter 2 – The Transcendent Field

Still at college, she signed up for a mediation retreat and started having spiritual experiences that shifted her perspective of reality significantly. She writes:

Nearly three hours after I had begun meditating the first morning of the retreat, I opened my eyes and rose from my cushion as if I were drunk, walking without the sensation of possessing a body. The world no longer looked the same; solid matter had been transformed into the luminous transparency of silence… My mode of perceiving had been jarred out of its ordinary pattern. It was impossible to focus separately on objects because the boundaries between them had receded into the background, supplanted by a luminosity so powerful that everything in the visual field appeared to melt together into one large radiant mass.

Suzanne Segal, Collision With the Infinite, Chapter 2

Suzanne wasn't sure if she was maybe doing something wrong and so she asked one of the teachers who just  smiled and said, “Enjoy the bliss!” – and when she heard the word ‘bliss’, she felt relief, because the only word that would come close to describing her new state of being was indeed bliss. But after several weeks in that elevated state of being, the experience slowly started fading away.

At that point, she decided to become a mediation teacher and signed up for an intensive training course in Italy. She received instructions in asanas, pranayama and meditation, five hours in the morning and another five hours in the afternoon.

Suzanne describes the training in the tradition of Maharishi as “rigorous” because he wanted his teaching preserved as purely as possible. During the course, which was very demanding, the course leaders were always on the watch for people showing signs of “unstressing” and would intervene immediately if necessary. She recalls one particular example:

One woman who began to hear the “voices of the angels” was moved to a room next to the course leader’s and told to begin cutting down her meditation until she was sitting only twenty minutes a day. Then she was asked to leave the course. She became furious and demanded to speak with Maharishi privately about the decision. Her request was denied, and a guard was posted at her door to prevent her from leaving her room or speaking with anyone from the course. Screams, shouts, and hysterical crying could be heard emanating from her room, but we never saw her again. Our only information was provided by the course leader, who maintained that she was fine and that one of her family members had come to collect her.

At the end of the course, just before Maharishi arrived, one young man began exhibiting severe paranoia. He haunted the hallways of the hotel, springing from doorways to rant about communist plots, spy telescopes trained on his window, and bugging devices in his room. He tried to intercept Maharishi as he entered the hotel to warn him of the dangers lurking inside, but Maharishi merely smiled at him and offered him a pink rose while signaling the course leader to prevent him from approaching any further. Arrangements were soon made for the young man’s departure. Frankly, we all worried about him and secretly prayed that nothing like that would happen to us.

Suzanne Segal, Collision With the Infinite, Chapter 2

Suzanne’s meditations stopped being blissful, which terrified her. And as far as she could tell, she seemed to be the only one in the group who had such experiences of severe fear, which only increased the fear. She decided to talk to Maharishi about this, but he seemed rather removed from the rest of the group, always surrounded by guards and practically unapproachable. Maharishi actually told them if they would meditate 6-8 years, they surely would get enlightened. He also gave them descriptions of “signposts” along the way that would help them to assess their position and progress on the path. He taught that enlightenment would come in 3 distinct stages:

The first was Cosmic Consciousness, the stage characterized by the witness, an awareness that watched while remaining separate from all phenomena and that was not overshadowed by the cycles of waking, dreaming, or sleeping. The witness, in other words, remained “awake” even as the body and mind slept, dreamed, or functioned in the world.

The next stage was God Consciousness, in which one perceived the manifest world as resplendent with sacredness, even though a separation continued to exist between “I” and “other.” In this stage, the witness, which had previously remained detached and flat, disappeared in “God’s consciousness,” which was a sublime realm of perception permeated with divine love.

The final stage was Unity Consciousness, in which separation of any kind was obliterated as consciousness expanded to encompass all of creation. The Unity state did not admit any duality, was bathed in the purity of Oneness, and was final and complete.

Suzanne Segal, Collision With the Infinite, Chapter 2

Now, that’s rather interesting. Above all, it once again shows that different people can and actually do mean very different things when they use the term CC. Ironically, Maharishi’s definition of CC also differs from the traditional yoga definition of CC, which is always referring to unity consciousness (at least AFAIK). And to add even more confusion, Maharishi insisted that unity consciousness could only be reached with the help of a guru who would be the only one able to recognize that state and confirm it, “Yup, that’s it!”…

I do have several disagreements with this. First of all, the way we use the term CC here, it always refers to unity consciousness. Secondly, since SR acausal, it follows that no one can give it and no one can deny it to anyone. Thirdly, if it takes someone else to confirm SR in order to be sure, then it ain’t SR. Once SR happens, you can’t possible not recognize it and miss it. (See Sadhguru’s talk: "How Do I Know if I am Enlightened?" here).

Suzanne didn’t find that odd though. She was rather relieved to know that Maharishi would eventually confirm her state of unity consciousness, so she wouldn’t have to figure it out all by herself and worry about it.

When Suzanne returned home, she and her boyfriend (another TM practitioner and teacher) were busy teaching and running a meditation center. She even managed to get her parents to meditate because they couldn’t help witnessing the positive effects meditation had on their children (her brother was part of the TM group as well). They especially liked the strict anti alcohol policy. Maharishi taught that alcohol is “poison to the nervous system” and so no one dare to touch it, lest it would interfere with their practice and progess.

What Suzanne found odd though was that some TM teachers, after TM having become very popular, were getting drunk not on alcohol but on power and influence, and instead of exuding an atmosphere of kindness and compassion (as taught by Maharishi), they became angry, controlling and vindictive.

According to Suzanne, Maharishi taught that siddhis (special powers) are distractions on the path and rather useless if the goal is enlightenment. But now, he seemed to have changed his mind because he suddenly offered a special 6 month siddhi course for advanced students in Switzerland. So she went to Europe for 6 months and started having powerful spiritual experiences again. The purpose of the course seemed to have been to produce “Governors of the Age of Enlightenment” who then would go out into the world, “heralding in the Age of Enlightenment” with the help of their meditation practice, sending joy and bliss and peace into the world.

Suzanne didn’t really like these siddhis. What she didn’t like either was the increasingly abusive atmosphere there, or what she called “an obvious lack of compassion” which seemed to go counter the declared goal of the organization of developing higher consciousness. So she suddenly started having doubts about the entire message of the organization. Maharishi was also nowhere to be seen. And what was worse, while she was thinking about leaving the organization, her boyfriend (at that time already her fiancé) decided to fully dedicate himself to the organization and broke up the engagement. Devastated, Suzanne returned home. Her parents thought another trip to Europe may cheer her up, so they went to Switzerland again and there she was finally able to talk to Maharishi about her fear issues:

“Maharishi,” I began, “I must ask you about an experience that I’ve been bothered with for over a year. Whenever I have clear experiences of transcending, I’m attacked by an overwhelming fear that makes me feel like I’m going to die right there if I don’t stop meditating.”
Maharishi broke into peals of laughter, a response I had not anticipated.
“Don’t worry about the fear," he said, still laughing. “It’s just the body holding on to the world. You must let go of the world to transcend, but the body becomes afraid because it thinks the world is all there is. You must not listen to the fear of the body—just let go."

