Collision with the Infinite: A Life Beyond the Personal Self [Paperback]

This is an enthralling and captivating book about a woman's sudden realization of the true nature of reality. May not appeal to those who may be dismissive of mysticism but I found it difficult to put down. Buy it!

All in all, it seems obvious that Suzanne Segal suffered a great deal. To be sure, she was a courageous and determined woman who battled long and hard with the consequences of her experience; and she certainly didn't preach a doctrine of despair and negativity like certain other unfortunate people who seem to have suffered the same fate. However, I find the idea of her experience being spiritual in its nature to be a complete contradiction of all of the genuine accounts of transcendence I, personally, have come across.

Higher meditation seems to be concerned with the process of reversing the polarity of consciousness from object (everything you might call conscious content, including thoughts and body etc.) to subject (the bare point of subjective consciousness without content). This process, once completed, should cause consciousness to realize ITSELF as it is in its own nature. This is a transcendent realization which takes place outside space and time and concerns consciousness completely detached from objects. It is when one realizes the Self - that is, the One Self shared by all objects. But this Self is not a self-in-the-world. It is the polar opposite of the world. For sure, it contains the world - indeed, it is the source of the world, and the objects of the world are an APPEARANCE of its formless meaning and value - but this is something entirely other than a state of complete identity with phenomena; or, if you like, with the objective pole of consciousness. Such a state would be an identification with the APPEARANCE and not the SOURCE. It has been said many times that the Self is the soul of the universe.... (N.B. I'm aware that the state of Self-Realization is not the final state of non-dual enlightened consciousness, but that is even more transcendent, not less).

Now, the reason I wanted say all of that is because there is a very worrying tendency to identify any state of consciousness which concerns loss of self as being necessarily transcendent or "spiritual", and it is my very firm conviction that this is simply not the case; and I find this very, very worrying, as there will be many people who have depressive or self-depreciatory tendencies who will seek (unconsciously) to have their self-hatred justified.

There is a completely incommensurable difference between nagating the objective personality as a means for reversing the polarity of consciousness, on the one hand, and seeking to destroy the one kernal of spiritual idenity we all share, on the other hand; and this kernal is the self. Not the personality; not the "ego" - the competing, protective and narcissistic feeling of being only an individual; but the core self which gives identity to all of these things. Without it, there is no hope of enlightenment, as it is the gateway to the transcendent. Extinguishing it in favour of the objects of consciousness is the opposite of enlightenment. This, I fear, is why Suzanne Segal struggled so desperately to rationalize her experience, as there was no other faculty of "knowing" available to her.

Finally, I would like to point out that there are a million reasons why a person would sooner annihilate their true self than allow it to be realized, and Suzanne Segal herself admitted that she had suffered the awful personal consequences of abuse. If an individual learns from an early age that they, in some innate way, are the reason for their own suffering - that their very BEING is somehow to blame - they will do anything and everything to avoid revealing themselves for fear of a repeat of their trauma. This process can be so ingrained as to become almost completely unconscious; which is to say that one relegates oneself - the real self - to one's unconscious so as to protect it. But the fear of being revealed is so great as to cause one to fear oneself above all else, eventually causing consciousness to abandon the self altogether....

I hope that, in writing this book, Suzanne Segal has left far more than simply a curio. Her legacy is far more important than that. Her life is a testament to the myriad ways in which we seek to destroy that which is real and of true value in eachother and ourselves, and I sincerely hope that her suffering and courage are seen to be the gift they are, however tragic that suffering was.