Another statistic of long-term ego-death was Suzanne Segal, who one day found she had become bereft of herself. After years of seeking a cure to the unease this experience had set off in her—it would seem that not everybody is at peace with being nobody—she wrote Collision with the Infinite: A Life Beyond the Personal Self (1996). The following year she died of a brain tumor at the age of forty-two. Although no link was established between her diseased brain and the disappearance of her ego, cerebral tumors causing altered states of consciousness and changes in personality are not unknown.5
Unlike U. G. but similar to Wren-Lewis, Segal sought answers to her transformation in spiritual traditions that addressed egoless experience. Unlike Wren-Lewis but similar to U. G., Segal had pursued a spiritual practice, Transcendental Meditation, before she became the beneficiary of enlightenment by accident. Segal lost her ego two years after discontinuing TM, which she performed for eight years. In an interview, she stated that she did not feel meditation played a role in the loss of her self-identity. U. G. was in agreement with Segal. After years of pursuing ego-death through meditation, he railed against this procedure as pointless and perhaps harmful.
—For most of humanity, including that part which studies consciousness, the phenomenon of ego-death is not enthralling, or even well marked as a human experience. Ordinary folk have all their big questions answered to their satisfaction by some big book. And cognitive psychologists, philosophers of mind, and neuroscientists have their reputations to consider as high priests of the noosphere. Quite naturally, then, almost no one figures their time to be ill spent in bickering about some point of scripture or a psycho-philosophical poser rather than in sizing up some superlative individuals who have called into question what we are or what we might be aside from slaves of our egos. Regardless of the life stories of U. G., Wren-Lewis, and Suzanne Segal, ego-death is a state that has nothing but anecdotal evidence to support it, which groups this phenomenon with mystical experiences and revealed religions. As one might imagine, though, ego-death is laden with about as much mass appeal as physical death. It has been eyeballed as an ideal only by a minuscule number of our species who feel there is something wrong with ego-life, which they conceive as an uncanny masquerade where things they would rather not see are behind every false face. To everyone else, life is life and death is death. We are not sold on impersonal survival. It would negate all that we are, or think we are, for what are we but egos itching to survive? And once our egos have been deposed, what would be left of us? By all recorded accounts, everything would be left except what Horwitz called “a vanity, an elaborate delusion, a ruse.”
Some would say that if human beings must exist, the condition in which U. G., Wren-Lewis, and Segal found themselves is the optimum model, one in which everyone’s ego has been overthrown and our consciousness of ourselves as persons goes up in smoke. As Segal tried to explain what had happened to her:
The experience of living without a personal identity, without an experience of being somebody, an “I” or a “me,” is exceedingly difficult to describe, but it is absolutely unmistakable. It can’t be confused with having a bad day or coming down with the flu or feeling upset or angry or spaced out. When the personal self disappears, there is no one inside who can be located as being you. The body is only an outline, empty of everything of which it had previously felt so full.
The mind, body, and emotions no longer referred to anyone—there was no one who thought, no one who felt, no one who perceived. Yet the mind, body, and emotions continued to function unimpaired; apparently they did not need an “I” to keep doing what they always did. Thinking, feeling, perceiving, speaking, all continued as before, functioning with a smoothness that gave no indication of the emptiness behind them. No one suspected that such a radical change had occurred. All conversations were carried on as before; language was employed in the same manner. Questions could be asked and answered, cars driven, meals cooked, books read, phones answered, and letters written. (Collision with the Infinite)
As the ego-dead, so we might imagine, we would continue to know pain in its various forms—that is the essence of existence—but we would not be cozened by our egos to take it personally, an attitude that converts an individual’s pain into conscious suffering. Naturally, we would still have to feed, but we would not be omnivorous gourmands who eat for amusement, gorging down everything in nature and turning to the laboratory for more. As for reproduction, who can say? Animals are driven to copulate, and even as the ego-dead we would not be severed from biology, although we would not be unintelligently ruled by it, as we are now. As a corollary of not being unintelligently ruled by biology, neither would we sulk over our extinction, as we do now. Why raise another generation destined to climb aboard the evolutionary treadmill? But then, why not raise another generation of the ego-dead? For those who do not perceive either their pleasures or their pains as belonging to them, neither life nor death would be objectionable or not objectionable, desirable or not desirable, all right or not all right. We would be the ego-dead, the self-less, and, dare we say, the enlightened.
