like that, swaying to and fro, with a funny little meaning which went beyond them. That little meaning annoyed me: I could not understand it, even if I stayed leaning against the gate for a hundred and seven years; I had learned everything I could know about existence. I left, I came back to the hotel, and there you are, I wrote.

5.4 A Happy Ending in Art?

Nausea continues after the park scene to strip Roquentin of his only remaining link with the past — his girlfriend Anny; even the Autodidact is taken from him. Sartre is luckier with the construction of Nausea than Nietzsche with Zarathustra however: there is no momentum in the narrative that requires him to deliver some kind of 'wisdom' at the end of it. But the ending does contain a resolution, and it turns out to be a restatement of Nietzsche's whole thinking and ethos: that the aesthetic justifies existence. For Roquentin realises that the song he listens to in the cafe has 'saved' two people at least: the Jew (who wrote it) and the Negress (who sings it). Perhaps it is significant that he latches on to these racial stereotypes because they give a well-defined sense of identity that he imagines that he lacks as a white European middle-class intellectual. This is how Sartre states his resolution:

She sings. That makes two people who are saved: the Jew and the Negress. Saved. Perhaps they thought they were lost right until the very end, drowned in existence. Yet nobody could think about me as I think about them, with this gentle feeling. Nobody, not even Anny. For me they are a little like dead people, a little like heroes of novels; they have cleansed themselves of the sin of existing. Not completely, of course – but as much as any man can do. This idea suddenly bowls me over, because I didn't even hope for that any more. I feel something timidly brushing against me and I dare not move because I am afraid it might go away. Something I didn't know any more: a kind of joy.
The Negress sings. So you can justify your existence? Just a little? I feel extraordinarily intimidated. It isn't that I have much hope. But I am like a man who is completely frozen after a journey through snow and who suddenly comes into a warm room. I imagine he would remain motionless near the door, still feeling cold, and that slow shivers would run over the whole of his body.

Some of these days
You'll miss me honey

Couldn't I try … Naturally, it wouldn't be a question of a tune … But couldn't I in another medium? … It would have to be a book.

Sartre does in his own terms justify his existence with his books, and is certainly remembered in the way that he wanted to be in this last section of Nausea. But do we really believe that he later felt that he had 'cleansed himself of the sin of existing'? For Rumi, if we remember, one is guilty of the sin of existing only if one does not strive to come to God; what would he say if God came to a person and that person says 'no thank you'? Because, using theistic terminology (and only as terminology), that is what Sartre does. He says 'no thank you' to the divine suchness in the park and turns to art as his salvation. Through art the artist attempts to achieve the goal of Pure Consciousness Mysticism: an expansivity and immortality, but through fame; unfortunately looking for the right thing in the wrong place. Others of course seek the same through wealth — Harding gives an excellent analysis and remedy for this in Head Off Stress — and through countless other avenues: through offspring for example. Harding (and others) also claim that the orientation toward the infinite and eternal allow one to pursue art or any other achievement with greater success than otherwise. But before we return in detail to the implications of the park scene we can usefully look at an issue raised by the likely inspiration for it in Sartre's mescalin experience. Many commentators have looked at the superficial similarities between accounts of the mystics and accounts of some drug-users, noting also that the ritual use of drugs has its place in many shamanic and religious traditions. Sartre took drugs no further, but Aldous Huxley used drugs for a large part of his adult life.

5.5 Drugs and Mysticism 

In The Doors of Perception Huxley gives the impression that his main motivation for taking mescalin in 1953 was the hope that he would be able to enter the state of consciousness of the mystic, visionary, or artistic genius. He felt that in some way he had not been blessed by Nature with a talent for these states, which he assumed were similar. He was a little disappointed not to see the kinds of visions that he thought these gifted individuals were endowed with as a matter of course, but reports to us an experience of suchness or da-sein similar to those from the Indian mystics or Eckhart. Here is an extract:

This participation in the manifest glory of things left no room, so to speak, for the ordinary, the necessary concerns of human existence, above all for concerns involving persons. For persons are selves and, in one respect at least, I was now a Not-self, simultaneously perceiving and being the Not-self of the things around me. To this new-born Not-self, the behaviour, the appearance, the very thought of the self it had momentarily ceased to be, and of other selves, its one-time fellows, seemed not indeed distasteful (for distastefulness was not one of the categories in terms of which I was thinking), but enormously irrelevant. Compelled by the investigator [into the effects of mescalin] to analyse and report on what I was doing (and how I longed to be left alone with Eternity in a flower, Infinity in four chair legs and the Absolute in the folds of a pair of flannel trousers!) I realized that I was deliberately avoiding the eyes of those who were with me in the the room, deliberately refraining from being too much aware of them. 

