In 2017 I read the book Collision with the Infinite by Suzanne Segal. It seems that she had enlightenment and it was the same as that in Lifewave. This book and the book One Taste by Ken Wilber showed me what the Lifewave enlightenment is. Yarr and his Adepts didn't seem to want to explain it to anyone in the 1980s.
I asked Google Gemini to summarise the states of consciousness that she went through. I don't believe she got to enlightenment by the same path as John Yarr and the Lifewave adepts. Only the third of the three states of consciousness is the one known in Lifewave.
1. The Witness State
This was the immediate aftermath of the "collision" she experienced on the bus. In this stage, her personal sense of "I" was gone, but a detached "witness" remained. She felt as though she was watching her body and mind from a location outside of herself. This period was characterized by intense terror and fear, as she was a conscious observer of a body that no longer felt like her own. This state persisted for months, and she sought professional help to understand it.
2. The Dissolution of the Witness
This second phase occurred after the "witness" itself disappeared. With no sense of personal identity or a detached observer, she entered a state of complete "no-self." All vestiges of a familiar "me" were gone. This was an even more frightening experience for her, as she no longer had even the detached observer to give her a reference point. She felt an even "heightened level of fear" and entered a period of continuous psychological distress. Despite this, her mind and body continued to function unimpaired.
3. The Realization of the Vastness
After a decade of suffering and seeking answers, Segal came to understand her experience within the context of spiritual traditions. She realized that the "emptiness" she had been experiencing was not an absence of something, but rather "the very substance of everything." She renamed this emptiness "the vastness." In this final stage, she accepted her state, and the fear gave way to a sense of freedom and joy. She began to see the world not as an external place, but as the expression of this vastness, which she came to understand was her true nature.
Below is a quotation from her book.
"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 at 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."
The first of these three states is called witnessing and seems to be an extreme form of dissociation. The self exists but merely witnesses thoughts and emotions. Thoughts and emotions seem to be something separate from the self. They, together with movement and speech, are not controlled by the self.
The second of these three states seems to be Buddhist enlightenment where the self does not exist. It is interesting that she suffered even more than in the first state. It would seem that most people who lose their sense of self do not experience this suffering. It's just a matter of luck whether you have this suffering and whether it continues for ever or moves into a different state.
In Ken Wilber's experience, the witness state dissolves into what he calls One Taste. Others call it One Mind. This seems to be what the Lifewave adepts (some of them) experienced. For Suzanne Segal however, the witness state dissolved into no-self and only later moved into One Taste. No-self and One Taste seem to be flip sides of the same thing. They are both forms of nonduality. In one of them the self does not exist and in the other everything seems to be part of the self.
Suzanne Segal practiced Trancendental Meditation. She writes about that in the first part of her book. She didn't seem to recognise that it was her intensive meditation that brought about these states. She seemed to think it was all random: there is nothing we can do to bring about these states of consciousness. In this respect she seems to be putting the point of view of nondualism.
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