Neville recounts a formative experience one night in 1926 or 1927 (he says he was 21 or 22, having been born in 1905), at the Larchmont Shore Club in New York, during a dance for young people held in the Prohibition era. Rather than join the dance, he went to bed reading a book on the life of Buddha with the light on and music still playing; he apparently fell into a trance around ten that night and was found the next morning at nine, the open book still on his chest, after what he describes as nearly twelve hours in a cataleptic state during which he experienced himself as infinite light.