We need to be a little cautious of this passage, because of the prior publication in 1946 of The Perennial Philosophy, for which he had read extensively from similar accounts by the mystics. Huxley invented a useful term for us however, the notion of the cerebral reducing valve. His observation was that the drug, rather than creating new experiences, inhibited the operation of a kind of narrowing function within the brain, so that the floodgates opened to what was already there. He also assumed that the medium or clairvoyant lived more permanently with the reducing valve opened (at least to some degree). We will discuss this further when we consider in more detail the role of the world-ordering function of the mind, but we can note that for Sartre his imagination was stimulated (seeing crabs and polyps everywhere), though more importantly the drug seemed to have shut down normal thought.
Despite Huxley's association of drugs with mysticism, Mary Lutyens tell us this about his attitude to Krishnamurti:

At first Krishnamurti was rather overawed by Huxley's intellectual brilliance but, once he discovered that Huxley would have given all this knowledge for one mystical experience not induced by drugs, he found that he could talk to him about what he called 'the points' he was making. 

 Huxley shows a modesty in his assumption that mystical 'states' were somehow beyond him (unaided by drugs at least); this modesty also shows in his remark that the value of his book The Perennial Philosophy lay in a large part of its contents consisting of quotations from the mystics. Where the arrogance of Nietzsche or Sartre may have been a reason for the failure of the mystic impulse in them, for Huxley it was his modesty. Part of the problem lies in the assumption that mystics have special capabilities, enabling them to have special experiences, and part of it (though not necessarily with Huxley) is that by making the assumption that the mystics are special one can avoid the reality staring out of one's own face (to use Harding's language); elevating the mystics can be used to postpone one's own realisation.
R.C.Zaehner disliked Huxley's linking of drug-induced experiences with mysticism, quoting his last words (a week before his death):

'We must not attempt to live outside the world, which is given us, but we must somehow learn how to transform it and transfigure it. Too much "wisdom" is as bad as too little wisdom, and there must be no magic tricks. We must learn to come to reality without the enchanter's wand and his book of the words. One must find a way of being in the world while not being of it. A way of living in time without being completely swallowed up by time.' 

