Transcendent Consciousness Is Not God, Part 1

Recently, I read Suzanne Segal’s Collision With the Infinite, which was written in the 1990s and republished last year. It brought me full clarity about something I have seen and contemplated for quite a long time: The confusion many on a nondualistic path make between transcendent consciousness (experiences of limitlessness, oneness, love, joy, ecstasy, bliss, etc.) and God.

A Course in Miracles makes a distinction between Knowledge (God) and perception (consciousness) for a very good reason: They are not the same thing. This is, in fact, crucial to understanding the forgiveness the Course teaches. As I have shared over the years, I have had direct Revelation of God, which revealed to me that, indeed, God is beyond consciousness, and moreover, only God is real. Therefore, all consciousness, no matter how transcendent, is a false experience. It is an illusion.

There is much to say about this, so I am writing about it in three parts. To start, let me briefly tell you Dr. Segal’s story.

As a young woman, Suzanne joined the Transcendental Meditation movement. TM basically commodified “enlightenment” to “bring peace to the world.” Its followers were taught that if they spent most of every day in meditation for eight or nine years, they would find enlightenment in three stages, Cosmic Consciousness (themselves as consciousness), God Consciousness (the divinity in everything in consciousness), and Unity Consciousness (the oneness of everything in consciousness). Eventually, for various reasons, including infighting at the highest levels of the organization, she left the movement. As her life moved on, she stopped meditating.

But a few years later, while four months pregnant, as she boarded a bus in Paris, her personal identity fell away suddenly. She had entered Cosmic Consciousness. What followed was ten years of terrible emptiness and fear. She had forgotten that the Maharishi had said that entering this first stage in the enlightenment he sold would be difficult and was best accompanied by a guru. So, as she had expected joy and bliss when ego dropped away, she did not recognize what occurred. All she knew was a terrible emptiness within and agonizing fear as a result.

For a decade, she sought help through several mental health professionals who, as her own mind was doing, pathologized her experience. However, she refused to take drugs, even for her anxiety. Eventually, hoping to understand what had happened to her, she became a psychotherapist herself. But nothing helped.

Finally, someone pointed her toward Buddhism. (TM comes out of a Hindu tradition.) The Buddhists knew exactly what she was experiencing—classic ego death. They had a great deal of literature on it and a lot to say about it, and she was reassured. She came to recognize the emptiness was pure consciousness, what she called the vastness. Her experience was transformed. She still felt fear, but as it did not affect her awareness of the vastness. She recognized it was simply an experience she had in the vastness. The presence of fear only meant fear was present.

She soon became aware that she was one with everything in consciousness and felt she must have shifted through God Consciousness in the empty years and onto Unity Consciousness. She was in a state where the infinite, which she felt was the substance of all things in consciousness, was constantly aware of itself. This is where the main part of her book ended.

The Epilogue of her book consists of excerpts from public talks she gave in the spring of 1996. Reading them, I felt something was off. I couldn’t put my finger on what, until I read the Afterword by her friend, Stephan Bodian, the Buddhist psychologist, writer, and teacher. He reported that around that time, Suzanne began having rapturous experiences that left her drained. Not long after this, the fear returned in force and the vastness receded from her awareness. She withdrew from public speaking and her friends. She became aware of repressed memories of abuse in her childhood, the repression of which she realized was probably part of her fear in those ten years after her “bus hit.” She acknowledged she used her awareness of the vastness to avoid her feelings and childhood trauma. (So, perhaps those mental health professionals were not all off in their assessment of her? Many pursued with her the possibility of childhood trauma.) She claimed she existed after all, and Stephan reminded her that there is a difference between existence and the personal identity being gone. Her friends were waiting for her to integrate her new realizations, but she became increasingly disoriented and showed other symptoms, leading to an eventual diagnosis of an inoperable brain tumor. She died a few weeks later. 

Suzanne’s story resonated with me, given the personal identity fell away from me a few years ago. (This is detailed in A Memoir of Christ: A Student of A Course in Miracles Awakens, available at www.amazon.com). I recognized much of her experience without a person, the disorientation and other effects when this occurs, the adjustments that must be made, and the growing awareness of the unity of consciousness. However, as rough as my time was, it was nowhere near as bad as Suzanne’s. For one thing, it didn’t happen suddenly, and I knew what I was going through. I was also aware of Something of which she did not seem to be: God beyond consciousness. So, while I felt I lost myself, I never felt I lost God. This awareness was my supporting “guru.”

What Suzanne’s story highlighted for me was something I learned long ago: The experiences that we consider transcendent consciousness are an effect on the brain. Yes, they can be brought about by true Spiritual experiences. But they can also be the result of certain drugs, strokes, tumors and other diseases—and copious amounts of meditation that basically rewire the brain. 

As I’ve laid the groundwork for a long discussion in an already long newsletter, I leave further discussion to the next two weeks.

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