Read
the New Afterword by Stephan Bodian
Collision with the Infinite
is an extraordinary work. One day over twelve years ago, Suzanne Segal,
a young American woman living in Paris, stepped onto a city bus and
suddenly and unexpectedly found herself egoless, stripped of any sense
of a personal self. Struggling with the terror and confusion produced
by that cataclysmic experience, for years she tried to make sense
of it, seeking the help of therapist after therapist. Eventually,
she turned to spiritual teachers, coming at last to understand that
this was the egoless state, the Holy Grail of so many spiritual traditions,
that elusive consciousness to which so many aspire.
This book is her story, her
own account of what such a terrifying event meant to her when it crashed
into her everyday life, and what it means to her now. Her sense of
the personal "I" has never returned, and she lives in that
heightened spiritual awareness to this day. She meets regularly with
a growing group of dedicated followers in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Stephen Bodian, the former editor of Yoga Journal who wrote
the introduction, found her to be "a fearless, joyful being who
radiates love and whose spiritual wisdom was equal to that of the
masters and sages I most respected."
Unlike so many spiritual
accounts, Collision with the Infinite is written in a completely
lucid, nonmystical, straightforward manner, instantly understandable
to Westerners and filled with luminous clarity. Nowhere in these pages,
in fact, do we have the sense of invasive ego or self-promotion, and
Ms. Segal presents us with a remarkable glimpse into "the mystery
in which all abides," that egolessness which seekers have pursued
since spiritual quests began.
Table of Contents
- Early Years
- The Transcendent Field
- Prelude to Emptiness
- Collision with Emptiness
- Devaluing Emptiness
- Analyzing Emptiness
- Emptiness Recognized as
Vastness
- The Secret of Emptiness
- Living the Vastness
- Conversations with the
Vastness
"Suzanne
Segal's Collision with the Infinite was a major milestone in my
life. I consider Segal's book one on the giant works of our time,
one of the most intriguing testaments of the mystical state, unique
in its own way and language. I carried it around with me for weeks,
couldn't bear to put it down, read and re-read it."
—Joseph Chilton Pearce author of The
Magical Child
"This
is an extraordinary account of the experience of selflessness. It
points to the heart of spiritual practice — even though the
language it uses does not emphasize the importance of practice."
—Joseph Goldstein author of The Experience
of Insight
"Collision with the Infinite is an amazingly
honest, fascinating, and vivid account of one woman's awakening
to her essential emptiness—and her eventual discovery, through
much pain and fear, that as emptiness-fullness it is freedom from
pain and fear. "In fact, this awakening is available, right
now and just as one is, to all who dare to look in at the infinite
and wide-awake space or capacity they are looking out of."
—Douglas Harding, author of On Having
No Head
"An excellent read. This book can serve
as a catalyst for the appreciation of the emptiness of self-existence
rather than the abhorrence and fear of it."
—Christopher Titmuss co-founder of Gaia
House, Devon, England
"I've met Suzanne, and I'm amazed at
her courage and her ability to live the life that chose her. Mystics
point the way. Suzanne is living it!"
—Lilias Folan, host of Lilias, Yoga
and You
"'Enlightenment' to me means a total
annihilation of the sense of personal doership. In the words of
the Buddha, 'Events happen, deeds are done, but there is no individual
doer thereof.' "Whether a traumatic experience is necessary
for enlightenment to occur is a moot point, but it happened to Suzanne
Segal. In her book, she describes the full story in a sincere and
lucid manner, in simple words and a fluent style that fascinated
me. "To anyone interested in the subject, I would say, 'Read
this book!' "
—Ramesh Balsekar, author of Consciousness
Speaks
When this extraordinary autobiography
was completed, in the spring of 1996, Suzanne Segal had begun offering
regular public presentations and weekly dialogues and leading a biweekly
"training group" for therapists in which she demonstrated her unique
way of working with people. She was full of energy and embodied a
radiant, unconditional love that drew people to her like a magnet.
Yet she never considered herself a teacher, insisting that we are
"all in this together"—we are all the vastness that she so immediately
experienced and so articulately described. Nevertheless, those of
us who were close to her frequently found that our own experience
of the vastness became even deeper and clearer in her presence.
In the late spring, Suzanne began
having a series of powerful energetic experiences in which, as she
put it, "the vastness became even vaster to itself." She laughingly
called them "bus hits" (referring to her original awakening at the
bus stop). Although they were rapturous at first, she seemed increasingly
to be disturbed by them and would often have to stop and rest after
a particularly powerful occurrence. At the same time she found it
more and more difficult to relate to the notion of "other" at all—and
so her therapists' group became another opportunity to share our "descriptions"
of the vastness together.