Zaehner reads a complete recantation of Huxley's position on drugs into these words, saying they were "a warning indeed to all who would foolishly maintain that psychedelic experience is not merely similar to mystical experience but is identical with it." However, Zaehner's objections to drug use derive at heart from his insistence on a theistic mysticism; but we have seen that Pure Consciousness Mysticism has no problem with any kind of devotional expression of the infinite and eternal; neither does it require devotion, or any kind of God. The objections to drug use that can legitimately derive from PCM are more to do with the general problem of peak experiences in mysticism, rather than from the lack of divine intervention (grace) that Zaehner found missing. 
Another advocate of drug use is the scholar Agehananda Bharati (born Leopold Fischer); but he is not evanglical about it like Huxley, and at the same time has first-hand experience of the mystical and generally a deeper understanding due to being both an initiate and practitioner of a mystical tradition and a professional scholar on the subject. Bharati suffers from the opposite problem to Zaehner: he has no concept of the devotional; however he seems to share the widespread emphasis on mystical experience, whether drug-induced or not. His assumption, a little like that of Forman, is that the mystical state has to be so transcendent as to be devoid of content (as with the Pure Consciousness Event discussed earlier), or that it has to be 'ectstatic', 'cosmic', or even psychedelic (as with Huxley). From this perspective he rightly points out that no-one can live in this state permanently, and from that draws the unfortunate conclusion that an individual needs only to have experienced these states (called by him the zero-state, or state of 'numerical oneness with the cosmic absolute') a few times in their life to be called a mystic. He somewhat mitigates this stance with the observation that the mystic should also be continuously obsessed with the unitive state, possibly to the extent have having no other small-talk (this is certainly true of the well-known mystics that I have met).
Frits Staal, a scholar of mysticism who emphasises, like Bharati, that scholarly work must be accompanied by practice (though it is less clear in his work what his own practice is), also discusses the relationship of drugs to mysticism. Staal's definition of mysticism is broader than Bharati's, and much broader than in PCM, so his debate widens the issues to include powers that may or may not be associated with drug-taking. Leaving this aside, however, there is still an emphasis on experiences.
The views of Zaehner, Bharati and Staal bring us to an important issue in Pure Consciousness Mysticism: what is the role of 'special' experiences, or experiences in general? Clearly Bharati is content to define a mystic as one who has mystical experiences as defined above, and on this basis Huxley and himself, for example, would count as mystics. Zaehner on the other hand found it unacceptable to equate drug-induced experiences with mystical ones. It is also clear that while many of the mystics that we have looked at in this book have had 'mystical experiences', but they have been chosen for discussion because of evidence that their orientation was permanently towards the infinite and eternal. It may be that for the large part they seem to live in an ecstatic way, like Rumi, Kabir, or Ramakrishna; or that for the large part they live in a very sober way like Whitman, Harding or Krishnamurti (which can make the identification of common factors difficult). It may also be that during a transitional phase in their lives, as they first encountered the infinite and the eternal (or the unitive), that they report 'special' experiences — as in the cases of Ramana Maharshi, Krishnamurti and Douglas Harding. However, we have seen in all of them the underlying orientation towards the infinite and eternal, and from this perspective we can also see that the use of drugs has no definite link with this orientation. An individual like Huxley may experience the infinite and eternal for a brief period while the drug takes effect, but their continuum is unchanged.
More probably the use of 'safer' drugs can give the individual some greater 'spirituality' in their lives, and this is being argued for the current widespread use of the drug Ecstacy in rave culture. It may also be possible that a drug-induced experience of the infinite and eternal becomes the starting-point for a process that leads to a permanent state of the unitive, but the author knows of no well-documented cases. The dangers of drug use are much clearer however: firstly there is the danger of illness or even death through overdose or accident or addiction. These are the conventional fears about drug use, and apply as much to tobacco and alcohol, but the specific fear from the perspective of Pure Consciousness Mysticism is that the drug user settles for the occasional mystical experience on drugs, and gains the notion that this is what Krishna, Whitman, Ramana, Krishnamurti, and all the others are talking about. Alternatively, in order to make the experience a continuum, they may seek continual use of drugs which by any account is undesirable.
In Sartre's case, the evidence is that his use of mescalin led to a bad experience of the mystical. Not only was he not better off afterwards, in the same way that Huxley knew he had gained nothing of permanent value from drug use, he was permanently set against the (limited) revelation it afforded him. Sartre's case also shows up the limitations of Zaehner's reasoning and the widespread emphasis on experience. Firstly, unless one believes in the the absurdity of Nietzsche's eternal recurrence, no two experiences can be identical; secondly, as Maharshi would put it, who is that has the experience? The manifest world offers countless types of experience (and we probably can at least make distinctions between types of experience), including, for those inclined, contact with disembodied spirits, angels, gods, God, ancestors, powers (why not?). But, entertaining as they all are (or frightening or destructive creative or transformative or whatever), there can be no fundamental differentiation between experiences compared to the category shift of knowing their source, the Unmanifest. Zaehner, Bharati, Staal, and all the others are free to define a mysticism where different types of experience have different value, but in Pure Consciousness Mysticism such a distinction in not that useful. At best an experience can re-orient one towards the infinite and eternal: Sartre's experience in the park was potentially such an experience, and if it was drug-induced then it had no essential difference to the experiences that Zaehner preferred. However the question still remains, why were similar experiences in Maharshi, Krishnamurti and Harding accompanied by a permanent orientation to the infinite and eternal, and not with Sartre? To consider this question we have to return to the heart of Sartre's experience in the park: nothingness (or rather its absence).