Suzanne Segal, Collision With the Infinite, Chapter 2

Now she had her answer and a clear instruction of how to deal with it, but she wasn’t all that satisfied with that answer it seems, because she knew she couldn’t let go just like that. And she was right. It took her many years until she finally let go, out of sheer exhaustion.

[shadowplay]

Thanks for posting these, she’s a fascinating figure. I find that some of her quotes are spot on and they have that palpable air of someone who is speaking authentically. Some of her later descriptions are not quite as convincing and I sometimes have the sense that she is trying tailor the accounts of her experience to fit with the prevailing teachers and teaching frameworks that she encountered. Later on she expresses doubts herself regarding some of her claims. But overall a worthwhile read.

[stardustpilgrim]

I think Segal experienced a version of the phantom limb experience. She actually did lose self, as one can lose a limb. But she experienced (psychological) pain because of a kind of shadow self still existing in old neural pathways. She wanted in a way to resurrect self. But it was completely gone, as gone as an amputation. But also not-completely-gone, as phantom limb pain.

[Reefs]

Jul 13, 2021 5:58:53 GMT -5 shadowplay said:

Thanks for posting these, she’s a fascinating figure. I find that some of her quotes are spot on and they have that palpable air of someone who is speaking authentically. Some of her later descriptions are not quite as convincing and I sometimes have the sense that she is trying tailor the accounts of her experience to fit with the prevailing teachers and teaching frameworks that she encountered. Later on she expresses doubts herself regarding some of her claims. But overall a worthwhile read.

It's actually fun writing this review. Going thru her book with a fine-tooth comb has been on my to-do-list for a long time because, as you say, there are a lot of things she says that ring true, but some other things she says that are not really adding up. So there's a bit of mystery that is asking to be resolved.

And I read this book more than 20 years ago, shortly after it came out, when I was still a seeker. So I remember it a bit differently. Actually, at that time, having just transitioned from Zen to Advaita, and getting familiar with the concept of no-self, I found her account of no-self slightly appalling, wondering how on earth could anyone want this? That couldn't possibly be the goal, could it? I'm not even sure if I read the entire book, because for a long time, I wasn't aware of her rather late happy ending, when she eventually found peace of mind and her brain tumor also seemed to have escaped my attention. So this is mostly for me to finally sort some things out in regard to Suzanne and her story. And if you guys get something out of this too, all the better!

And there's also always the question, when her name comes up on the forum, if what she experienced was really just some kind of psychological disorder or something more, something that you read about in spiritual books, i.e. a realization of the highest order.

Her views about her 'condition' certainly kept changing over time. In the epilogue it is said that she eventually accepted that a self does exist and yet ultimately doesn't. Apparently, that one year between her book launch and her death, she also spend time cleaning up some long suppressed psychological issues. She was a trained psychotherapist after all.

I think what people may find appealing about her style is that she seems to be free from any kind of belief system or ideology. She doesn't try to sell something. She just presents the raw data, with the bare minimum of interpretation or spin on her part, mostly just for context. And she doesn't really use any specialized vocabulary, so it's easy to read and easy to understand.

The book is definitely a classic by now!

[Reefs]

Jul 13, 2021 9:55:23 GMT -5 stardustpilgrim said:

I think Segal experienced a version of the phantom limb experience. She actually did lose self, as one can lose a limb. But she experienced (psychological) pain because of a kind of shadow self still existing in old neural pathways. She wanted in a way to resurrect self. But it was completely gone, as gone as an amputation. But also not-completely-gone, as phantom limb pain.

That's an interesting perspective. However, her main problem was the constant fear factor. When she lived in Paris, after the bus stop incident, she actually had to change her bed sheets every morning because they were wet from all the sweating the fear caused overnight. And as you can see in the review so far, that fear has been with her since she was a child. So there definitely are psychological factors playing a significant role here.

But the way she describes that witnessing mode actually reminds me of some out of body experiences I've had in the waking state. It was something similar, the body does everything as usual, the people around won't notice it at all, but your center of perception is suddenly not centered in the body anymore, but outside the body. It's totally weird, but I found it rather amusing instead of frightening and it just lasted for minutes instead of months or years.

Maybe some others can relate to this as well. But her witnessing mode also continued in sleep. So in that sense, it's something different from what I had experienced.

[Reefs]

Chapter 3 – Prelude to Emptiness

Suzanne quit TM and went to California to continue with academic life. After all these years of silent contemplation and exploring inner worlds, she suddenly seemed hungry for life and worldly activities. Now she meditated only sporadically and obviously enjoyed her new and very active life. She eventually graduated with a degree in English Literature and then left for Paris. Why exactly Paris, she didn’t know, it just seemed “it was the next obvious thing to do” – something she would say often when she looks back, searching for a reason why she made this or that decision. This kind of attitude became part of her general approach to life.

According to Suzanne, in Paris, she quickly learned to speak French like a native and two years later, she also married a French native and was about to start a family. However, her happiness was short-lived because unfinished business kept bubbling up. After she arrived in Paris, she had completely stopped meditating. And the superficial life in Paris, the “cult of surfaces” as she calls it, didn’t seem to be a match to someone like Suzanne who was longing for a life of spirituality and the deep mysteries of existence since her early childhood. Apparently, she also wasn’t done with the TM community yet. She writes:

I was also angry at Maharishi, deeply disappointed in the spiritual world he represented, hurt that I hadn’t found the enlightenment he had promised I would attain in six to eight years. Maybe it was the death of my own naivete I was mourning as I lashed out at Maharishi in my mind.

Suzanne Segal, Collision With the Infinite, Chapter 3

Also, while fluent in French, she found it stressful constantly having to speak in a foreign language and felt that, although she had perfect command of the language, she never could fully communicate what she wanted to say. Which became another factor that added to her feeling of being out of place. In short, she wasn’t really herself anymore but decided to keep up appearances:

I began to feel trapped. The happiness I had enjoyed during the years of regular spiritual practice had dimmed to a faint memory. A crust of despair and cynicism had formed around me, making it impossible to deny that I had been gripped by a deep loneliness. The loneliness soon gave way to intense anxiety and then began erupting with alarming frequency into fullblown panic attacks. I was sinking into confusion while desperately trying to look like I had everything under control.

Suzanne Segal, Collision With the Infinite, Chapter 3

So up to this point, my personal impression is that, all in all, her spiritual practices proved to be rather pointless. She had no purpose in life, no idea who she really was, no peace of mind, lived a life she didn’t want to live and also seemed to be on the run from past negative experiences. And soon things should take a turn for the worse when keeping up the appearance of normalcy became almost impossible. Suzanne doesn’t go into much detail, but she is alluding to some sort of bargain she had with her husband, Claude, that marrying him would automatically mean to have children, lots of children. And somehow, understandably, she didn’t feel ready for that next step. She managed to postpone pregnancy for over a year, but then she eventually gave in and almost immediately got pregnant – "ill-prepared", as she adds later.