A depiction of what our lives might be like in such a state would seem to have been recorded in the eightieth section of the Tao Te Ching, perhaps to show up humankind’s modus vivendi by daydreaming about one not of this earth.
Let all lands be small
And their people few,
So they have no need
For time-saving machines.
Let them keep their minds
On the coming of death
And never stray far
From where they were born.
Should they have boats
Or carts to go traveling,
Let there be nothing
They would want to see.
Should they have weapons,
Let them be put someplace
Out of everyone’s sight
To rust and grow useless.
Let each person’s duties
Be no more than may be
Kept track of by tying knots
On a short piece of string.
Let their food be enough
And their clothes drab,
Their homes decent shelter
And their lives unremarkable.
If the next land is so close
That they can hear its
Dogs barking at night and its
Roosters crowing at dawn . . .
Let them get old and die
Rather than be troubled
By the least curiosity
To have a look over there.
One might think of this not as a description of an ego-dead society but of one that is dead all the way. But one would be wrong. Wherever there are those who “get old and die,” there are also those who live in wait for age and for death—youths and infants and infants-to-be. And because none of them should take his fate personally in the Taoist scripture quoted above, why not take it as it comes? Of course, this would not occur to the ego-dead, just as it does not occur to species of a lower order that recycle themselves as nature bids them. The ego-dead would be back to where our race began—surviving, reproducing, dying. Nature’s way would be restored in all its mindlessness and puppetry.
But even if ego-death is regarded as the optimum model for human existence, one of liberation from ourselves, it still remains a compromise with being, a concession to the blunder of creation itself. We should be able to do better, and we can. To have our egos killed off is second-best to killing off death and all the squalid byplay that flitters around it. So let all lands be small, and let them grow smaller and smaller until no lands are left where any human footstep need press itself upon the earth.
—At the height of her ego-death, Segal was ecstatic twenty-four hours a day. She also began to speak of what she called the “vastness,” a term that sounds as if it belongs in one of Lovecraft’s tales of cosmic horror. To Segal, the vastness was a unitary phenomenon that comprised all existence. As she wrote, “The purpose of human life has been revealed. The vastness created these human circuitries in order to have an experience of itself out of itself that it couldn’t have without them.” Living in the vastness as she did, nothing was useless to Segal because it served the purposes of the vastness. For her, it also felt good once she had gotten over her initial fear of being a tool of the vastness rather than a person. However, toward the end of her life, as American psychotherapist and Buddhist Stephan Bodian recounts in his afterword to Collision with the Infinite, Segal began to have more intense experiences in which “the vastness became even vaster for itself.” This new phase of the vastness both distressed her emotionally and sapped her physical energy until she died from her unsuspected brain tumor not long afterward.
Like Segal’s vastness, Schopenhauer’s Will has the same purpose in mind for human beings—to use our “circuitries” to acquire some kind of knowledge of its mindless self. For Schopenhauer, though, the self-seeking Will does not feel good to human beings except during moments when we temporarily satisfy its universal ravening as it emerges within us. Why the vastness or the Will should want to use us in this way is a mystery. Both of these meta-realities do serve the purpose of making sense of human life in their own way. But whether they make us feel good does not seem to matter to either of them. We are just vehicles; they are the drivers. And wherever we are going, as Segal and Schopenhauer have assured us, along with every other individual whose consciousness has been opened to the vastness by whatever name or nature, we must keep in mind that we are not what we think we are. Taking things a step further, Professor Nobody would teach us that neither is our world what we think it is, lecturing with a flamboyant dispassion on the omnipresence of the infernal in “The Eyes That Never Blink.”
Mist on a lake, fog in thick woods, a golden light shining on wet stones—such sights make it all very easy. Something lives in the lake, rustles through the woods, inhabits the stones or the earth beneath them. Whatever it may be, this something lies just out of sight, but not out of vision for the eyes that never blink. In the right surroundings our entire being is made of eyes that dilate to witness the haunting of the universe. But really, do the right surroundings have to be so obvious in their spectral atmosphere?