5.6 Nothingness in the Park

We come now to the difficult discussion of nothingness (and again we caution against taking too seriously distinctions between nothingness, nirvana, and the unmanifest). Anyone who knows the object-less love that is at the core of the devotional orientation can enter into the infinite and eternal. If it needs to grow then the Gita, or the writings of  Whitman, Rumi or Kabir, or the accounts of Ramakrishna, or the presence of Mother Meera can be sought out. It may be felt as a love of Nature; as a love of God, or a love for a mystic dead or alive, or a supposed deity: the point is that it does not need explaining, cannot be explained. But this door is so rarely open in the West, and the better educated and more intelligent the person the less likely it is to develop spontaneously — there simply isn't the environment for it. 
The other door is nothingness.
It was stated in chapter one that nothingness was the inevitable counterpart of infinity; the other side to the coin of expansion: if expansion cannot take place through love and embraciveness, then it can take place through nothingness. However, this relationship between the nothing and the infinite, and the ways in which nothingness can be directly encountered have only been glossed over so far. It is Sartre's park scene that gives us now enough material with which to attempt this exposition in the context of luminaries like Ramana Maharshi, Krishnamurti and Douglas Harding.
Let us imagine that every educated Westerner at some point finds him or her self in Sartre's park, and that we are going to help them use the experience to orientate themselves to the infinite and eternal, to make it their continuum, and not to escape from it through art or whatever (though there is nothing wrong in art per se, far from it). Clearly we do not wish upon them either a bad drug trip or a crushing depression that they should land up in Sartre's frame of mind in the park, but we can use these as metaphors for the more generally pervasive but unnoticed alienation of the modern condition. In other words there has to be some discontinuity in a person's life to take them to this park, a sense of something lost. So, we arrive in the park with our basic requisite: time to spend, nowhere to go. The first thing that we note is that the park smiles at us — this is essential: existence, however confusing it will get for a bit, is benign. The second thing we note is that words disappear — they disappeared for me in Koregoan Park, as for Sartre in Bouville Park. We have all known moments when words disappear, generally when confronted with the sublime or ecstatic, perhaps the sunset, music, or sex, though it is easy to labour this point however, especially if one has had any exposure to Eastern philosophy. Sartre's description of this state is so exquisite that perhaps we can use his imagery to recapture for ourselves the unusual moments of being wordless, thoughtless. Sartre brings our attention to the black knotty root of a chestnut tree that plunged into the ground by the bench he was sitting on — clearly it occupied his whole frame of vision, and it was simply and irrevocably there. We now are presented with lesson number three in the pursuit of nothingness: the experience of suchness, or da-sein. We have become temporarily lost, aimless, we have time; we note that the park smiles at us, we can lose our sense of fear and be ready to encounter anything (or nothing), we lose words for the time being, and we are faced with the suchness of some simple object. Lesson four: we watch the struggle of the mind to defeat this suchness. The Buddha once compared this struggle to that of a fish thrashing about on the shore: we are out of our customary milieu, and we thrash around hopelessly. Sartre dissects with great insight all the possible avenues for denial of the suchness of existence. 
He first of all tries the oldest strategy known to man: he names the existents. This is so fundamental an activity to our thinking that one can call man the animal that names things — but unfortunately Sartre is having difficulty with words. He tries to remember that by using things you tame them; his previous engagement with the prolific existents was only through their use to him; as stage scenery to be discarded after the tiresome necessity of picking them up. He then considers describing them: green rust, black and blistered boiled leather — he is trained in the use of artistic and poetic adjectives, but the root of the chestnut tree escapes this old trick as well. He then attempts to retreat to the safety of  concepts drawn from the purer world of mathematics and science: lines, circles, black: all of these used to have a reality for him that had kept existence at bay, but no longer. Sartre then draws on another uniquely human ability: to use comedy, vaudeville, a sense of superfluity, absurdity — he can reduce the dignity of the existents… but to no avail.