[Reefs]

Chapter 4 – Collision with Emptiness

This is the longest and probably the most quoted chapter of the entire book. Suzanne’s perspective of realty started shifting again. She had one of those “luminosity” spiritual experiences again she had described in chapter 2. The difference this time was that she had no one she could share this with. Her husband certainly wasn’t the one to talk to about these things. And so she tried even harder to appear as normal as possible while inside quietly wondering if she had gone insane and – yet again – became absolutely terrified. But that was just a one time event. The shift in perception continued and she now had regular perception altering “episodes” that could last from several minutes to several hours:

During these episodes, the world appeared to be one-dimensional, as if it were a movie set cut from cardboard with nothing behind it. The Parisian scenery appeared flat, empty, and cartoonlike, lacking dimension or solidity. In addition, all the distinct edges that had previously marked separations between things took on a fuzzy liquidity without clear delineation, flowing together in an ocean-like movement. Objects that had previously seemed stable appeared to be simultaneously larger and farther away, pulsating gently in a single motion of life, subsisting in their own perceptual strata that was unreachable to my astounded mind. Each time these shifts occurred, terror arose immediately and remained, even increased, throughout their duration.

Suzanne Segal, Collision With the Infinite, Chapter 4

Her first attempts to deal with this was to take the rational route, analyzing her situation and going thru a list of possibilities of what could have caused these altered states of mind, like lack of exercise, certain foods, not enough sleep, the stress surrounding her pregnancy… but nothing she could think of made sense. Her condition remained a mystery to her.

Then, on a lovely spring day, on her way home, she decided to take the bus instead of the metro as usual, so that she could enjoy the beautiful weather. As she was standing there at the bus stop, in no hurry, just soaking up the sun and enjoying the moment, suddenly another, but this time radical shift in perspective occurred:

As I took my place in line, I suddenly felt my ears stop up like they do when the pressure changes inside an airplane as it makes its descent. I felt cut off from the scene before me, as if I were enclosed in a bubble, unable to act in any but the most mechanical manner.

I lifted my right foot to step up into the bus and collided head-on with an invisible force that entered my awareness like a silently exploding stick of dynamite, blowing the door of my usual consciousness open and off its hinges, splitting me in two. In the gaping space that appeared, what I had previously called “me” was forcefully pushed out of its usual location inside me into a new location that was approximately a foot behind and to the left of my head. “I” was now behind my body looking out at the world without using the body’s eyes.

From a non-localized position somewhere behind and to the left, I could see my body in front and very far away. All the body’s signals seemed to take a long time to be picked up in this non-localized place, as if they were light coming from a distant star. Terrified, I looked around, wondering if anyone else had noticed something. All the other passengers were calmly taking their seats, and the bus driver was motioning me to put my yellow ticket into the machine so we could be off.

I shook my head a few times, hoping to rattle my consciousness back into place, but nothing changed. I felt from afar as my fingers fumbled to insert the ticket into the slot and I walked down the aisle to find a seat. I sat down next to an older woman I had been chatting with at the bus stop, and I tried to continue our conversation. My mind had completely ground to a halt in the shock of the abrupt collision with whatever had dislodged my previous reality.

Although my voice continued speaking coherently, I felt completely disconnected from it. The face of the woman next to me seemed far away, and the air between us seemed foggy, as if filled with a thick, luminous soup.

Suzanne Segal, Collision With the Infinite, Chapter 4

After she got off the bus, she tried very hard to will herself back into her usual body-centered perspective again, but couldn’t do it:

The force of will failed miserably. Instead of experiencing through the physical senses, I was now bobbing behind the body like a buoy on the sea. Cut loose from sensory solidity, separated from and witnessing the body from a vast distance, I moved down the street like a cloud of awareness following a body that seemed simultaneously familiar and foreign. There was an incomprehensible attachment to that body, although it no longer felt like “mine.” It continued to send out signals of its sensory perceptions, yet how or where those signals were being received was beyond comprehension… The witness was absolutely distinct from the mind, the body, and the emotions, and the position it held, behind and to the left of the head, remained constant.

Suzanne Segal, Collision With the Infinite, Chapter 4

She recalls the experience as “nightmarish beyond belief”. When she finally got home, she didn’t even try to explain what happened to her husband. The body just seemed to go thru the motions as usual but she already started trembling and sweating in fear. So she excused herself and went to bed. But to her surprise, the witnessing mode from a position behind the body continued even in sleep. Mind and body were definitely asleep, but something else was still awake and witnessing everything.

The next morning when she woke up, she was assessing her situation again, wondering if she had a nervous breakdown or was suffering from schizophrenia and was wondering if what had happened would ever stop. She describes her new perspective like this:

The witness appeared to be where “I” was located, which left the body, mind, and emotions empty of a person. It was amazing that all those functions continued to operate at all.

Suzanne Segal, Collision With the Infinite, Chapter 4

The thought occurred that this was the Cosmic Consciousness experience Maharishi mentioned, the first stage of awakening and the first step to unity consciousness. But “the mind” quickly dismissed this possibility because Cosmic Consciousness couldn’t possibly that kind of hellish experience.

Now, Suzanne keeps telling her readers that “the mind” freaked out and went into overthinking because it couldn’t make sense of what had happened, but it does seem to me that the way she uses the term ‘mind’ isn’t exactly how we here would use it. Because what she describes is clearly not unity consciousness, there’s a clear sense of separation, loneliness and also desperation – and above all, fear. Which means she never actually moved beyond mind and so what she calls ‘the witness’ and ‘the mind’ and 'the person’ are all just different aspects or levels of mind, just not functioning in the usual or ‘normal’ way it is supposed to happen for ‘normal’ human beings.

After several months, another shift occurred. The witness disappeared and with it the any sense of being a ‘person’. Which she found even more frightening, because now there wasn’t something to hang on at all, just an empty body that kept functioning as usual, with thoughts and emotions as usual. But it all seemed to belong to no one:

The disappearance of the witness meant the disappearance of the last vestiges of the experience of personal identity. The witness had at least held a location for a “me,” albeit a distant one. In the dissolution of the witness, there was literally no more experience of a “me” at all. The experience of personal identity switched off and was never to appear again.The personal self was gone, yet here was a body and a mind that still existed empty of anyone who occupied them. The experience of living without a personal identity, without an experience of being somebody, an “I” or a “me,” is exceedingly difficult to describe… when the personal self disappears, there is no one inside who can be located as being you. The body is only an outline, empty of everything of which it had previously felt so full.

The mind, body, and emotions no longer referred to anyone—there was no one who thought, no one who felt, no one who perceived. Yet the mind, body, and emotions continued to function unimpaired; apparently they did not need an “I” to keep doing what they always did. Thinking, feeling, perceiving, speaking, all continued as before, functioning with a smoothness that gave no indication of the emptiness behind them.

Suzanne Segal, Collision With the Infinite, Chapter 4

Since from the outside she seemed to be functioning as usual, no one around her noticed what had happened to her. Her life could basically continue as before. And yet, “the mind” went into overdrive, trying to make sense of this by asking questions, why this body is still functioning, to whom belongs this body, who is looking thru those eyes...? There were no answers to these questions. There was no Suzanne inside anymore:

The more baffled the mind became, the greater the fear. By this time, the body had locked into a pitch of terror that generated continuous shaking in the extremities and copious sweating. My clothing was constantly damp, and the sheets on the bed needed to be hung out to dry every morning. Worst of all, simultaneous with the cessation of personal identity, the experience of sleep had changed radically, leaving me with no escape from the constant awareness of emptiness of self. Sleeping and dreaming now contained the awareness of no one who slept or dreamed, just as the waking state of consciousness contained the awareness that there was no one who was awake.

