Collision with the Infinite: A Life Beyond the Personal Self

By Suzanne Segal

Book Overview

The autobiography is the extraordinary story of how a young Jewish woman from the Midwest came to terms with the powerful transformation despite the mind`s relentless attempts to pathologize it, and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1916290337
• ISBN13: 9781916290334
• Release Date: February 2020
• Publisher: New Sarum Press
• Length: 190 Pages
• Weight: 0.56 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Enlightenment can happen to anyone ?

The author lost the sense of self one day standing at a bus stop, 4 months pregnant, in Paris, France and it never returned. Not understanding what had happened, she thought herself mentally ill and spent the next decade seeking therapy and studying psychology. Finally coming across a book on Buddhism, she reads that the loss of the sense of self is the goal of millions of Buddhists worldwide. An amazing journey, and very inspiring.

Fabulous

I've wanted to buy this book for quite some time, and today it came in the mail. I read the whole book in less than one day and found it absolutely wonderful. Some reviewers have mentioned that a distinct weakness to the book is Segal's insistence on the irrelevance of spiritual practices. I do not consider this a weakness but in fact part and parcel to Segal's "ideas" of liberation--what we call spiritual practice and what we call non-spiritual things are in fact synonymous to one another within the context of the vastness. This is liberation itself, the idea that the only purpose served by practice is to demonstrate how practice is unecessary. This seems to mirror other "individuals" who state that going to the bathroom, eating, and sleeping are as much a spiritual practice as is meditating or praying. To Segal there is no living apart from the vastness or even necessarily in the vastness--rather, instead of indentifying with these two dualistic states, we rather are the vastness itself, quite different from inside or outside this vastness. There have been times where I have been told that this enlightenment comes by grace and I think "Ah, why can I not have that? Why am I so unworthy?" but then I remember what Segal's first and foremost insistence is: we are all the vastness; we can never NOT be the vastness. In this case, enlightenment is just a delusion itself. Wonderful book, wonderful.

Extraordinary, Beautiful, and Heartbreaking

Suzanne Segal's extraordinary story of her experience of the instantaneous and total loss of her "self" is simply fascinating, and should be read by anyone blessed or cursed to find themselves wandering the incomprehensible and often bleak terrains of the varieties of spiritual undoing. Her style is beautifully straightforward, lucid, and generous, without affectation. In her matter-of-fact at-homeness with the most extraordinary conditions of consciousness, she is similar to Bernadette Roberts, whose own books on the no-self experience are the best I've ever encountered. This book has distinct weaknesses--Segal's final insistence on the irrelevance of spiritual practices rings a little strange in the light of her own years of intense meditation practice that preceded her catapulting into the land of no-self, and her failure to consider more fully the relationship between her history and the apparently spontaneous dawning of the no-self state strikes me as unsatisfying. And the book's somewhat sketchy epilogue clearly raises more--and fascinating--questions than it answers. The early death of this extraordinary woman is heartbreaking; how marvelous it would have been to see where her further development led her. But as it is, she has left us a precious gift in this memoir, like a note from a previous climber, high up on a frigid mountain, pointing the way ahead.

An absolutely wonderful book

I am still high from reading this book yesterday. As a fellow T.M. teacher who was in Livigno, Italy, training to become a teacher just two months before Suzanne, I feel that I can almost remember her question to Maharishi about the pain of her experience. Her comments on the flaws of this large spiritual organization are accurate, but sad to read in print. But how she could have missed the signs of her own enlightenment is beyond me, as we were so carefully taught to recognize the symptoms. Why she failed to check in with Maharishi earlier is also incomprehensible. Still I feel that her book has given me a personal key to the next steps in my own spiritual evolution. Just reading her words, and her final, total clarity around her experience was a wonderful darshan that makes me want to give away copies of her book to everyone I know.

A mind-bending, provocative spiritual autobiography

I woke up at 4 in the morning and I decided that, rather than complain about my unintentional wakefulness, I would embrace it and see what happens. How perfect that I decided to reach for Collision with the Infinite, the story of an American woman who, during the un-enlightening act of stepping on a bus in France, spontaneously realized the goal of mystics throughout the ages -- stepping beyond any notion of an "I," a "self" to whom things happen. More incredible than her instantaneous realization was the terror and confusion that, for ten years, arose in the mind of this woman along with her lack of awareness of "who" was experiencing this terror. Ms. Segal's search to understand her experience and the evolving awareness that arose kept me wide awake until I had finished her story only 2 hours later. And her story sparked my story. To say that Collision altered *my* sense of self would be simplistic at best. A must read for seekers of all kinds