What about analogy?: existence is like the "weary women who abandon themselves to laughter and say: 'It does you good to laugh' in tearful voices." But this does not describe the way that existence is pressing in on him in the park. So he tries to regiment the phenomena: count, order, by height, coordinates, bearings, measurements; but he soon sees through the arbitrary nature of all these relationships. He tries to reduce things to their function: the root as a suction pump. Even politics gets a mention: he imagines somebody complaining that there are rights involved in all of this (the right to be safe, the right to be in control, the right to exclude anything that doesn't fit).
What Sartre is doing for us is showing how we normally construct the world, how existence is normally mediated through the activities of the mind. This faculty, made up of all the mental processes just described, is of course vital to our survival; they take the place and also subsume the instincts of the animals. The philosopher Mary Warnock, basing her work on Hume and Kant, calls these processes collectively the imagination, giving the word a specialised meaning in addition to the more common one relating to fiction-making. For her, imagination enables us to maintain the feeling that objects have a coherent independent existence, despite the fragmentary nature of the sense impressions we receive of them. This function is universal in its basics, but becomes more differentiated in its intellectual layering: for example if Karl Marx, Rudolf Steiner, and Richard Dawkins were sitting on the park bench with their world-ordering functions intact they would give very different accounts of the park. For Marx the park would represent bourgeois ideals, realised at the expense of working people: the wrought iron-work of the bench and railings would conjure up capitalist factories and a chain of exploitation and dependency; the trees and grass as the raw material for an irrelevant aesthetic phenomenon bought and sold in the capitalist market-place as art. For Rudolf Steiner, the man-made elements of the park would, in their rectilinear and curved designs, represent a spiritual impoverishment in the artisan; the trees and birds, even the stones, would exist for him as spiritual entities dormant in various degrees, and capable of evolution into man and angel. For Dawkins the profusion of life-forms would represent the unending struggle for the establishment and preservation of genes; each living organism a vessel adapted exclusively as a carrier for those genes, and showing in a non-linear kind of way a richness deriving from the simplest of concepts; man and his creations perhaps more subtle in the parallel between genes and memes: the park-bench and its design belonging to the latter. We can multiply these world-views endlessly, for example the lover and his mistress see the park differently again, through an emotional colouring. 
What is happening to Sartre in the park is that this normal faculty (including both the basic world-ordering imagination and the acquired world-views of the middle-class intellectual) that we take for granted is breaking down, and he has not he context of Eastern meditation techniques to realise that this process is an opportunity, not a pathology. The whole training in meditation, particularly in Zen Buddhism, is to suspend the world-ordering faculty (in a controlled manner) in order for existence to present itself naked. But Sartre in the park is frightened, just as I was in India. He complains that he was the root of the chestnut tree; that things crowded in on him, that they were exuberent and obscene: 'existence is a repletion which man can never abandon', even with closed eyes.
Then he finds another possible solution: transitions. Things came into being, and if he could capture that moment of nascency when they manifested themselves from their necessary preconditions he could defeat the awful raw suchness of things: he could take refuge in a process. But Sartre could not jump to that point just before things came into existence, he could not find the preconditions, he could not find the vantage point where he could be safe from existence: 'It didn't make sense, the world was present everywhere in front and behind'. It was not like the theatre where the raw unpredictable events of the play took place in front, and back in the stalls everything was in control: one could just get up and leave. Behind him there was more of the same horrible superfluity that he saw endless examples of in front of him, he only had to turn and look. Sartre then locates the key to his problem: he hits on nothingness.
His instinct brings him to the point where he identifies the missing element in all the profusion: nothingness; but immediately his life, his culture, and his training tell him that nothingness cannot be grasped. Gandhi was certain the the Unmanifest could not be aprehended, Nietzsche said that talk of the intransitory was misanthropic and a lie, Jung saw nirvana as an amputation, and Sartre knew that nothingness could not be grasped. Great intellects, serious men; they represent the Western intellectual (even though Gandhi was an Indian). 