Suzanne Segal, Collision With the Infinite, Chapter 4

By this time the fear factor became a problem that she couldn’t hide anymore, not from herself and also not from others. She decided to talk to her husband about this who had noticed her increased anxiety. But she found it impossible to explain. The more she tried to explain what was going on, the more insane she must have appeared to her husband. so he decided to take her to psychiatrist friend. But the psychiatrist was equally at a loss. He said, all he could do for her is give her some medication that would calm the anxiety, but nothing strong since she was still pregnant.

Then the idea occurred to Suzanne that a more familiar environment may help her get herself (her ‘self’) back together again and she decided to go back to America to see her mother, hoping that would trigger some familiar feelings and restore her old sense of identity that she was used to and at ease with. But when they met at the airport, nothing changed in her perception or feelings and her heart sank, realizing that she would never have a personal identity again. And as she drove home, thoughts kept coming, wondering ‘Who recognizes this scenery?’ or ‘Who are these people in the car?’ Everything seemed “totally familiar and foreign at the same time”.

Her family also noticed that she wasn’t doing well. And she talked to her brother (a TM practitioner) about her experience and new perspective but other than occasionally having no sense of a body, he couldn’t relate, he never felt like not being a somebody. So again, there was no one who could help her. And so they suggested to see a therapist. Suzanne readily agreed, because her fear level, which was already high, kept rising by the day.

The psychotherapist seemed immediately mystified by her story, never having heard anything like this and sensing the terror Suzanne was experiencing, he eventually got frightened, too. So that was another, rather counterproductive encounter.

When you read thru the book you will notice that a word Suzanne often uses is “emptiness” and she doesn’t seem to use it the way we use it here. We don't use it in the literal sense, we use it in a metaphorical sense. But Suzanne does seem to use it in the literal sense. Because the way she describes her state of being is akin to an empty body shell walking, talking and doing things people do, but there’s no identification with anything that is happening and also no relation to anything, just life passing by, without purpose, without meaning, without taking part in anything – just empty, void of any kind of vitality almost. She doesn’t seem to feel alive at all.

Her family gave a party in her honor before she left for Paris again and from the outside, Suzanne was behaving like a ‘normal’ human being (she tried really hard), but inside she kept wondering, ‘Who are these people?’ and ‘Who remembered all their names?’

After she returned to Paris, another shift occurred:

In addition to the absence of self, the filters that had previously screened out the constant sensory input of the world had ceased to function. I could no longer venture into stores or other crowded places because the sensory stimulation seemed to overload the now delicate circuits of an already overtaxed brain. The mind was struggling to hold onto the thought of my existence, since, in the mind’s view, my very existence depended on it. With too much stimulation, the mind was unable to hold that thought, and a horrifying fear of annihilation would ensue.

Everything appeared to be dissolving right in front of my eyes, constantly. Emptiness was everywhere, seeping through the pores of every face I gazed upon, flowing through the crevices of seemingly solid objects. The body, mind, speech, thoughts, and emotions were all empty; they had no ownership, no person behind them. I was utterly bereft of all my previous notions of reality.

Suzanne Segal, Collision With the Infinite, Chapter 4

Now Suzanne suddenly remembered an old friend from her college days who was a follower of Meher Baba. Maybe he could help her, she thought. She contacted him and told him her story. To her surprise, he congratulated her and tried to assure her that she this was not something pathological but something wonderful, a much sought-after spiritual experience, actually. he said people would spend years sitting in caves trying to achieve that state of consciousness. But Suzanne assured him that this was far from wonderful, in fact, it was a horrible state of being because she was terrified all the time and would rather go back to her old, personal self state of being. He then advised her to meditate on Baba’s name and the fear would dissolve. And that’s where Suzanne knew that he had no idea what she was experiencing, because there was no doer anywhere to be found, only doing. And really, if that’s what people are trying to achieve, she thought, they must be out of their minds!

When her daughter was born, an ordeal that lasted for 3 days, while still in labor, she had a realization:

During childbirth it became utterly clear that all of life is accomplished by an unseen doer who can never be located. The previous sense of an “I” who was doing was totally illusory. The personal “I” had never been the doer—it had only masqueraded as the doer. Everything continued as before, only the person who used to think she was doing was absent.

Suzanne Segal, Collision With the Infinite, Chapter 4

Her child, a baby girl, turned out to be just fine and her relationship with her as well. Even though there was no mother there, she observed, there was mothering happening quite naturally. Her relationship with her husband, however, began to deteriorate and she thought she couldn’t possibly expect him to understand what was happen with her:

The person he had married was no longer there. I was no longer able to have “personal” relationships, and never would be again.

Suzanne Segal, Collision With the Infinite, Chapter 4

Nevertheless, when she decided to leave Paris for good and return to America, he made arrangements to come with her in an attempt to keep the family together. It shouldn't work out though. Her daughter, however, grew into a happy and healthy child, not the least traumatized by what has been going on with her mother.

[Reefs]

Chapter 5 – Devaluing Emptiness

Having lived with the experience of no-self for 2 years now, Suzanne returned to America, hoping that living in familiar surroundings would calm the fear. That didn’t happen. Instead, she constantly felt pressured by her family to see a psychiatrist. Especially her mother saw Suzanne’s case as sad and hopeless.

What Suzanne especially struggled with was the tendency of people to label her as pathological – not because it was pathological (no one could say for sure, really) but because what she experienced didn’t fit into any known scientific/psychological/diagnostic categories. She felt profoundly misunderstood. In addition, her mind, not being able to come to terms with this experience of no-self, always seemed to reach the same conclusion, that there must be something very wrong with Suzanne. And the terror she used to experience all day every day was the best piece of evidence.

And what Suzanne was going thru didn’t match anything she heard about spiritual awakening either. What she remembered was mostly descriptions of bliss, joy and ecstasy – but for her there was only emptiness, and every time her mind noticed that emptiness, she felt terrified.

As already mentioned, in the same way she couldn't related to herself (her self) anymore, she couldn’t relate to other people anymore either:

Relationships to other people had been radically altered. Without a personal “I,” there was nowhere for the reverberations of experience to be received. The feeling of being connected to others was gone because there was no longer a person to whom they could be connected. I must reiterate, however, that all feelings continued to arise appropriately. What had vanished was the reference point of a personal self that felt the feelings personally. Emptiness was consistently co-present with all emotional or mental states, and this co-presence precluded any personal quality from existing. No thoughts, feelings, or actions arose for any personal purpose anymore.

Suzanne Segal, Collision With the Infinite, Chapter 5

And her name was just that, a name:

The strangest phenomenon of all was the fact of having no name—literally. The name by which I had been identified now corresponded to no one. Seeing that name written down stimulated no current of recognition; hearing that name spoken produced no sense of the person to whom it referred. To this day, an intensification of emptiness still occurs when that name is spoken or written. This intensification is experienced as a deepening of emptiness, like a void turning in to look at itself and in that glance being reminded of how empty it really is.

