The attainment of cessation
A rare meditative state in which perception, feeling, and thought switch off entirely — and then resume.
Among the meditative attainments described in Buddhism, the attainment of cessation (Pali nirodha-samāpatti, "attainment of cessation," also called the cessation of perception and feeling) is the most extreme and the rarest. In it, the ordinary streams of mental activity — perception, feeling, and the various movements of thought — temporarily come to a complete stop. For a set period the conscious mind, in effect, switches off, and then, by a prior resolve, switches back on.
This is not the same as the goal of the path, and the distinction matters. Nirvāṇa is the permanent freeing of the mind from greed, hatred, and delusion; the attainment of cessation is a temporary suspension of mental functioning, after which one returns to ordinary awareness. The texts present it as accessible only to highly advanced practitioners — typically non-returners and arhats (those at the higher stages of awakening) — who have first mastered all the deep absorptions, including the subtlest "formless" states, and only then let even those fall still. It is sometimes described as the nearest thing in life to the peace of final liberation, a foretaste rather than the thing itself.
Because so much mental activity ceases, this state raised genuine puzzles for Buddhist thinkers: if consciousness fully stops, what carries the continuity of the person across the gap, so that meditation resumes in the same individual rather than ending in death? Different early schools answered differently, and these debates helped drive later philosophical developments about the underlying continuity of mind. For the ordinary reader, the key point is simply how finely Buddhism mapped the mind's depths — down to a state where even awareness itself rests.