How do I do this:

[nwthomas]

You, my friend, have asked a very deep question! I doubt that my answer will live up to it. I do not think that there is any definite answer to the question of how to have such an experience; there are infinite ways of doing so, and none of them work all the time for everybody. But I will give one example of how I had such an experience in one particular instance, and what it was like.

The story in question begins a few months ago. At this time I was writing a book, and putting a lot of effort into the question of how to express the true nature of existence in words. I felt that I had experienced the true nature of existence, and my single greatest desire in life was to explain this so that others could understand it. I was singlemindedly bent on this goal. But, in all of my attempts to do this, I had met with nothing but failure.

I was reading the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein. In this book the author gives a logical analysis of the structure of language to attempt to demarcate precisely what it means for a statement to be meaningful. It is deeply involved in extremely abstruse and difficult to understand logical investigations. So I am struggling through this book, and I get to the end, where Wittgenstein abruptly veers off into religious, ethical, and mystical considerations. He says that all of the concepts of religion and mysticism are nonsensical and meaningless, because they are attempting to express something that cannot be expressed:

For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed.

The riddle does not exist.

If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered.

Scepticism is not irrefutable, but palpably senseless, if it would doubt where a question cannot be asked.

For doubt can only exist where there is a question; a question only where there is an answer, and this only where something can be said.

We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be asnwered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer.

The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem.

(Is not this the reason why men to whom after long doubting the sense of life became clear, could not then say wherein this sense consisted?)

There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical.

I was inclined to believe him in this, because the route by which he came to this conclusion was so rigorous and strictly thought out. More than that, it articulated in a very clear way precisely what I had been painfully discovering for myself in my failed attempts to articulate the true nature of existence.

Therefore I learned that my greatest goal in life was impossible to achieve, and that I had been wasting my time all along. On learning this I entered into a new state of consciousness. I lost awareness of the world around me, and for several hours it was as if I was existing in a single frozen moment. I felt a sense of timelessness, sacredness, and immortality. Though I was moving around and functioning in the world, nothing could disturb this state of perfect peace and silence. It was as if nothing was happening at all; I couldn't have said whether I was dead or alive. The experience left a significant mark on my memory, in that afterwards I was never able to go back to doing things the way I had done them before. Having learned that I was trying to do something that could not be done, I had to reevaluate my priorities and find new direction in life.