Suzanne Segal, Collision With the Infinite, Chapter 5

She mentions that at some point “the mind” did recall her childhood game of repeating her name until her identity disappeared (see chapter 1), noticing some similarities to her current situation. Which did give her some sort of comfort.

Suzanne and her husband separated shortly after. Her husband would eventually go back to France, heartbroken and disappointed - unlike Suzanne, who felt no sadness, because to her the relationship had ended when the experience of no-self took over her life.

Around that time, her brother mentioned Robert Peterson, a spiritual teacher and former TM student who allegedly became enlightened during one of Maharishi’s intensive training courses in Switzerland. She attended one of his talks and he invited her to join his community in Canada. Suzanne wasn't sure about joining a spiritual community again, discussed it with her brother, made some arrangements and eventually gave it a go.

She went there in hope to find someone she could talk to about her experience of no-self, but realized that the topic of no-self was never really brought up, probably because Robert was a follower of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. And according to Suzanne, Maharishi never mentioned no-self in any of his teachings.

After having been part of the community for a while, she also noticed that Robert seemed to have a tendency of seeing the world and everyone else in terms of good and evil. She remembers one particular incident that shook her to the core:

One day a woman who had been labeled “psychotic” by Robert arrived for a week-long course. She was attractive, and she spoke coherently and lucidly about a variety of topics. No one but Robert perceived her to be “crazy.” In Robert’s view, in fact, craziness and evil were synonymous. The woman was asked to stand in front of the group of students and describe her experience. She stood nervously and said, “My problem is a profound lack of self.”

Hearing this statement made my blood run cold. It was the worst verification I had ever heard that the emptiness was what the fear proclaimed it to be: insanity. Robert responded to the woman’s description by telling how he had “cured” her the previous evening by “giving her back a self.” She agreed that this had occurred and expressed her immense gratitude to him. He smiled and proudly accepted her praise.

Suzanne Segal, Collision With the Infinite, Chapter 5

Now Suzanne really panicked and wanted to talk to Robert about this. And they talked for hours, but mostly about other things. And it seems it helped her calm down. One week later though, Robert called her and asked her what she had done to him, because he has been feeling really strange since she talked to him, he said. He already had told the other community members that Suzanne was evil and made it clear to her that she couldn’t stay with the community anymore, and basically threw her out on the spot. Her boyfriend at the time, who was also a member of the community, had been prohibited from contacting her and later was also accused of being evil. Interestingly, her boyfriend also once asked Suzanne what she had done to him, because after talking about this no-self experience with her, he didn’t feel so happy anymore. So, like Robert, he concluded, that must surely have been Suzanne's fault.

“The mind”, says Suzanne, used this as evidence again to label her condition as pathological and concluded that there was no point in seeking help in the spiritual realm either.

Moving back home from Canada, her father died. He had been suffering from Alzheimer’s for many years, not being able to recognize his children, his former self almost completely gone, an empty shell… Suzanne couldn't help but notice some eerie similarities to her own condition. And that frightened her, because she might soon end up like him. And despite there always being the experience of no-self, there still was the attempt by "the mind" to be a someone and restore her former self:

When I received the news of his death, I cried. There was no one who felt sad, yet the emotional response occurred as before and appeared to be about a someone, though it was not. Crying was there—simply that. To others it may have seemed that there was someone who was sad, but there was no one.

The mind did not take well to this continuation of emotional functioning in the face of no-self, and once again it began collecting evidence to show that something was wrong with the experience. At the same time, it tried to make it look like I was a someone who was responding appropriately to the death of her father. I flew back to Chicago immediately and helped my brothers and mother make arrangements for the funeral. In their presence I cried profusely and regularly whenever we spoke about our dad. The “attempt to be someone” was putting on a convincing performance, and I told no one that all those emotions never for a moment referred to a “me.”

Suzanne Segal, Collision With the Infinite, Chapter 5

[Reefs]

Chapter 6 – Analyzing Emptiness

Suzanne’s daughter turned out to be a delight to watch growing up. A naturally very happy child, she helped Suzanne to get some distraction from her fearful overthinking. And from time to time the awareness of emptiness now moved to the background and gave her mind a sense of ‘normalcy’ again. But as she noted, the mind's “hyper-vigilance” was exhausting. Her life revolved around one thing only - the strangeness of this no-self experience, which never seemed to go away. But the most prominent fear was still the fear of insanity. So she turned to psychotherapy again.

Her new therapist, Carl, diagnosed her with depersonalization disorder. He told her that this would actually happen rather often, but would usually only last for days or weeks, but not years like in her case. And he was so positive that this issue would resolve naturally and very soon, that Suzanne became hopeful again and put all her energy into therapy. She declined taking medication though, because her mother had been taking antidepressants for years and Suzanne didn’t like what the drug did to her mother, especially how she considered her therapist as some kind of god.

However, after months and months of therapy, the fear didn’t subside but got worse. The emptiness also seemed to deepen. By that time, probably because of her new focus and Carl’s rock solid trust in the inevitable success of his therapeutic approach, Suzanne may have seemed a lot more ‘normal’ than before and Carl ended the therapy sessions with her. As he later revealed, he was assuming Suzanne was ‘normal’ again, especially since their relationship had already transitioned into a romantic relationship. He was wrong.

Once again, Suzanne realized that no one was able to understand her situation. Carl insisted on his diagnosis, depersonalization disorder, which would eventually go away, because that’s how he usually saw it happen, it comes and then goes away again. But Suzanne pointed out that there wasn’t any disorder coming and going, that this was always there, even when asleep. The following exchange sums up her dilemma:

“I don’t know what else it could be but symptoms of depersonalization,” he replied. “Maybe you’re just getting overly dramatic about the whole thing. I mean, you’ve been saying for a long time that you don’t exist as an individual person, but here you are right in front of me talking to me. You’re here, you know. You just think you’re not."

“Why does everyone say the same thing? Do you think I’m just making the whole thing up? The fact that you see a body in front of you and hear a mouth speaking words doesn’t mean a thing. The fact is, in my experience there is no person. It isn’t something you can see from the outside. I’ve been telling you this for almost a year now!”

Suzanne Segal, Collision With the Infinite, Chapter 6

That was the end of their relationship – professionally and romantically. But what Carl had left her with was a strong desire to really get to the bottom of this, on her own. This very specific diagnosis he had given her, kept haunting her. She wanted to learn more about this. So she signed up for a course in psychology and soon was busy reading, memorizing and writing about psychological theories. It was 6 years now that she was living with no-self. She wanted answers, real answers:

Remembering Carl’s diagnosis, I spent extra time reading up on the “dissociative disorders,” including depersonalization, derealization, and dissociation. Clearly, certain characteristics of those disorders were or had been present in my experience, although none of them described the most prominent feature—the absolute absence of personal “I-ness” accompanied by unimpaired (and even improved) functioning in the world.

