Suzanne Segal

The following is a brief review of Suzanne Segal’s book, “Collision with the Infinite: A Life Beyond the Personal Self.” She was born in 1955 and died at age 42 in 1997.

There are many things about this book that resonate with those who believe in advaita and nondualism. Of course, this is my interpretation of her book. I would be interested in your feedback on this review.

In her book, Suzanne mentions her experiences that include such things as no self, witness, not being the doer, emptiness, and vastness. Also, she talks about her attraction to Ramana’s writings.

At age 18, Suzanne started to meditate and got involved with Transcendental Meditation and eventually became a TM teacher. She eventually quit TM because of the cruelty that she witnessed in the hierocracy of the TM top people.

After graduating college, Suzanne decides to go to Paris and stops meditating. She meets her husband there and eventually becomes pregnant. One day at age 28, as Suzanne is waiting in line to step into a bus, she experiences no self and a witness. After several months, the witness disappears but the loss of a personal self continues. The marriage eventually fails because her husband does not understand what she is undergoing.

Next is what Suzanne describes as the winter of her life, which lasts 12 years. It should be mentioned in addition to the loss of personal self there was a constant fear about this lost present. Thinking that she is going insane, Suzanne seeks help from psychotherapists; in fact, 12 therapists over 10 years.

Not having a background in advaita or nondualism, the psychotherapists label her “disease” as being a “dissociative disorder,” including depersonalization, derealization, and dissociation. Somehow, Suzanne believed this description did not accurately explain what she was going through.

While Suzanne gave up on her psychotherapists, she decides to go back to school for a Ph.D and become a therapist. She does graduate but decides that psychotherapy will not “cure” the loss of a personal self. Suzanne decides, instead, to spend her time training other psychotherapists about the concept of no self.

In the spring of 1992, Suzanne decides to seek a spiritual perspective on the emptiness of personal self. She first discovers Buddhism, which talks about emptiness and no self. She attends a meeting where Jean Klein is teaching. Klein was a well-known teacher of advaita. Jean invites Suzanne to meet with him the next day. He reassures her that everything that has happened to her is according to the advaita tradition.

Others reassured her that her feeling of fear was not that unusual, since Suzanne had no previous reference about no self. Either by letter or in person, Suzanne communicated with many people, including Jack Kornfield, Ram Dass, A. H. Almaas, Poonjaji, Gangaji, and Andrew Cohen. They all give Suzanne encouraging feedback.

Suzanne calls Ramana Maharshi her “spiritual father.” She found one passage in his writing very encouraging to her: “the sastras say one must serve (be associated with) the unmamifest 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.” This passage was significant to Suzanne because that in two years things may change for her, if Ramana was correct.

Suzanne writes, “As it turned out, the joy was to arrive all at once, crashing onto the shores of awareness suddenly and irrevocably, just as the first wave of the dropping away of the self had occurred twelve years ago.

“From the clear experience of emptiness of self, my state of consciousness was about to transition abruptly into the next season — the experience that not only is the no personal self, there is also no other. In other words, I was about to shift permanently into unity awareness, in which the emptiness that dominated my consciousness was seen to be the very stuff of all creation. Once the secret of emptiness was revealed in this way, I began to describe it as ‘vastness.’”

As for the concept of “doer,” Suzanne writes, “When it becomes clear that there is no personal reference point, it becomes apparent that there never was a personal reference point, and that everything is done and has always been done by an unseen doer. This doer doesn’t start doing when it seen as the doer. It has always been the doer; the personal self has never been the doer.”

Suzanne died in 1997 of a brain tumor.

I hope this helps to explain her book better; obviously for brevity, I had to leave a lot of information out. I still have questions, such as how can a former TM teacher not look to the spiritual realm first, instead of psychotherapy? Why would the universe cause her so much grief for 12 years with the abrupt ending of her personal self, without the preparation or understanding?