With a guru, in monasteries, and isolated for weeks at a time in forests, Lerner practiced the Buddhist art of vipassana or 'insight meditation.' From exercises which took him 'inside his body' to undo knots of pain, he progressed through various stages of awareness to glimpses of the 'clear white light' and, for an instant, nirvana. Sensitively and convincingly written, his self-absorbed book nearly succeeds in describing the ineffable.