Nonsense and
the Next Life
Whereas it is permissible, in our language, to speak of a man as surviving a complete loss of memory or a complete change of character, it is self-contradictory to speak of a man as surviving the annihilation of his body.
A. J. Ayer,
Language, Truth and Logic
We have gone on a pilgrimage through the fascinating parallel world of nonsense. Now we are ready to circle back to the biggest question of human existence: the prospect of life after death. This chapter applies some specific principles we have learned to formulate a new understanding of what happens when we die. We will see how our new knowledge about nonsense definitions, nonsensical magic words, and nonsense travel narratives clarifies the notion of an afterlife. We will learn how the logic of nonsense gives rise to a simple, reliable technique for communing with the spirits of our departed loved ones, and we will comprehend a bold new rational method for investigating near-death experiences.
Nonsense of several distinct types constitutes the notion of life after death. Early in the twentieth century, some analytic philosophers raised what then seemed a telling, even decisive objection to philosophical inquiry into life after death. Their objection reputedly precluded further rational investigation of perhaps the biggest question of human existence and a problem with a long history in philosophy. Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Plato, Democritus, and Epicurus, for example, addressed the question in their philosophies, yet that philosophical tradition seemingly came to an end when analytic philosophers contended that the notion of life after death is unverifiable, unintelligible nonsense.
That was analytic philosophy’s standard objection to ancient philosophical problems, of course. Various eminent analytic philosophers discussed the view that discussion about an afterlife is meaningless and unintelligible. The English philosopher C. D. Broad, for example, said that some philosophers “concluded that it is simply meaningless to talk of a human personality surviving the death of its body.”86
Similarly, the Welsh philosopher H. H. Price said:
If we are to discuss the problem of survival intelligently, we must try to form some idea of what the life after death might conceivably be like. If we cannot form such an idea, however rough and provisional, it is pointless to discuss the factual evidence for or against the “Survival Hypothesis.” A critic may object that there is no such hypothesis, on the grounds that the phrase “survival of human personality after death” has no intelligible meaning at all.87
Philosopher C. J. Ducasse also posed the question whether or not the notion of life after death is intelligible, pointing out that
Persons who are convinced that “the human personality survives bodily death,” or convinced that it does not, or who are curious as to whether or not it does, are in fact in the position of being full of curiosity or conviction as to they know not just what! Evidently, so long as one does not know just what one means by the phrase “the personality’s survival after death,” one cannot tell what kinds of observable facts would or would not constitute evidence of such survival. Persons who use the phrase usually think they know well enough what they mean by it. But this is only because they have never adequately considered the diversity of meanings confounded under that wishful vague phrase.
Analytic philosophers were following in the footsteps of David Hume (1711–1776), a Scottish historian and relentlessly skeptical empiricist philosopher. Hume’s insights into causality and inductive reasoning helped shape the scientific mind. Hume identified and eloquently stated the primary problem that stands in the way of genuine rational inquiry into the prospect of an afterlife. Specifically, he acknowledged that the question of life after death does not mesh with the principles of ordinary Aristotelian logic:
By the mere light of reason it seems difficult to prove the Immortality of the Soul...By what arguments or analogies can we prove any state of existence, which no one ever saw, and which no way resembles any that ever was seen?...Some new species of logic is requisite for that purpose, and some new faculties of the mind that they may enable us to comprehend that logic.88
Hume’s famous criterion probably was an ironic statement. That is, he probably meant that rational proof of life after death is impossible. After all, ordinary Aristotelian logic has served us well for more than two thousand years, and we usually assume that we know our minds well. How likely does it seem that there could be unknown faculties of the mind?
The rational principles of nonsense that this book developed can be roughly characterized as a new kind of logic, however. Furthermore, the sense of nonsense can be plausibly characterized as a previously unknown faculty of the mind. We are in a somewhat better position than were Ayer, Broad, Price, Ducasse, et.al., to judge whether the notion of an afterlife is unintelligible.
Calling an idea unintelligible, and thereby dismissing it, is part of the landscape of scientific, academic, and religious debate. Previously, however, there was no clear rational method for resolving disagreements over whether or not an idea is unintelligible. Now, however, our typology of nonsense engenders a method for settling some such disagreements, for if a disputed idea matches a previously established type of nonsense, that proves that the idea is unintelligible nonsense. This chapter applies that method to prove positively that the notion of life after death is a complex form of nonsense in the following specific ways.
