Has Anyone Since Buddha Reached Nirvana, Really?

One day in 1982, while boarding a bus in Paris, the 27-year-old Segal experienced a sudden shift in her consciousness. She described the experience in her book, Collisions With the Infinite:

"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."

Segal described this first period of her experience as "witnessing", since she was aware of herself but also critically detached from it. This was tremendously unpleasant for her, full of anxiety and fear:

The moment the eyes opened the next morning, the mind exploded in worry. Is this insanity? Pscyhosis? Schizophrenia? Is this what people call a nervous breakdown? Depression? What happened? And would it ever stop? ... The mind was in agony as it tried valiantly to make sense of something it could never comprehend, and the body responded to the anguish of the mind by locking itself into survival mode, adrenaline pumping, senses fine-tuned, finding and responding to the threat of annihilation in every moment."

Having a background in meditation, Segal questioned whether this break could be the first step in a positive journey but dismissed it:

"The thought did arise that perhaps this experience of witnessing was the state of Cosmic Consciousness Maharishi had described long before as the first stage of awakened awareness. But the mind instantly discarded this possibility because it seemed impossible that the hell realm I was inhabiting could have anything to do with Cosmic Consciousness."

In the years after her break Segal continued to function with seeming normalcy, completing a doctorate in psychology at the Wright Institute. She continued to feel completely depersonalized, literally as if her own name did not refer to anyone. She described it as if her "... body, mind, speech, thoughts, and emotions were all empty; they had no ownership, no person behind them. I was utterly bereft of all my previous notions of reality".

Segal's state of mind terrified her, and she sought advice from California's Buddhist community. Buddhism intentionally cultivates loss of ego and a sense of emptiness and oneness, and spiritual teachers tried to help Segal see her condition positively. Several even congratulated her: "This is a wonderful experience. It has to stay eternally with you. This is perfect freedom. You have become (moksha) of the realized sages," read one letter she received.

Twelve years after her initial break, Segal dramatically entered another phase of her experience, centered around a sense of unity of perception between herself and the world:

"In the midst of a particularly eventful week, I was driving north to meet some friends when 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 knew myself to be was now apparent as the infinite substance of everything I saw."

This sense of cognitive and spiritual oneness remained with Segal for two years, up through the publishing of Collisions in 1996.