In the Vinaya Pitaka (111.4) the Buddha left a concise map of his journey to nirvana – a description of the course of his meditation that night, couched in the kind of language a brilliant clinician might use in the lecture hall. …

I roused unflinching determination, focused my attention, made my body calm and motionless and my mind concentrated and one-pointed.

Standing apart from all selfish urges and all states of mind harmful to spiritual progress, I entered the first meditative state, where the mind, though not quite free from divided and diffuse thought, experiences lasting joy.

By putting an end to divided and diffuse thought, with my mind stilled in one-pointed absorption, I entered the second meditative state quite free from any wave of thought, and experienced the lasting joy of the unitive state.

As that joy became more intense and pure, I entered the third meditative state, becoming conscious in the very depths of the unconscious. Even my body was flooded with that joy of which the noble ones say, “They live in abiding joy who have stilled the mind and are fully awake.”

Then, going beyond the duality of pleasure and pain and the whole field of memory-making forces in the mind, I dwelt at last in the fourth meditative state, utterly beyond the reach of thought, in that realm of complete purity which can be reached only through detachment and contemplation.

This was my first successful breaking forth, like a chick breaking out of its shell…

This last quiet phrase is deadly. Our everyday life, the Buddha is suggesting, is lived within an eggshell. We have no more idea of what life is really like than a chicken has before it hatches. Excitement and depression, fortune and misfortune, pleasure and pain, are storms in a tiny, private, shell-bound realm which we take to be the whole of existence.

Yet we can break out of this shell and enter a new world. For a moment the Buddha draws aside the curtain of space and time and tells us what it is like to see into another dimension.