Nonsense definitions underlie stock phrases that collectively express the notion of the life after death. The sentence “There is life after death” is an outright self-contradiction,for “death” means the final, irreversible cessation of life. Yet when I spring this fact on people in face-to-face conversations, it takes them by surprise. They get flustered, but they are forced to admit that it is true.
Still, as we saw earlier, people try to correct themselves when they realize that they have been talking nonsense unknowingly. They attempt to put what they had been trying to say into some other words that do make sense. So, when they realize that talking about life after death is self-contradictory, they substitute some other supposedly synonymous expression.
In this case, however, the technique does not work, for all the other common language expressions that are supposedly interchangeable with “life after death” are nonsense, too, by our own established definitions and criteria.
For example, some prefer “survival of bodily death.” Why does the word “bodily” appear in this phrase? “Death” already includes the notion of there being a body that dies, so the “bodily” is superfluous, except perhaps to soften the self-contradiction. “Survival of death” shocks the mind and is brazenly self-contradictory. This shocking self-contradiction is the power behind Woody Allen’s famous joke, “If you can survive death, you can survive just about anything.”
To survive something is to get through it without dying, so it makes no sense to talk of someone surviving death, whether the qualifier “bodily” is added or not. We are not provided with an explanation about what any supposed differences between regular death and “bodily” death might be.
We can substitute familiar expressions of supposedly equivalent meaning; we can use the word “beyond,” for example, and say, “There is life beyond death.” So, here, instead of a bold self-contradiction, we have a mystifying spatial metaphor. That is, there is no literal sense in which life could be “beyond” death, yet no clear metaphoric meaning is established, either.
Moreover, “after” expresses a temporal relationship and “beyond” expresses a spatial relationship. Upon reflection, then, it seems strange that the phrases “life after death” and “life beyond death” are used as synonyms. So, instead, we move on by substituting purely spatial phrases like “the world beyond” or “the beyond” or “the other side.”
These are spatial terms but not spatial concepts. “The world beyond” does not exist in any defined spatial relationship to the present world. Thus, we cannot point to the beyond, for example, if someone asks us to do it. The request simply makes no sense.
“The other side” is equally problematic, for there is no clear answer available for the next logical question, namely, “The other side of what?” “The other side” suggests a dividing line or barrier separating two spaces, yet nothing whatsoever indicates in which direction “the other side” supposedly lies from this world.
So, “the world beyond death,” “the beyond,” “the other side,” and the like are not literal in meaning, but they are not meaningful, intelligible metaphors, either. Although they resemble metaphors, there is no way of telling what their supposed literal meanings might be. In other words, we cannot specify equivalent literal meanings for supposed spatial metaphors like “the world beyond death.” Consequently, by the criteria established earlier, phrases such as “the beyond” and “the other side” are nonsense metaphors.
The idea of an afterlife is not yet a full-fledged concept. Rather, it is a loose conglomeration of self-contradictions and figurative nonsense such as meaningless, unintelligible spatial metaphors. Plenty of other nonsensical metaphors and other nonsensical figures of speech are also used for verbalizing the idea of an afterlife. For example, death is sometimes likened to an expansion of consciousness or an ascension to a higher plane of consciousness. Here again, however, we are falling back on spatial metaphors that have no equivalent literal meanings that can be specified.
Whatever figure of speech anyone uses for the afterlife, however, the essential problem remains the same. Namely, the figures of speech are never linked to equivalent literal meanings. Therefore, the nebulous notion of life after death is a complex mixture of self-contradictions and figurative nonsense. Nevertheless, as we know, nonsense stimulates a flow of odd mental imagery, half-formed ideas, and fragmentary chains of thought, so phrases like “life after death” and “the world beyond” evoke plenty of jumbled mental images, garbled half-thoughts, and incoherent or distorted mentation—and we mistake that for a concept of the afterlife. Moreover, adding to the confusion, we shift indifferently and casually from one of these words or phrases to another until we make a complete circle. Our minds get lost amidst enthralling but foggy images and half-formed notions, and we take for granted that these familiar words and phrases have a determinable literal meaning.
We glide smoothly from “life after death” to “the world beyond death” to “the next life” to “the afterlife” and so on. We readily interchange self-contradictory phrases with assorted figurative nonsense. The ease of substituting one supposedly equivalent phrase for another heightens the illusion that these literally meaningless, unintelligible expressions somehow make sense.
The circular process of substituting nonsense for nonsense does not amount to a meaningful, intelligible definition of “life after death.” Instead, we recognize it as a new sub-type of nonsense definition. That conclusion follows from the long process of discovery and reasoning in which we have been engaged, so the core notion of life after death is nonsense after all, just as various eminent thinkers have said.
