Collision with the Infinite, by Suzanne Segal
Fascinating first-person account of a unique spiritual, or neurological, experience
(Review posted 16 Oct 2004 16:53:40)

Standing at a bus-stop one day, something happened to Suzanne Segal. She experienced a profound spiritual event, or a rare neurological event, or likely both, and she lost her sense of Self. And the consequences of this played out in the rest of her life, she wrote this book. (You can find out more about her, and the book, all over Google.)

In science, and in intellectual endeavor in general, it's often instructive to see what happens when something goes wrong. We smash atoms together to examine the fragments, we do psychological studies of people whose brains are fine except for an iron bar through the right temporal lobe, we see what happens when you bombard a fruit fly's genes with radiation.

From this external scientific vantage, "Collision with the Infinite" is a fascinating study of consciousness and self-consciousness, and of the (as it turns out) potentially loose linkage between the two. Ms. Segal had consciousness, subjectivity, an inner life, but it didn't (at least for awhile) include a Self, a (what?) center of consciousness, a symbol (symbol?) of the entity doing the perceiving.

Which is pretty amazing.

The book is also fascinating from the subjective side, read as the story of a fellow seeker after enlightenment and satori. Ms. Segal's experience clearly has something or other to do with (and may be more or less exactly the same as) the loss of self that's so key to various contemplative traditions.

Much of what she writes about her feelings (or the feelings that remained once she herself vanished) echoes Buddhist and Taoist writings about the relation between universe and self, and what happens when the two merge, or when self is seen as only a mask that the universe temporarily wears. She has the same problems with language and expression that other people writing in this vein have had; struggling with the paradoxes implicit in distinguishing non-duality from duality, in writing about how it feels not to exist as anything separate from "the vastness".

This edition of the book (Blue Dove Press, 1998) includes an epilogue excerpted from public talks Ms. Segal gave in 1996, and an afterword written by her editor and friend Stephan Bodian after her death. She had, it turns out, a brain tumor. At the end of her life, her experiences became more intense, sharper, more varied and polymorphous. Does this tell us things about the relationship between the biological and the spiritual? Or is just asking that question a category mistake? Here, unlike most of elsewhere, we have what might be direct empirical evidence bearing on these questions.