Suzanne Segal, Collision With the Infinite, Chapter 6

She was ready for a new therapeutic approach. She tried the transpersonal/clinical approach. Her new therapist, Sam, was pondering 2 possibilities, either a dramatic seventh chakra opening, i.e. a profound spiritual experience, or a dissociative state as a means to escape reality:

I spent three years in therapy with Sam analyzing and unearthing childhood memories and feelings. Early in treatment Sam discarded the possibility that the experience might be a spiritual one, and we proceeded with the (unspoken) assumption that no-self was a state I had entered, in Sam’s words, "to escape feeling fear, sadness, or other difficult emotions.” It was, in other words, a defense mechanism, a psychological strategy for survival. Sam maintained that I had not received sufficient “mirroring” as a child, and the wounds that had developed by “not being seen” by others when I was young were now manifesting as this emptiness. He said I was narcissistically injured and had this “huge hole” inside me that I was trying but would never be able to fill.

Suzanne Segal, Collision With the Infinite, Chapter 6

Sam’s name soon should be added to a long list of therapists (10 so far) that had failed Suzanne over the years, eager to cure her condition, but instead of helping her getting rid of the fear, they only increased the fear by “pathologizing emptiness”, as Suzanne put it. After all, her worst fear was that she had gone insane. So given her a label that only describes crazy people, was rather counterproductive.

The relationship with Sam abruptly ended after it was clear to Suzanne that Sam didn’t really trust her. He actually thought she made it all up, but didn’t dare to tell her. So Suzanne eventually confronted him, wanting to know what he really thought about her:

He flipped through his spiral notebook for a minute until he located the correct page. Then he took a deep breath and began reading. ‘“She’s been devaluing me for several months now because I won’t gratify her need to feel special. She used to see me as the ‘good breast,’ the nurturing object who was all-good, perfect, worthy of emulation. Now she sees me as the ‘bad breast,’ the all-bad, fallen-from-grace, deeply disappointing, frustrating, non-fulfilling object. Her pre-Oedipal wounding is more and more apparent, and her primitive defense mechanisms are operating full force. She’s splitting, seeing me as the all-bad punisher. She’s infuriated that I won’t love her as the special one in my life.’”

Suzanne Segal, Collision With the Infinite, Chapter 6

Suzanne was speechless and couldn’t believe what she just heard. Sam was proud of his analysis and waiting for a response from Suzanne. But she just got up and left. There was nothing more to say. He thought this no-self experience was something pathological. Suzanne still didn’t think so, even though there were days when she couldn’t leave the house because she was “literally shaking with terror”.

But one positive thing that came out of these useless therapy sessions was her new friendship with Steve, a good friend of Sam. They both trained to be psychotherapists. And she should stay together with Steve for the next 9 years. But quickly reassures her readers that:

Never for a moment in all those nine years, however, did Steve and I have a personal relationship, since there was never a "me" for him to be in relationship with.

Suzanne Segal, Collision With the Infinite, Chapter 6

Soon she was ready for more therapy. Lauren, therapist #11, had the reputation of being both a therapist and a spiritual teacher who warned her right at the first meeting to never go into that emptiness because it was dangerous. And added that Suzanne should never ever listen to anyone who recommended going into that emptiness because they had no idea what they are talking about. Needless to say, Suzanne’s fear was off the charts again. Lauren also made it clear that she was deeply worried about Suzanne and feared that she would soon cease to function normally if she kept going on the way she was.

WTH?!

I don’t know why, but Suzanne decided to keep seeing Lauren. And predictably, Lauren didn’t’ cure her of anything and only helped Suzanne to turn the fear factor up a notch again. It went so far that, after 3 months, Lauren felt the need to end the therapy, because she felt Suzanne became too unstable and she couldn’t deal with that kind of responsibility. So she urged Suzanne to find another therapist that could take her place.

Now, Suzanne admits that she always knew that Lauren was wrong. And yet she went there for 3 months. Which makes me wonder, could it be that Suzanne got hooked on fear and therapy? With all that emptiness (in the literal sense of the word) in her life, maybe fear was the only thing that made her feel alive?

More than anything, Suzanne wanted her therapists to look at her situation from a “non-pathologizing” perspective. So she tried a different approach. She found a therapist (#12) with a psychodynamics background and just didn’t mention her no-self dilemma. She went there for a year, but in the end, she didn’t trust her therapist and didn’t dare to mention her no-self experience, so she never could talk about what she really wanted to talk about. So she quit.

It actually took her two more therapists until she was finally ready to give up therapy. Therapy simply didn’t work for her. Around that time, she was already in the second year of a doctoral program in psychology. But she didn’t seem all that happy with the analytical stance, which felt to her like a straightjacket:

I could never understand why someone would want to pay good money to a person who says little to them, refuses to respond to the simplest of questions, sees in their actions hidden, negative motivations (“the fact that you’re two minutes late for therapy means that you’re resistant to treatment”), and pathologizes their experience by interpreting everything they do as a sign of some deeper, underlying problem. Traditional psychotherapy seems to be based on a primordial fear of mystery, and this fear creates the tendency to reduce, interpret, or pathologize all manifestations of consciousness that do not fit the cultural norm.

Suzanne Segal, Collision With the Infinite, Chapter 6

She also realized that psychology in general was the wrong place to look for help:

As I neared the end of my training, it became clear that I was looking in the wrong place to understand the experience of no-self, since, psychologically speaking, this experience was something of which I needed to be cured. The notion of “cure” involves trying to eliminate, stop, or change something that you, or more importantly your therapist, cannot accept as appropriate. But there was obviously no way the experience of individual identity was going to return, and it was now appallingly clear that the field of psychology hadn’t the slightest clue about what was going on.

Suzanne Segal, Collision With the Infinite, Chapter 6

Nevertheless, she finished the doctoral program and got a license as a psychologist – because that was just the next obvious thing to do.

[zendancer]

Jul 13, 2021 11:36:39 GMT -5 Reefs said:

Jul 13, 2021 9:55:23 GMT -5 stardustpilgrim said:

I think Segal experienced a version of the phantom limb experience. She actually did lose self, as one can lose a limb. But she experienced (psychological) pain because of a kind of shadow self still existing in old neural pathways. She wanted in a way to resurrect self. But it was completely gone, as gone as an amputation. But also not-completely-gone, as phantom limb pain.

That's an interesting perspective. However, her main problem was the constant fear factor. When she lived in Paris, after the bus stop incident, she actually had to change her bed sheets every morning because they were wet from all the sweating the fear caused overnight. And as you can see in the review so far, that fear has been with her since she was a child. So there definitely are psychological factors playing a significant role here.

But the way she describes that witnessing mode actually reminds me of some out of body experiences I've had in the waking state. It was something similar, the body does everything as usual, the people around won't notice it at all, but your center of perception is suddenly not centered in the body anymore, but outside the body. It's totally weird, but I found it rather amusing instead of frightening and it just lasted for minutes instead of months or years.

Maybe some others can relate to this as well. But her witnessing mode also continued in sleep. So in that sense, it's something different from what I had experienced.

Yes, I, too, had forgotten that fear had been a significant issue in her life from a much earlier time than after the "collision."

I, too, had an OOB experience prior to a CC, and, like you, it only lasted a short time and was not fearful, just strange. The point of perception was in front of and slightly above the body's head, but because the CC had begun, the concept of "inside" or "outside" wasn't applicable. The entire idea of "inside" or "outside" had disappeared. After only a minute or so, the point of perception was back in it's usual place, behind the eyes, but I had no idea who, or what, was looking at the world.

