Suzanne Segal

"I lifted my right foot to step up into the bus and collided head-on with an invisible force that entered my awareness like a silently exploding stick of dynamite, blowing the door of my usual consciousness open and off its hinges, splitting me in two. In the gaping space that appeared, what I had previously called 'me' was forcefully pushed out of its usual location inside me into a new location that was approximately a foot behind and to the left of my head. 'I' was now behind my body looking out at the world without using the body's eyes."

"I suddenly became aware that I was driving through myself. For years there had been no self at all, yet here on this road, everything was myself, and I was driving through me to arrive where I already was. In essence, I was going nowhere because I was everywhere already. The infinite emptiness I new myself to be was now apparent as the infinite substance of everything I saw."

"The substance of the vastness is so directly perceivable to itself in every moment that the circuitry at times requires another adjustment phase to get used to more infinite awareness. When asked who I am, the only answer possible is: I am the infinite, the vastness that is the substance of all things. I am no one and everyone, nothing and everything -- just as you are."

Suzanne Segal taught publicly for awhile until she began to experience bouts of 'vastness expansion', fear and doubt. She began to judge what she had been saying or claiming to know. She thought her talk about the vastness was perhaps a defence mechanism to protect her from feelings and childhood abuse memories. In 1997 she was diagnosed with a massive brain tumor and died shortly thereafter.

Stephian Bodian, her very close friend says

"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."

Photos - Suzanne Segal and Stephian Bodian