If we talk of an analogy, compare a person practicing dharmma and meditation to a grade 1 student. The learning process for an entire year of a grade 1 student is quite important. At the end of the year, if the student took the final exam and passed it, he or she became a grade 1 graduate, and will be ready to study for grade 2 after a summer break.
Passing a final exam for grade 1 is the key step. Yes the 1 full year study is a very important process as I said before. But if he did not take the exam, and he stopped studying for a while, he would forget all what he studied in the past year, and he would not even have a grade 1 certificate from school with him.
Passing the "final exam" to become Sotāpanna, a 1st level developed person called a stream-enterer, is very important. Frequent meditation of both Samatha and Vipassana would prepare the mind so that it is ready for the final exam. When the time comes, the mind will enter a Jhana state by itself, and the observer would see some phenomenon in the mind briefly, to which he felt neutral and indifference to it, and experienced an emptiness, the Nirvana, briefly. He might "see" an extremely bright yet cool light sphere coming out from his own chest while he sat closed eyes in a lotus position. Moment after, it would be gone and everything is dark again, he would start pondering of what had happened, and he would realize that his mind had changed inside permanently. His selfness disappeared, or mostly disappeared, or became irrelevant. He did not even feel proud of what just happened at all.
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