Soon the "bus hits" were happening
frequently, and by the end of the summer Suzanne realized that she
was physically exhausted and would have to withdrew from public life
temporarily to recuperate. The doctors she consulted concurred that
her vital energy had been depleted and prescribed hormones and other
supplements to help restore her. Around this same time, she also noticed
that the fear, which had disappeared several years before, had returned.
Suzanne precipitously ended all
of her groups and public appearances, except for the therapists' group,
which she continued for an additional month. To some in the group
it seemed that she had lost touch with the vastness, and that her
presence had noticeably diminished. At one point she got out of her
chair and joined the others who sat on the floor, symbolically abdicating
her role as a guide and source of insight. Where she had been easily
accessible to her friends for chats on the phone or walks on the beach,
she cut off almost everyone and withdrew into virtual seclusion.
Throughout the fall she spent most
of her time at home, alone and with her family, taking regular walks
by the ocean and sitting on her patio looking out at the Bolinas Lagoon
in Stinson Beach, California, where she lived. During this period
she recovered memories of childhood abuse, which seemed to explain
some of the fear she had experienced during her 10 lonely years of
being no one before realizing that she was everything. When I suggested
that perhaps the fear originated from a part of herself that was split
off or dissociated from conscious awareness, she immediately agreed.
At one point she excitedly called
me to describe her recent discovery that she did in fact exist—land
insisted that all the spiritual teachers who taught the non-existence
of an abiding self were mistaken. I spent an hour on the phone with
her explaining the difference between having no self and not existing.
During this period Suzanne seemed
to drift in and out of experiencing herself as the vastness. At times
she talked about God, and once, during a walk on the beach, she described
seeing angels. At a certain point she acknowledged that she had used
the vastness as a defense to protect her from her feelings and from
the painful process of coming to terms with her childhood.
In the first few months of 1997
Suzanne felt less and less connected with the vastness—and more
and more disoriented, apparently because of all the new insights she
was having. "This human life thing is really something, isn't it?"
she often mused, almost to herself. Those of us who were close to
her now looked forward to a prolonged integration process, in which
she gradually learned to be someone as well as no one. But her health
would not allow this to occur.
By late February Suzanne had difficulty
holding a pen, remembering familiar names, or standing on her own
without feeling dizzy. At the urging of her chiropractor, she entered
the hospital on February 27, and X rays revealed that she had a brain
tumor. She elected to have it removed but chose not to undergo radiation
or chemotherapy. When the surgeons operated on her one week later,
they found that the tumor was too widespread to eliminate completely.
On March 8 she returned home, and on March 10 she and her fianceé,
Steve Kruszynski, were married at a small ceremony at her home. Shortly
thereafter they traveled to Oklahoma to seek out alternative treatment.
But when Suzanne relapsed, the trip was cut short, and it became clear
that she had come home to die.
Several days after returning from
her trip, Suzanne lapsed into a coma. A small group of close friends
visited daily to join her family in sitting with her, breathing with
her, and saying goodbye. Early on the morning of Tuesday, April 1,
Suzanne Segal died. Following a Tibetan custom, the body was wrapped
in a cloth, surrounded by flowers, and left untouched for three days.
On the third day we sat with her body as a local rabbi performed a
traditional Jewish ceremony at her mother's request.
The following Saturday, nearly
100 people—Suzanne's many friends and relatives—gathered
to celebrate her life, appreciate her gifts to us, and share our grief.
At sunset, her husband, Steve, her fourteen-year-old daughter, Arielle,
and her brother Bob waded out into the cold spring surf and scattered
her ashes into the sky. Some people say they saw the form of an angel
materialize briefly and then disintegrate into the sea.
Those of us who were close to Suzanne
never doubted the depth or the authenticity of her realization. Yet
toward the end of her life we could only watch as that realization
slipped between her fingers like so much sand, leaving her frustrated
and confused. No doubt her brain tumor helped precipitate this confusion.
But other factors seemed to contribute, especially the surfacing of
abuse memories and the insights that ensued.
Suzanne's example speaks to us
of the importance of integration—of the personal and the transpersonal,
the psychological and the spiritual—and raises questions about
the relationship between dissociation—in which parts of the psyche
split off from one another—and genuine, abiding awakening. By
dying before this integration had occurred, Suzanne left each of us
with the koan of discovering it for ourselves.
—Stephan Bodian
Fairfax, California April 1998
The author would like to thank Neil
Lupa and John Prendergast for contributing valuable information that
helped to chronicle the events depicted in this afterword and for
reviewing the final draft for accuracy.
