The inability to see the meaning in everyday experiences that we have been taught to see in them, and the having of a disease in which such meaning is constantly shifting due to one’s own subjective nature, allows, if one has the presence of mind, for the possibility of mysticism, the ability to project no meaning into everyday experiences. This a possible interpretation of Zen mysticism. It will not account for the Tibetan Buddhist mystic’s "undifferentiated unity" or the Christian mystic’s "oneness with God". Zen mystics, on the other hand, say a walk through a rock garden, or the act of chopping wood, can be just as "enlightening" as what is actually experienced in deep meditation.

This type of mysticism, on the reading of some, was what Sartre suggested in certain passages of Nausea. The following is an example. The edition is editor Robert Denoon Cumming’s The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, pp. 59-60.

All at once the veil is torn away, I have understood, I have seen. . . . The roots of the chestnut tree sank into the ground just beneath my bench. I couldn’t remember it was a root anymore. Words had vanished and with them the meaning of things, the way things are to be used, the feeble points of reference which men have traced on their surface. I was sitting, stooping over, head bowed, alone in front of this black, knotty lump, entirely raw, frightening me. Then I had this vision.

It took my breath away. Never, up until these last few days, had I suspected the meaning of "existence." I was like the others, like the ones walking along the seashore, wearing their spring clothes. I said, like them, "The sea is green; that white speck up there is a seagull," but I didn’t feel that it existed or that the seagull was an "existing seagull"; usually existence conceals itself. It is there, around us, in us, it is us, you can’t say two words without mentioning it, but you can never touch it.

His words "but you can never touch it" point to a certain ineffability in his experience. He goes on to suggest that what has happened to him is that he has ceased to project meaning onto his experience, to see it through the webs of significance that to him are arbitrary, and conceal the truth. But this cannot be taken as a literal description of the experience—it itself words can never touch, because words themselves mean things; the experience is devoid of all meaning. The Zen mystic will describe his experience by saying, "It is what it is, and nothing else." One cannot put it into words, because as soon as one does, one has a mere representation of it made up of meaning—the meanings of words—and it is not "what it is".

In the mid-1990s, after reading of an interpretation of Existentialism that viewed it as a transcendence of webs of significance such that I have suggested (it was the work cited in the "Acknowledgements" section below), I decided to try to cease to project meaning onto my experience as well. I did not do this through deep meditation with the eyes closed, but merely sitting in a park or taking a walk. In order to do this, I found I had to leave all analysis of Existentialism I had read behind—this became only another conceptual framework that imposed meaning on experience, and so I had to forget it itself as well. I found that I experienced things that have to do with Sartre’s experience that I quoted, and "It is what it is, and nothing else" described it perfectly. But I wasn’t all the way there. The grass did not look like what I had been socialized to think of as grass, my hand did not look "normal"—everything appeared new and strange, like there was nothing like it in the world, like no words could tell me what it actually was. But this was only a stage.

As I continued in these walking meditations over the years, I realized part of the meaning we have in life comes from a certain consciousness we have of the past—everything that has led up to this moment. If we had no consciousness of this, things would not make "sense" in the same way. This does not necessarily mean being caught up in memories or living in consciousness of past moments. Even when we are living in the present, we have a certain consciousness that this makes sense in the context of our past. It makes sense that I am here now, because I was once born, had a childhood, went through adolescence, and got to the point where I am now—this is what we call a "life", and a "life" makes perfect sense to us.

I began to apply this process of ceasing to project meaning onto this very consciousness, the context by which we draw the "meaning" and feeling that "this all makes perfect sense" out of the present moment. I found, eventually, that objects around me appeared perfectly natural again. I was not like Sartre, to whom the root did not appear like a root, but who "couldn’t remember it was a root anymore". Now, the sentence, "It is a root," or, "It is grass," or, "They are people," became completely natural expressions of my experience. The problem with such sentences is that they cannot communicate the experience, and what it is like, to anyone else. There is no way to do so.

Once I got to the point where I could say, "It is grass," again, I saw it in a completely new way. What the grass was, and what the cultural meaning of "grass" was, were identical. But all meaning had been undercut by an overpowering sense that even meaning, experiencing things as I had been socialized to do so, was itself completely meaningless. Meaning itself lost its meaning, so that when I said, "It is grass," and the concept "grass" and its image were identical, I could see past the very socialization that made meaning itself seem to make sense—there was no reason for anything, nor could there ever be.

I can bring on at least some level of the insight and understanding of this experience at will (though sometimes this will be clearer than other times), but I am the first to admit I don’t do it as much as I should, and most of my everyday life is not spent living in such an experience. Zen Buddhist Shunryu Suzuki says in his compilation of lectures, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, of the goal of mystical experience, "Before you attain it, it is something wonderful, but after you attain it, it is nothing special. It is just you yourself, nothing special." It doesn’t solve all my problems for me; it is not a state of utter bliss. There is nothing different in it, in terms of emotion, perception, or "inner sense", than any everyday experience anyone has—except for the insight it gives on the nature of which all experience is made, the fundamental nature of everything that is. It means nothing and gives me perspective on everything. But it is no different from how you are now. Right now, you may think it is a completely different experience than anything you have ever known, but it is no different from walking through a park or sitting in a kitchen drinking coffee. In fact, it is so "ordinary" that I sort of say to myself, "It is an interesting insight, but it is not necessary for happiness," and do not explore it as much as I should. It takes some concentration and effort to bring on, so I get lazy about it. I’m sure if I did practice it more I may get to even another level, or be able to hold it in my mind for more than half a minute.

Such a mystical, "ceasing to project meaning" onto our lives and experience is only part of the schizophrenic illness. The schizophrenic ceases to project the meaning he has been socialized to project, but in addition spontaneously projects his own real-seeming, even disturbing, meaning onto his experience, that is issued from his own subjective psychology. Unless we had some degree of plasticity in our ability to see beyond the meaning we have been socialized to see in things, mysticism would be impossible, as well as the shift in webs of significance necessary to cultural anthropological study. In my own case, antipsychotic medication was needed to give me the presence of mind to make sense of such an experience, and to stop automatically generating my own personal meaning in things, which is no more mystical than projecting the socially constructed meaning the mystic tries to leave behind. Schizophrenics, though mysticism can accompany psychosis, do not generally have a sound understanding of such an experience. But unless we had the genes that contribute to psychosis—the ones that allow us to see beyond our webs of significance—mysticism, such as Sartre and Zen Buddhists describe, would be impossible.