Many of us have experienced moments of Breaking Through without knowing what to call it. The philosophy cannot be paraphrased, and Ricketts himself struggles to define the concept by offering examples of personal experiences or second hand accounts to make his understanding clear. Perhaps one can best Breaking Through as a sort of epiphany that occurs when stimulated by some everyday or traumatic experience. This experience must not be traumatic, shocking, or stressful, but consistent with common experiences of all humans. For example, many of Ricketts' examples are of traumatic experiences.
Society normally deals with traumatic experiences in a predictable fashion.
In other words, when a loved one dies, it is expected for the relatives to grieve. The person experiencing the breakthrough will accept the death or view the death as periphery on a whole new plane of life and death. Looking at the whole picture of life and death, the person may feel more in touch with the concept of impermanence. The stimulus can be a death, a fight, or an opera. There is no predetermined set of events that will cause an epiphany.