Therefore, sentences like “Is there a life after death?” are nonsense questions. We already saw that nonsense questions play a crucial role in religion as well as in scientific inquiry. Asking whether or not there is an afterlife is part and parcel of being a human being. In religion and the spiritual life, the idea of a life after death is an enduring source of hope and inspiration. Like other important nonsense questions, the question of life after death also constantly stimulates rational inquiry and debate.
Nonsense concerning life after death may sometimes arise from the mind’s attempts to escape the reality of death. Earlier, we learned that people sometimes talk nonsense because of severe stress. They may talk incoherent nonsense when their minds are racing as they are trying to escape situations of mortal danger. Hence, soldiers sometimes talk incoherent nonsense upon being rescued from horrific battles in which they narrowly escaped death or life-threatening injury. In such cases, nonsense is the mind’s last-ditch attempt to escape imminent death.
Speculating about life after death may sometimes also be partly an attempt to evade the reality of death. In other words, in trying to escape death, the mind may contradict itself, pose nonsense questions, and create nonsensical figures of speech.
Speculative books about life after death have been enormously popular since antiquity. Reading such books is a pleasurable way of escaping one’s anxieties about death. Similarly, Houdini entertained audiences with death-defying escapes from seemingly inescapable predicaments. He seriously pondered the question of life after death and even promised to try communicating from the other side, if there were an afterlife. Hence, popular books about life after death and Houdini’s entertaining escapades attest to the same principle: namely, life after death would be an ultimate form of escape—an escape from the space-time continuum itself.
Nonsense occurred in magical formulas that once supposedly transported people temporarily to a world beyond death. Earlier, we discussed the ancient belief that uttering the right combination of exotic nonsense could magically alter reality. Similarly, it was also believed that formulaic nonsense words could open a doorway between this world and an afterlife world. In other words, nonsense once symbolized the transition from physical reality into a transcendent afterlife reality.
Shamans supposedly transported themselves across the Great Divide by singing songs that mixed nonsense with meaningful language to produce a unified effect. Shamanic songs consisted of nonsense syllables and meaningless refrains combined with meaningful, intelligible parts. Certain shamans of Siberia would shout, “By the power of our songs, we cross it!” in the middle of their performances. That would signify to the audience that the shaman had at that point crossed the barrier into the spirit world.
Nonsense was not just a one-way street, however, that went only to the other side. For the magical, cross-dimensional effect of nonsense also worked in the opposite direction. The right nonsense could sometimes pull the departed from the spirit world back to this world.
Nonsense occurred in magical formulas that once supposedly called spirits back from a world beyond. The Greek Magical Papyri contained instructions for contacting the dead in the afterlife world. The procedure required someone who wanted to call up the spirit of a deceased person to utter specific, strange-sounding nonsense words. Uttering the mysterious magical nonsense formula of “SOUTHOU BERBROI AKTEROBORE GERIE” would supposedly call up an apparition of a departed individual.
Nonsense was also used at ancient Greek oracles to make spirits of the dead visible and audible to spectators. Lucian of Samosota poked fun at oracles of the dead and the exotic, meaningless nonsense that was used there to summon spirits. Lucian said that evokers of spirits uttered strange polysyllabic, foreign-sounding words that made no sense.
Using nonsense to summon the dead is also sometimes a theme of popular entertainment. For example, the movie Beetlejuice is a dark comedy about a haunting. In the movie, a medium called up spirits of the dead by uttering the following nonsensical combination of words:
Hands vermillion
Start of five
Bright cotillion
Ravens dive
Nightshade’s promise
Spirits strive
To the living
Let now the dead come alive.89
Incredible as it may seem, nonsense can actually be used successfully to induce visionary reunions with the deceased. I know because I re-created the ancient process. I guided hundreds of people through a procedure during which they experienced vivid, lifelike apparitions of their departed loved ones. The procedure I devised has been replicated by multiple independent investigators with the same remarkable results.90
I reconstructed this procedure by combing two sources. I read ancient historical and magic texts that describe how to evoke spirits of the deceased. I also studied archeological reports of excavating the most famous of the ancient Greek oracles of the dead. Putting those two sources of information together made it plain how the process worked.
Ancient historical and literary texts reveal that formulaic nonsense was a key component of procedures for preparing people’s minds for experiencing apparitions. Meanwhile, archeological findings showed that apparitions appeared in reflective surfaces such as mirrors, polished metal bowls, or pools of clear water. That detail uncovers a psychological principle involved in the operation of the oracle of the dead.