Take a cramped waiting room, for instance. Everything there seems so well anchored in normalcy. Others around you talk ever so quietly; the old clock on the wall is sweeping aside the seconds with its thin red finger; the window blinds deliver slices of light from the outside world and shuffle them with shadows. Yet at any time and in any place, our bunkers of banality may begin to rumble. You see, even in a stronghold of our fellow beings we may be subject to abnormal fears that would land us in an asylum if we voiced them to another. Did we just feel some presence that does not belong among us? Do our eyes see something in a corner of that room in which we wait for we know not what?
Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror. Then: no belief or body of laws will guard you; no friend, no counselor, no appointed personage will save you; no locked door will protect you; no private office will hide you. Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness.
From: The Conspiracy against the Human Race
***
Short exchange with certain lady on Goodreads who didn't like review posted by V.B
message:
1. This book is not about pathological 'depersonalization'. That is the beginning of the book and even Ms. Siegel says it was not pathological and it was not about 'depersonalization'. It is quite clearly about the process of enlightenment and the truth of knowing that everything and everyone is you and you are everyone and everything. The ecstasy and the joy of it. Perhaps you didn't read the last few chapters?
2. Just because tumours can cause altered states doesn't mean that was what was happening to her. In addition, the first part of the process of enlightenment happened 12 years before she came down with a brain tumor.
2. You are a bombastic idiot,
Dear Madam!
I think my fault is that I did not make clear what I mean using word depersonalisation. In the Dhamma and Nisargadatta's [NM] teaching it means highest enlightenment or awakening. Nibbāna is cessation of the person.
[NM: You, as the person, imagine that the Guru is interested in you as a person. Not at all. To him you are a nuisance and a hindrance to be done away with. He actually aims at your elimination as a factor in consciousness. ... Liberation is never of the person, it is always from the person.]
Enlightenment can be stated as a discovery of what one truly is, but since it is a timeless and eternal reality, imagining oneself to be a person so-and-so, is already step into darkness (at least according to the Buddha and NM).
I hope I made this point more clear: on spiritual level there is nothing pathological in depersonalisation, contrary, the existence of the person is pathological.
Another point, total enlightenment -cessation of a concept "I am"* - happens very rarely all at once, and there are gradual stages of awakening
*[ NM Immortality is freedom from the feeling: 'I am'. Yet it is not extinction. On the contrary, it is a state infinitely more real, aware and happy than you can possibly think of. Only self-consciousness is no more.]
Before such realisation one must first abandon any positive self-identifiication "I am this or that". In practical terms it means the attitude of detached observer where only "I am" is present, but no personal self-identifiication. This is already a certain stage of awakening, and I do grant her such attainment. I suppose this is the state of Eckhart Tolle, his teaching is quite good, but he emphasis only pure being - "I am".
What I indeed deny is that the author attained the final realisation, and I base my judgement on the fact that such state is totally without fear and any mental confusion.
[Q: How shall I recognise this state when I reach it?
NM: There will be no fear.]
As I understood, you totally reject idea that brain tumour had anything in common with her enlightenment. Of course there is such possibility, I simply do not know. I try to do my judgement according my present understanding of things as they are, and since my understanding is not perfect you may be right I I may be wrong.
However as I understand things: enlightenment is the result of very intense practice or very rarely - like in the case of Eckhart Tolle - tremendous personal suffering. Since it was not so in her case, I believe there was connection between her brain problem and her experience of vastness.
What I am not sure: was her experience only initiated by the brain tumour, in the case it survived the death of the body, or it was just temporal experience totally determined by the state of neurological system.
Much of human misunderstandings comes from the fact that people use the same words, but prescribe to them different meanings. I hope that at least I clarified the meaning of "depersonalisation", in spiritual tradition to which I belong.
May You be well and happy
Varapanyo Bhikkhu
PS
In my spiritual tradition harsh speech is a serious obstacle to enlightenment, but since you seem to believe in kind of spontaneous enlightenment which doesn't depend on how we act, you do not try to restrain your own speech. No doubt there is a consistency between your views and your practice 🙂
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