Buddhist methods aim to understand the very ground from which all the projections such as thoughts and emotions arise. The meditator must first unlearn the ordinary course of semiosis, in which meaning of a sign is its interpretant, which is itself a sign for another interpretant – the trajectory is virtually infinite. Instead of translating signs e.g. thoughts into further signs, meditation aims “to jam that kind of internal radiophony continually sending in us” (Barthes 1982) by “flipping” semiotic consciousness. In these "non-ordinary" states, the analysis of sign as a sign is gradually dropped, relations are disregarded as irrelevant and ideally, in this moment, becoming free from any significance – giving way to a different way of feeling-into the world. Researching meditation has revealed how awareness of the demolishing rather than the fixating functions of signs presents semiotic selves with constructive doubt and a flexibility of meaning-making. This metacognitive focus on “meaning-breaking” counteracts mental proliferation of signs, preserving the deep hierarchy of sign construction for crucial rather than trivial moments in human lives (Valsiner).Analysis is supported by descriptions of first-person experiences of Estonian Chan retreat participants (collected 2022–2024). The aim is twofold: To emphasize the theoretical relevance of “exemption from meaning”; and to propose a semiotic framework for analyzing Chan meditation. Investigating meditative experiences, and vice versa – using meditation as a method of contemplative research, may prove helpful for semiotics, because meditation gives access to the semiotic mind per se.