Gazing into the optical depth of a mirror, crystal ball, or pool of clear water often induces fantastical iridescent visions. Gazers report seeing majestic landscapes, mountains, forests, lakes, and rivers. They also report seeing faces of people moving around in complex settings such as inside buildings or on a street. The images appear lifelike, with essentially photographic reality. The images often have bright, beautiful, lively colors, and they appear and take on a life of their own irrespective of the gazer’s conscious volition. The images usually appear to be three-dimensional, and they move around on their own accord.
I constructed a simple apparitions chamber where people could experience realistic interactive visions of deceased loved ones. You can try this for yourself by following simple instructions.
exercise
Induce Visionary Reunions with the Deceased
Choose a small room, such as a well-ventilated walk-in closet. Paint the walls of the room flat black or cover the walls and ceiling of the room with a black fabric known as teeshot poplin.
Obtain a wall mirror the sides of which are about three or four feet in height and width. Place a comfortable chair on the floor about three feet in front of the mirror on the wall. Choose a chair with a back that reclines slightly backwards so that you can relax comfortably.
Position the mirror high enough on the wall so that you cannot see your reflection when looking upward from the chair. Obtain a small plug-in lamp with a little light bulb, say about the size of a ping pong ball or smaller and place the lamp behind the chair. You might add a rheostat (a dimmer switch) in the circuit and place the switch where you can easily reach it from the chair. That way, you can adjust the light in the darkened chamber to your own comfort level. This requires trial and error to achieve your optimal level.
That is all the physical apparatus you need to commune with your deceased relatives and friends. Completing a psychological and spiritual procedure is needed to prepare your mind for perceiving and interacting with spirits in your apparition chamber. Nonsense was an integral element of ancient techniques for calling up the spirits of the deceased. Choose some work of nonsense that speaks to you and strongly affects your consciousness. You might choose a favorite nonsense poem, for instance, or a particularly mind-bending book by Dr. Seuss. Keep the work of nonsense close at hand so that you can read it shortly before entering the apparition chamber.
Choose some deceased person known to you that you would like to see again. Call up your poignant memories of this person. Ask yourself what your most pleasant memories of this individual are and also reflect on the unpleasant memories, the conflicts, and any unfinished business. Looking at old photographs of the person might help. Take your time and go through the process thoughtfully, feeling the emotions.
If you are a loner and homebody like me, you might prefer to try this procedure by yourself. Otherwise, choose a friend to help you through the process. Your friend can ask you questions about the deceased person you want to see. That will stir up your memories and feelings about your relationship with your deceased loved one. Don’t hurry and don’t skip any steps.
Continue the process of reflection until you have brought your memories and feelings about your deceased loved one vividly before your mind. Then read aloud the work of nonsense that you selected. That will help shift your consciousness to a state in which you can more readily perceive and experience apparitions of the deceased.
Once you have completed all those steps, enter your darkened apparition chamber and sit down. Switch on the light and adjust the illumination with the dimmer switch. Get comfortable in the chair and relax deeply. Gaze into the depths of the mirror and let the memories and feelings you experienced during the preparation process flow through your mind.
Plan to spend at least an hour in the chamber during your first attempt. People who experience apparitions often say that they first see clouds, fog, or mists form in the mirror. More defined images or visions then appear. Some people say that a three-dimensional vision of their departed relative or friend forms in the mirror. Others say that the apparition then steps out of the mirror and emerges into the room. Yet others say that their consciousness goes through the mirror into a parallel reality where they meet departed loved ones.
About 30 percent of subjects report hearing the audible voice of the deceased during their experience. Almost all the rest report experiencing heart-to-heart or mind-to-mind communication or conversations with their loved ones. Most report a vivid sense of presence of their loved ones during the encounter.
My book Reunions (Villard Publishers, 1993) covers my research in greater detail. Classical scholar Daniel Ogden’s book Greek and Roman Necromancy (Princeton University Press, 2001) is a fascinating history of oracles of the dead. Ogden’s book discusses how evocation of the deceased influenced the origins of Western thought in ancient Greek philosophy.
Nonsense as a Comedic Gateway
Nonsense has been used in jokes, cartoons, and songs to denote the entrance into a world beyond death. The idea of nonsense at the gateway between this life and the next life is also a familiar theme of popular entertainment. Singer Shirley Ellis’s “The Clapping Song” was a hit in the 1950s. The song combined a nonsense chant with hand clapping. People in the audience would clap their hands in a certain sequence in time with the singer’s words and music. Again, here is an example of nonsense chanted by a group, along with physical activity, to forge or strengthen social bonds.
