Rating: 
Summary: The terror of the absolute
Review: Collision With the Infinite is a fascinating addition to the small but growing body of literature dealing with the Western experience of self-realization. Segal's narrative provides a compelling and disturbing account of her sudden, unsolicited and irreversible recognition of the utter emptiness of the Self nature, a realization that, because she lacked any guidance at the time it occurred, left her in the grip of overpowering terror. Even her acceptance and ultimate enjoyment of that condition was unstable and began to slip away as her health failed.Most accounts of enlightenment deal with it from the perspective of the blissful, exalted state it represents. Segal has given us a roadmap of the potential suffering that can arise when such transformations occur outside the traditional student teacher relationship.
Rating: 
Summary: Thought-provoking but inconsistent
Review: I agree with the previous reviewer that this book offers an interesting description of the spiritual experience of having "no-self" but isn't a particularly inspiring read. What was confusing though is that in the introduction we're asked to transcend viewing Suzanne's experiences pathologically, but in the epilogue she herself sees that she has been dissociated due to childhood sexual abuse. Why ask us to suspend a pathological interpretation only to invite us back to that interpretation at the end?
Rating: 
Summary: Some books just bare the Truth
Review: I am amazed out how the Universe will always put the right teacher at the right time in my life. What a book this is! I was so moved by it. And do you know when books just feel right to you? Well thats how I felt. I hope you feel the same. If you need a jolt of Truth...here you go.
Rating:
Summary: Some books just bare the Truth
Review: I am amazed out how the Universe will always put the right teacher at the right time in my life. What a book this is! I was so moved by it. And do you know when books just feel right to you? Well thats how I felt. I hope you feel the same. If you need a jolt of Truth...here you go.
Rating:
Summary: An absolutely wonderful book
Review: 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.
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Summary: Enlightenment: Now What?
Review: I found Ms. Segal's life story very interesting and refreshing. It used to be, that enlightening experiences were rarely ever shared, and certainly not spoken of so openly and honestly, let alone published. However, after reading the reviews herein, I was astonished to realize that no one picked up on several facts so candidly expressed by Ms. Segal. First of all, it is obvious to this former meditation instructor that Ms. Segal was born into this life with a strong conscious connection to her soul and the dharma of a seasoned yogi. (Anyone who sits in meditation daily at age 7 chanting their name inwardly as a mantra is indeed a person with much spiritual groundwork already covered.) Second, her fiancé jilted her at a time when she was most vulnerable. This, during the second six-month-long meditation retreat they both attended in Europe under the auspices of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the first Indian Master to bring Transcendental Meditation to the West. I believe being jilted would undo any good woman; but under these extraordinary circumstances, I can tell you from experience, everything in ones' life is magnified during a retreat of this nature. When in this space one becomes very "soft". Meaning, hyper-sensitive to even the most mundane things and the subtlest thought-forms. This is why it is most important to seclude oneself from the outside world, entirely released from responsibility and be with those of like intent as much as possible. Maharishi's retreats are specifically designed for huge chunks of karma (accumulated stress) to fall away in order to create "emptiness"; a space for the light to fill. Oftentimes, the out-picturing of this is not always pleasant, to say the least. Ms. Segal was quite young at the time this happened and I believe, due to her naiveté, was not prepared for the repercussions which appeared to have left a deep, enduring wound in her psyche. During retreats, there is always this anticipation on behalf of the meditator to have a great illuminating, epiphany: one specific event that shouts "enlightenment, at last"! More often than not, though, like Ms. Segal, there is a certain amount of disappointment and sense of inadequacy encountered in the wake of this. I used to remind those I was honored to assist that, just because something incredible fails to occur, it does not mean there was not any movement nor ones' goal not met. It all depends on the soul and its own cosmic time-table. None of us can really know the details in this regard; that is, until we put aside all attachment to the outcome of all our endeavors, spiritual or not. In fact, one eventually arrives at the point where there is no difference between the spiritual and the mundane: in short, the spiritualization of matter. With regard to extraordinary experiences, an Indian guru once told me, "...it comes to whom it comes to" and his comment has proved a great comfort to me and many others to realize there appears to be no rhyme or reason. We may have an inkling, but most likely, the experiences we have take many years to integrate. It is usually in retrospect that one sees the perfection of all experiences and is truly able to "see things just as they are", as the Buddha taught. After Ms. Segal's "bus stop hit" (which by the way, took place 6 years after the retreats and during which time she had ceased meditating), she had no idea what happened to her. I also find it so astounding that "fear" was her constant companion after this and that she did not simply allow herself to go into it, particularly in light of her intensive meditation training. In fact, it took her 12 years to sort this out after lengthy and varied psychotherapy only to find the answers she sought in Buddhist texts. Then found relief, only to realize that what she had been seeking, she'd possessed all along. Once realized, she was truly free and able to experience real joy for the first time in her life. Her account brings to mind Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz" where Glenda the Good Witch tells her, "...but my dear, you've had the power to go home all along!" Life is like that. Each of us has all we ever need, right now, in this moment. All that is required of us is to realize that there is nowhere to go and nothing to gain: We are It. All in all, Ms. Segal's biography is a fascinating and riveting; though a bit contradictory with regard to the value she places on spiritual practice. Quite simply, the tale of a contemporary mystic immersed in the challenges of a modern world. Read up for a glimpse of things to come, because I've a feeling this and many more similar experiences are in store for more of us than ever before in our planet's history.....
Rating:
Summary: A mind-bending, provocative spiritual autobiography
Review: 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
Rating:
Summary: Fabulous
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Breathtaking story
Review: Segal's spiritual autobiography was both tremendously exciting and disturbing. I haven't been so engaged by a personal spiritual awakening story since I read Franklin Jones' Knee of Listening back in 1976. Within a week I had gone back and read the book again. The happiest part was when she went on retreat and suddenly realized the all-encompasing unity of the universe, and had to fall to her knees at the wonder of it all. I was sad that she did not have the time to integrate her realization fully into her daily life, but I don't fear for her final destiny. I will read it again when I get it back from a friend.
Rating:
Summary: Extraordinary, Beautiful, and Heartbreaking
Review: 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.
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