The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 84 of 125
Driving through myself
I LOOKED UP THE passage, the one I had remembered under the holly, from Suzanne Segal’s Collision with the Infinite: 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. Collision with the Infinite was one of the most widely acclaimed accounts of awakening to appear at the end of the twentieth century. The “years there had been no self at all” to which Segal refers had been the key experience of her life. Out of the blue (in the middle, in fact, of boarding a bus) she had lost all sense of who she was. All her subsequent life had been spent in a state of ego-free dissociation in which she found, to her surprise, that she could function perfectly well. The passage quoted above was the beginning of her finding a new and far more profound sense of identity.