Extracts from A Path with Heart, by Jack Kornfield:

"One of the most comprehensive maps of Buddhist meditation is the Theravada (the Elders) map of higher consciousness... The Elders' map divides the mystical realms into two broad areas: those attained by expanding the self and those attained by dissolving the self...

"For expanding the self, the Elders outlined eight refined levels of consciousness, called the Realms of Absorption (also called the Higher Samadhis). The realms bring us to states of celestial lights and expansion where we experience extraordinary feelings, visionary illuminations, and states of rarefied stillness. Beyond these states, the map of the Elders describes another whole set of mystical realms called the Realms of the Dissolution of Self...

"In Insight Meditation, once we have abandoned the luminous state of arising and passing, we open to a profound cycle of dissolution, death, and rebirth ... In this stage, nothing around us seems solid or trustworthy. On all levels, our consciousness becomes attuned to endings and death. We notice the end of conversations, of music, of encounters, of days, of sensations in the body on a powerful cellular level. We senses the dissolution of life moment to moment. Now the dark night deepens. As our outer and inner worlds dissolve, we lose our sense of reference. There arises a great sense of unease and fear, leading students into a realm of fear and terror. "Where is there any security?" "Wherever I look, things are dissolving." In these stages we can experience this dissolution and dying within our own body. We may look down and see pieces of our own body seeming to melt away and decay, as if we were a corpse. As the realm of terror deepens, periods of paranoia may arise. In this stage, wherever we look, we become fearful of danger...

"People experience these feelings in many different ways: as pressure, claustrophobia, oppression, tightness, restlessness, or struggle, or as the unbearable endless repetition of experience, one after another, dying all the time. We can feel as if we are stuck in meaningless cycles of life. Existence can seem flat, arid, and lifeless. It is as if there is no exit. As we learn to acknowledge each state, name each state, and meet it with mindfulness, we discover that we are dying over and over again ... In traversing these painful stages, there next arises a deep and profound desire for freedom... Even though we wish for freedom, there often arises a sense of impossibility, that we cannot go any further, that we cannot let go any more. We enter the stage of great doubt; we want to stop; we become restless... Here the world becomes too difficult; our spiritual practice asks too much of us; we wish we could quit and go home to our bed or our mother.

"Because the powerful stages of fear and dissolution touch such painful chords in us, it is easy to get stuck in them or lose our way among them. In this process, it is important to have a teacher, otherwise, we will get lost or overwhelmed by these states and quit...

"To bring things to resolution means we must go right into them. We must be able to look them straight in the eye and say, "Yes, I can open to this too," meeting them with an open heart that neither grasps nor resists them...

"When we can finally look at the horrors and joys, our birth and our death, the gain and loss of all things, with an equal heart and open mind, there arises the state of the most beautiful and profound equanimity... From this perspective we can see that we are nothing and that we are everything. At these deep levels of practice, profound satoris and mystical awakenings continue to unfold…