I agree that the way we use the term "CC" is equivalent to the term "unity consciousness." In that state of not-knowing the intellect simply isn't functional in any normal sense. It's as if all conventional understanding disappears and there is just a unity-conscious witnessing of "what is."

Because the unity-conscious witnessing only lasted about 15 minutes, there was no continuing experience of that after normal cognition returned. I've read about one or two ZM's who seemed to claim that the witness remains awake even while the body is sleeping, but that sort of thing never happened to this character.

[Reefs]

Chapter 7 – Emptiness Recognized as Vastness

Suzanne now started to look in a different direction for an explanation of no-self and started to read more about the spiritual perspective of emptiness and no-self. She felt particularly drawn to Buddhism where she could find entire volumes written about the concepts of anatta (no-self) and shunyata (emptiness). And she was delighted to see her experience of no-self described exactly the way she experienced it, confirming that this wasn’t something pathological:

One aspect of my experience that Buddhism was particularly helpful in explaining was that although individual identity had dropped away, all the personality functions remained completely intact. Now, however, those functions floated in a vastness that referred to no one. All the same experiences still happened, there just wasn’t a “me” to whom they were happening. And the appropriate responses just happened as well, arising out of and then subsiding into themselves. Everything appeared and disappeared on the broad screen of the infinite—interactions, emotions, talk, actions of all kinds.

Without an individual self to direct action and speech, the concept of service took on an entirely new dimension. Now action and speech were seen to arise not out of any personal purpose, but out of what was needed in the moment for the situation at hand. There was no personal functioning, yet functioning in its entirety continued unimpaired—a co-presence of functioning and not-functioning, existing and not-existing.

The Buddhist texts explained this by saying that what remains in the state of no-self are empty functions (empty, that is, of individual personhood) called skandhas, or “aggregates.” What speaks, then, is the speaking function, what thinks is the thinking function, what mothers is the mothering function, what feels is the feeling function, and so forth. These functions do the job of living in the world, and they are empty of individual self.

The five skandhas are generally translated as form; feelings and sensations; perceptions; mental formations; and consciousness. All experiences associated with the sense of self, according to the Buddhist teachings, can be analyzed into these five skandhas. There is no persisting self to be found over and above their functioning. These five “aggregates” do not in any way constitute a self. Rather, their interaction creates the illusion of self.

The worst fear we encounter as human beings is the fear of annihilation. What happens, then, when annihilation occurs and still something remains? The Buddhists say that we have then stepped into truth. The skandhas remain but their truth (which is that they are empty) is revealed. This was my direct experience. But why had no one ever mentioned how bizarre and frightening the “step into truth” can be?

Suzanne Segal, Collision With the Infinite, Chapter 7

Apparently, the Buddhist texts perfectly described her own experience, except for one thing: the fear factor. That seemed odd to Suzanne. Why didn't anyone mention this?

At this point, an old friend from her meditation days contacted her and she told him about her experience and he reminded her of something Maharishi once said:

Evidently Maharishi had made it clear that Cosmic Consciousness (the first stage of awakening) was a horrible experience and that the guru’s presence was essential to help the person move quickly through the stage of witness awareness. Without the guru, Maharishi claimed, the person could be lost indefinitely in confusion and fear. The guru did not actually give someone the experience of enlightenment, he said. Rather, the guru verified such an experience by saying, “Yes, that’s it!”

Suzanne Segal, Collision With the Infinite, Chapter 7

She came across a compilation of interviews with spiritual teachers by Stephan Bodian, a therapist in the area. And there was an interview with Jean Klein who seemed to describe her experience. And so she contacted Stephan. She told him about her no-self experience and – to her surprise – he said that this appears to be the state of freedom all spiritual traditions, especially Advaita, have been referring to and that this was a wonderful thing. What he couldn’t explain though was the fear. So he suggested Suzanne should talk to Jean Klein, who followed the tradition of Advaita, and Ramana Maharshi in particular.

Two weeks later, Suzanne went to see Jean at one of his talks at Berkeley. During the Q&A session, she told him about her no-self experience and Jean confirmed that this is it. When asked why there is still so much fear, Jean said:

“You must stop the part of the mind that constantly keeps trying to look back at the experience,” he responded. “Get that part out of the way, then joy will come.”

Suzanne Segal, Collision With the Infinite, Chapter 7

That was the answer Suzanne was looking for. Indeed, she says, there as an introspective part of the mind that couldn’t come to terms with emptiness and kept sending messages that something was wrong, that part of mind kept looking for something that wasn’t there anymore, like a reflex. Jean's advice gave her great relief.

After having met Jean, Suzanne began contacting other spiritual teachers who wrote about emptiness and no-self. The replies she received made it clear to her that there had indeed something profound happened. And that gave her enormous relief. They all verified that she has had an important realization. However, there still was no joy and fear was still arising. How could that be?

It is a long list of spiritual teachers she contacted, mostly Advaita and Zen, and they all congratulated her and confirmed that this is it, what everyone is looking for. However, the fear remained. And like her dozen therapists before, these well-meaning people couldn’t really help her either. There was always fear, and no joy. So apparently, that wasn't really it. At least they didn’t label her as pathological.

Then she discovered Ramana Maharishi’s teaching which resonated deeply with her, especially what he had to say about the jnani and how he experiences the world:

Ramana: After transcending the dehatma buddhi (I-am-the-body idea), one becomes a jnani. In the absence of that idea there can be neither doership nor doer. So the jnani performs no actions. That is his experience.

Q: I see you doing things. How can you say that you never perform actions?

Ramana: The radio sings and speaks, but if you open it you will find no one inside. Similarly, my existence is like the space; though this body speaks like the radio, there is no one inside as a doer.

Q: I find this hard to understand. Could you please elaborate on this?

Ramana: The potter’s wheel goes on turning round even after the potter has ceased to turn it. In the same way, the electric fan goes on revolving for some minutes after we switch off the current. The predestined karma which created the body will make it go through whatever activities it was meant for, and the jnani goes through all these activities without the notion that he is the doer of them—because he is not. It is hard to understand how this is possible, but the jnani knows and has no doubts.... He knows he is not the body, and he knows that he is not doing anything, even though his body may be engaged in some activity. These explanations are for the onlookers who think of the jnani as one with a body and cannot help identifying him with his body.

Q: It is said that the shock of realization is so great that the body cannot survive it.

Ramana: If a man must at once leave his body when he realizes the Self, I wonder how any knowledge of the Self or the state of realization can come down to others.... The fact is that any amount of action can be performed, and performed quite well, by the jnani without his identifying himself with it in any way or ever imagining that he is the doer. Some power acts through his body and uses his body to get the work done.

Q: You say the jnani sees no differences, yet it seems to me that he appreciates differences better than an ordinary man. If sugar is sweet and wormwood is bitter to me, he seems to realize it so. In fact, all forms, all sounds, all tastes, etc. are the same to him as they are to others. If so, how can it be said that these are mere appearances? Do they not form part of his life experience?

Ramana: I have said that equality is the true sign of a jnani. The very term equality implies the existence of differences. It is a unity that the jnani perceives in all differences, which I call equality. Equality does not mean ignorance of distinctions. When you have the realization, you can see that these differences are very superficial, that they are not substantial or permanent and what is essential in all these appearances is the one truth, the real. That I call unity.