5.7 The Arrows of Awareness

Sartre complains that existence was everywhere, in front and behind. For whatever reason, he was in a state of heightened awareness, choiceless awareness (as Krishnamurti would put it), and the manifest and manifold overwhelmed him: his world-ordering capacity (imagination) had broken down, his 'cerebral reducing valve' had opened. He had an underlying emotional position of depression, so the manifest world was coloured with that, but this is not the real problem. His problem was that he had no training in awareness. An old metaphor for awareness is the arrow: Sartre's arrow of awareness is going out to the manifest and manifold, it is the 'single-headed' arrow of Krishnamurti's teaching (though not of his reality). The awareness was bigger than his customary one, but it only went out. Gurdjieff, and much more explicitly, Harding, teach the 'double-headed' arrow of awareness: to bring attention to what is one looking out of. If the brilliant, profuse, exuberant suchness of the park does not point back at the observer in such a way that the person also senses their awareness as much as the content, then existence does indeed become overwhelming, with no place to call home. If we imagine the double-headed arrow pointing out at the park, and at the same time pointing back towards oneself, then what is it actually pointing at? The answer is nothingness (or nirvana or the unmanifest, or Harding's Space): one's true identity. Sartre is existentially mistaken when he said that in front was existence, and also behind. If he had followed the arrow back from what was in front he would have found that it pointed to the very nothingness that he desperately needed, but was convinced (without enquiry) that it was not possible to reach (if this statement seems hard to grasp then look back to Harding's experiments described in the Chapter Two). Sartre's notion of what was 'behind' was consistent with the 'behind' created by the Humian world-ordering function — that is a constructed reality, fictional but useful: but if we can drop memory and imagination (without the risk of damage to these functions) then there is no 'behind', or at least not in the ordinary sense. This absence of a 'behind' is illustrated by Douglas Harding in his observation (and it is ours if only we look) that rooms never have a sixth side. Conceptually a box-shaped room has six sides, but existentially it has five at the most; the sixth wall is replaced by nothingness, the space for the universe to exist in. Harding sometimes uses the word 'backing' to indicate the opposite of what is in front; it is another word for the unmanifest source of the manifest; this 'backing' is existentially present as opposed to the 'behind' constructed throught the Humian imagination. We may also remember a remark by Whitman commented upon earlier that he has 'distanced what is behind me for good reasons,' in connection with the manifold exuberance of existence. Whatever his intention with this aside, it is a useful point: the abundance has to be distanced when we need to or we are overwhelmed by it.
The third possibility in connection with the arrow metaphor is of course that of the arrow-head pointing only inwards. This is the nature some forms of meditation practice, the concentration of one-pointed awareness, directed inwardly, and resulting in total withdrawal from the senses. It leads to Forman's Pure Consciousness Event, and perhaps it is what Ramakrishna and Socrates experienced, but as pointed out earlier it is not possible as a continuum within a normal life, as it represents a rejection of the manifest, and would have killed Maharshi if he had not begun to direct his attention outwards again. Neither should we dismiss its possible importance in training: withdrawal from the senses for periods of time can help in the establishing of awareness or the immoveable "I" of Maharshi.
Sartre created a milestone in honesty in his observations in the park. He gives us a picture of reality that almost no writer has had the intellectual honesty to do up to that point: he stripped away all literary pretensions of narrative and human drama, and put his energy into the observation of a totally mundane scene. But his powers of observation take him precisely half-way: he cannot see the nothingness that underpins the profusion, he cannot sense the "I" that Ramana suddenly discovered, or the 'space' that Harding found in the place of his fictional head. Sartre could not follow the arrow back to where it came from: the true interface between the unmanifest and the manifest. If we do not notice the nothingness where it is, then other sorts of oblivion are sought out: in drink, drugs, or suicide. Sartre's tentative optimism that art would be a solution was still a recognition that the real thing was missing.
We can look at the problem of nothingness in terms of the threat that it poses to identity; we may remember that D.H.Lawrence complained that Whitman had lost his 'self' through his expansiveness, in other words lost his identity. In the previous section it was suggested that nothingness was one's true identity — it sounds like a philosophical proposition: logically, if all bases for identity are subject to change, then the only true (permanent) identity would have to be devoid of substance, i.e. nothingness. If one heard this from philosophers then one might be justified in ignoring it (after all they make countless logical propositions), but the mystics do not speak in logical propositions, they speak to one through their being, and their being is full of light, it is full of love, it is embracive; it is everything that the miserable Sartre in the park is not.
But nothingness cannot be the whole picture either — if it were, then Jung would have been right in his assessment of nirvana as an 'amputation'. We also note that the majority of the non-devotional mystics talk about expansion rather than annihilation, for example Whitman. However, if Whitman's expansivity were of the nature of Sartre's in the park, where there was no relief from the existents, he would have been in the same kind of trouble, his identity would have 'leaked out into the universe'. We have no indication from Whitman of a conscious engagement with the unmanifest substrate to his manifest, populous world, but his eminent sanity and sense of the eternal points to its presence.
Sartre, possibly under the shock of mescalin, or depression, or both, experienced a suspension of the normal world-ordering function of the mind and notices suchness and brings to it a Western mind that engages with it to give us a quite unique account. Harding also experienced a suspension of the world-ordering function, but he was better prepared (as I was) because of an acquaintance with Indian thought (Harding says he was actively engaged in the enquiry: who am I?); where he takes us however is unique to both East and West: he gives us the first comprehensible account of nothingness, and scientific method for its verification.
What does this mean in terms of identity however? Clearly the suspension of the world-ordering function is required to apprehend nothingness, or we could say more generally that mind needs to be silent. This represents a shift in the energy of an individual from mind to no-mind, which is the same as a shift in identity. When we imagined Marx, Steiner, or Dawkins taking Sartre's place on the park-bench we conjured up very specific world-views, and individuals obviously gain much of their sense of identity from them. If they were to abandon their world-view, and also the more basic world-ordering functions learned in childhood, then the park would stand naked before them. It is the investment in personal identity that makes this a seemingly pathological experience — when by training or by temperament one is fluid enough about one's identity, then it becomes a divine experience.
The contextualists believe, quite rightly, that identity is largely constructed through language, but do not consider the possibility that one can suspend both language and this narrow sense of identity created through its normal functioning. This is partly because they define mysticism in a certain way, rather differently to Pure Consciousness Mysticism, placing the emphasis on experiences. Further, some believe that mystic experiences are experiences of a certain category of object: this category being vaguely defined as the numinous, the mystical (tautologically), the wholly-other, and so on, allowing for a range of possible experiences; these in turn mediated by the world-ordering systems that the subject identifies with. Stephen Katz and the contributors to his Mysticism and Language make many valuable contributions to our understanding of the role of language in connection with a broader form of mysticism, but Katz's fundamental position is stated thus:

It is my view, argued in detail elsewhere, that mystical reports do not merely indicate the postexperiential description of an unreportable experience in the language closest at hand. Rather, the experiences themselves are inescapably shaped by prior linguistic influences such that the lived experience conforms to a preexistent pattern that has been learned, then intended, and then actualized in the experiential reality of the mystic.

Sartre's experience in the park offers us a good counter-example to Katz's argument! (Sartre is quite explicit that his account is a postexperiential description of an unintended and certainly unlearned experience.) But Katz is describing a different range of phenomona: for example my temptation when visiting Mother Meera was to bring about the kind of cosmic visions that Arjuna had of Krishan (or Harvey of Meera), and if I had succumbed it would have provided a good illustration of Katz's view. Pure Consciousness Mysticism on the other hand is about a direct apprehension of the infinite and eternal which is only possible when 'prior linguistic influences' are suspended — Krishnamurti points out over and over again that as soon as language has entered the fundamental thing has escaped one again (perhaps Krishnamurti is not a mystic for the contextualists).
But Warnock gives us a hint that Hume was not satisfied that mere 'imagination' (his term for the world-ordering function) could perform such a difficult task as bringing sense to the world in the first place. We have the impression that, as he brought his powers of concentration to bear on anything, it seemed to fall apart rather than become clearer, concluding that 'carelessness and inattention alone afford us any remedy'. I could be misreading this, but I recognise the effect and goal of some types of concentration meditations, where reality seems to fall apart, for example when staring fixedly at an object for long periods of time. Sartre's image of the 'startled hares' is a good one: by bringing the language-based world-ordering faculty too heavily to bear on an object their apparent solidity begins to waver. For the purely intellectually-oriented person the despairing conclusion must be that carelessness and inattention are the remedy (i.e. not to push this rather delicate functioning), but for us the remedy is different: to allow awareness and attention to grow and rely on a different faculty to bring order to the world: the faculty of the heart. (This is something that all the mystics will whisper to you: the world is ordered through love.)
Clearly, even the mystic is not without a 'mundane' world-view, and clearly a mystic could not function if the normal world-ordering capacity were permanently damaged, as in some forms of mental illness. However, to voluntarily suspend it is to cease to identify with it, and to start to identify with something else. That something else cannot be pure nothingness: it has to be at the boundary of nothingness and profusion, it has to be the interface between the unmanifest and the manifest. This interface is the source of all creation, and also the source of all destruction, called God in theistic systems of thinking. In non-theistic language it is hard to find a suitable word for it, though consciousness is not a bad start — or even Pure Consciousness. Perhaps then we could say that mystics identify with consciousness, which in turn brings positive sensations (the word bliss is used in Hindu thought in association with awareness, the Buddha on the other hand was wary of it). In turn these positive sensations may be interpreted or amplified as the devotional or theistic, if the temperament of the individual is so inclined, though in a democratic world we should not privilege such intepretations.

References for Chapter Four: Sartre