Went to the Boulder public library and picked up Collision with the Infinite by Suzanne Segal. It’s a fairly short book, so I was able to power through it in a few hours, and it was a really good read! It’s an autobiography of sorts (excerpt here), where Suzanne shares a radical experience she had that permanently transformed her consciousness, after which she was left (quite permanently) with no sense of an “I” or doer.
Instead of being totally thrilled, she was instead completely panicked (although there was no “I” panicking). For 11 years after which she continued to find out why her sense of “I” had disappeared, why everything was happening anyway, and there was still so much fear and terror arising. She went through about 12 therapists, each who pathologized her condition (incorrectly), all while earning a PH.d in counseling psychology!!! She finally consulted with the spiritual traditions, and was given a much better diagnosis…
Each teacher she talked to about her experience verified that she had indeed achieved a deep recognition of no-self. The fear finally subsided and she awoke then to not only the emptiness of self, but also to the emptiness of other, and in the recogition that there was no solid & fixed other, that there was infinite fullness! All in All, a beautiful and inspiring work….
I had never heard of Suzanne Segal or her experience until reading your blog entry. It was fascinating. Thank you for sharing it with us. If she experienced Witness consciousness in the beginning, it was a different kind of experience of it than any I’ve ever read about or heard of before.
When her Witness consciousness collapsed into what seems to have been permanent non-dual awareness, I was reminded of Alan Watts’ description of ‘nirvana’:
“Nirvana is a radical transformation of how it feels to be alive. It feels as if everything were myself or as if everything were happening of itself. There are still efforts, choices, and decisions, but not the sense that I make them. They arise of themselves in relation to circumstances.”
I wonder if there was any relation between Suzanne’s brain tumor that ultimately killed her and her experience. Was her experience a result of a very slow growing tumor or was the tumor entirely incidental to her experience? What’s more, I wonder if her non-dual consciousness allowed her to meet her death with complete equanimity.
Nagarjuna,
Thanks for your comments! I had no idea that Suzanne passed away from a brain tumor… As far as whether or not that impacted her experience, I have no idea. It seems unlikely that she had the tumor for 15 years prior to death (when she had her initial experience), but who knows… I’m certainly not an expert on brain tumors, and I don’t have if they have any link to mystical experiences, although John Travolta would have us think so…