Roy Melvyn, The Core Teachings of Ramana Maharshi

And another passage from Ramana she found particularly interesting:

When asked by a disciple if it was necessary to be associated with the wise (sat-sanga) in order for the Self to be realized, Ramana answered: ‘‘Yes, [what is required is] association with the unmanifest sat or absolute existence.... The sastras say that one must serve (be associated with) the unmanifest sat for twelve years in order to attain Self-realization...but as very few can do that, they have to take second best, which is association with the manifest sat, that is, the Guru.”

Suzanne Segal, Collision With the Infinite, Chapter 7

It had been almost 12 years since no-self took over Suzanne’s life.

Another Zen teacher, Richard, after listening to her story said that it seemed to him that Suzanne was still in the winter phase and that the spring phase would eventually bring the joy she sought:

Richard was assuring me that I was encountering just one season of the emptiness and that I could trust it to change, just as surely as the spring always arrives, even after the longest winter.

Richard was able to provide me with the solid context of a tradition that was intimately familiar with the emptiness of individual self. He told me Zen stories and anecdotes about ancient Chinese masters. He showed me how I was “seeing with the same eyes" as the ancestors.

In the end, Richard’s greatest gift to me was the knowing that spring would arrive. And arrive it did.

Suzanne Segal, Collision With the Infinite, Chapter 7

However, as helpful as Richard’s perspective may have been, it soon became clear to Suzanne that he was not speaking from direct experience, but from book knowledge only. He said that Suzanne got stuck in emptiness which caused the fear and suggested some practices she could do to get rid of the fear. To which Suzanne replied that there was no one who could do any practices because she couldn’t locate a doer or practitioner.

And this is one of several instances in the book where Suzanne’s story and understanding shows some inconsistencies. Apparently she was aware that there was no self that could do any practices, but on the other hand, doing psychotherapy for the last 10 years was no problem?

[Reefs]

Chapter 8 – The Secret of Emptiness

This is the part of the book that deals with an actual realization, the way we here would define the term, i.e. seeing from a perspective prior to mind. So far, I can’t really recognize a perspective that is prior to mind in what Suzanne has written. Sure, she keeps talking about emptiness, no-self, the witness and the mind just being silly and so on and it all sounds rather detached and free, but then there’s this tremendous fear that Suzanne doesn’t seem to be able to let go. It almost seems as if this fear has become her new identity. She certainly does not yet see it for what it is. In fact, it all has too much of a 'poor me' story.

And so whatever happened up to this point, is still happening in the realm of mind. Especially the way she describes her witnessing mode shows all the signs of what we sometimes call a 'split mind'. Now, if that’s something pathological, that’s an interesting question. Suzanne already admitted that if you go thru the checklist of symptoms for depersonalization/derealization disorder that most of the listed symptoms would indeed apply to her, except, she says, that it didn’t interfere with normal functioning in the world.

And this is the point where I think Suzanne isn’t being honest with herself, because, as we’ve seen in this review, the fear actually did interfere with normal functioning, she regularly mentioned sweating and trembling and being unable to leave the house for days. So I’d say the case for a depersonalization disorder is pretty strong. It is definitely not enlightenment what we’ve seen up to this chapter in the book. But it could fall into the category of awakening, a ‘dark night of the soul’ period maybe, or the winter season, as she called it later, some sort sort of twilight zone.

Anyway, Suzanne eventually had a big unity consciousness experience:

In the midst of a particularly eventful week, I was driving north to meet some friends when I suddenly became aware that I was driving through myself. For years there had been no self at all, yet here on this road, everything was myself, and I was driving through me to arrive where I already was. In essence, I was going nowhere because I was everywhere already. The infinite emptiness I knew myself to be was now apparent as the infinite substance of everything I saw.

In the wake of this transition to the vastness of emptiness, I began to meditate intensively. I spent hours each morning and hours again each night just sitting in the vastness, as blossoms began appearing on the tree of emptiness. A strong pull arose to do a solitary retreat, so I arranged to stay for a long mid-January weekend at a Buddhist retreat center in the Santa Cruz mountains.

As I drove through the wintry landscape on my way there, everything seemed more fluid. The mountains, trees, rocks, birds, sky were all losing their differences. As I gazed about, what I saw first was how they were one; then, as a second wave of perception, I saw the distinctions. But the perception of the substance they were all made of did not occur through the physical body. Rather, the vastness was perceiving itself out of itself at every point in itself. A lovely calm pervaded everything—no ecstasy, no bliss, just calm.

At the same time, something else began emerging which continues to this day—something I can only describe as a “thickening into unity” that was both experiential and perceptual. From that day forth I have had the constant experience of both moving through and being made of the “substance” of everything. This is what is experienced first—the stuff of unity, its texture, its flavor, its substance. This non-localized, infinite substance can be perceived not with the eyes or ears or nose, but by the substance itself, out of itself. When the substance of unity encounters itself, it knows itself through its own sense organ. Form is like a drawing in the sand of oneness, where the drawing, the sand, and the finger that draws it are all one.

Suzanne Segal, Collision With the Infinite, Chapter 8

So Suzanne finally had a realization that put an end to her fear and dissociative state of being. She finally realized that she had only come half circle by only recognizing no-self, but now she realized that not only was there no self, but also no others! BOOM! Full circle.

She explains her new perspective:

Fear’s grip now broke, and joy arose at once. The experience of emptiness had given up its secret. The emptiness was seen to be nothing but the very substance of everything. I finally saw what had been in front of me the whole time but had been obscured by fear: There is not only no individual self, but also no other. No self, no other. Everything is made of the same substance of vastness.

All the Zen stories Richard had told me came flooding back, and I began laughing and crying uproariously, unable to stop. Finally I fell to the ground, weak with the vision of it all. For twelve years I had known, seen, breathed emptiness, and now it extended throughout the universe in great tidal waves of empty fullness. That everything was unified in the emptiness now seemed like the most obvious thing in the world, but it had taken so long for me to stumble on it. I guess it had stumbled on itself.

Needless to say, nothing has ever been the same since. The fact that “I” no longer existed, that there was no person anymore, gave way finally and completely to the realization that there is nothing that is not myself. What remains when there is no self is all that is.

Suzanne Segal, Collision With the Infinite, Chapter 8

And that’s exactly it!

[zendancer]

"The fact that “I” no longer existed, that there was no person anymore, gave way finally and completely to the realization that there is nothing that is not myself. What remains when there is no self is all that is."

Sounds like a kensho realization to me.

[Reefs]

Jul 15, 2021 15:52:01 GMT -5 zendancer said:

I've read about one or two ZM's who seemed to claim that the witness remains awake even while the body is sleeping, but that sort of thing never happened to this character.

Yes, occasionally you hear and read about such tings.

Jul 16, 2021 12:34:14 GMT -5 zendancer said:

"The fact that “I” no longer existed, that there was no person anymore, gave way finally and completely to the realization that there is nothing that is not myself. What remains when there is no self is all that is."

Sounds like a kensho realization to me.

Definitely! And that was just an appetizer. The next two chapters are going to be a doozy, she covers a whole list of realizations. You'll love it! She almost talks like you, hehe.