In the late 1960s, a cartoon in the Saturday Review of Literature featured a colossal nonsensical diagram of the entranceway to heaven. In the cartoon, two men had just arrived in heaven and, newly transformed into angels, they stood side by side, surveying the scene. They gazed upward toward a vast, complex geometrical diagram in the distance that dominated the landscape. The diagram looked like those that are found in the later chapters of high school geometry textbooks.
Each line, tangent, circle, or triangle in the diagram was labeled with a different abstract term. Hence, the diagram contained a meaningless, unintelligible mish-mash of words such as “truth,” “charity,” “love,” “justice,” “wisdom,” “holiness,” and so on. To designate the enormous geometrical diagram, there appeared beneath it the words the meaning of life.
Heidegger and a Hippopotamus Arrived at the Pearly Gates is a book that uses jokes to explain philosophical ideas about the afterlife. The title refers to one of the book’s jokes. Heidegger—whose philosophical writings were notoriously obscure, if not unintelligible—and a hippopotamus faced St. Peter at the same time. St. Peter would allow only one of them past the Pearly Gates, so he asked each of them for some sort of reason to let them in. Heidegger spoke first and said:
To think Being itself explicitly requires disregarding Being to the extent that it is only grounded and interpreted in terms of beings and for beings as their ground, as in all metaphysics.
St. Peter immediately turned Heidegger away and admitted the hippopotamus into heaven by default. The joke reversed the normal situation, for talking nonsense typically gets someone across to the other side. In the joke, though, Heidegger was excluded from heaven because he talked nonsense. In sum, ancient magical beliefs about nonsense are somehow preserved in popular culture through cartoons, humor, and songs.
Nonsensical Questions about
Death and Justice
Nonsense modeled on worldly justice systems is central to many people’s notions of life after death. Bereaved people often ask where their deceased loved ones are. They ask this plaintively, sincerely, from the bottoms of their hearts. They ask this, knowing full well where the body was buried or where the ashes were scattered. Asking “Where?” is a normal part of the grieving process.
Yet, in reality, it does not make intelligible sense to ask where a deceased person is. Asking where my dead grandfather is, for example, is simply meaningless and unintelligible. Still, questions like that automatically arise from within us during periods of grief. Apparently, the subconscious mind does not distinguish clearly between death and departure or abandonment. “Where is my deceased grandfather?” is a nonsense question. Yet, like meaningful “Where?” questions, it presupposes a spatial frame of reference. That is, it calls for an answer in spatial terms.
Furthermore, although asking where a dead person is is meaningless and unintelligible, it still may convey considerable imperative force. We may feel pressure to come up with an answer, even knowing that it is a nonsense question. The mind feels compelled to provide some sort of place description to satisfy persistent, nagging questions about where dead people are.
Earlier, we saw that formatting unintelligible language as a place description can create a convincing inner sense of another world. Such nonsense worlds cannot be, except in words. Yet, some nonsense worlds exert a strong hold on the human mind.
Heaven and hell are many religious people’s answers to “Where?” questions concerning the dead. In effect, heaven and hell are places where the dead still live. But in what direction do these places lie, and how far distant are they? These questions are unmanageable because they make no intelligible sense. The universe contains the only space we know anything about, and heaven and hell do not exist in an intelligible spatial relationship to the universe.
Furthermore, heaven and hell are nonsense worlds modeled on worldly systems of justice—reward and punishment. However, eternal reward and punishment are dispensed in heaven and hell, which is a nonsensical system of justice. Their sheer unintelligible everlastingness removes heaven and hell from the category of justice and puts them in the category of nonsense.
The idea of justice includes a proportionality between an act and its consequent reward or punishment. A human life spans a few decades, which is insignificant compared to the supposed infinite billions of trillions of eons of eternity. Whatever someone did during that brief span of time, though, is supposedly subject to an everlasting, eternal, unending reward or punishment in heaven or hell. Therefore, notions of supposed eternal heavenly or hellish rewards or punishments bear no intelligible relationship to the concept of justice. In other words, heaven and hell are a form of nonsense built around the idea of a justice system.
Ancient Greek Nonsense and EVP
Nonsense is inherent in the notion of life after death. This chapter has presented evidence that the notion is a complex conjoining and comingling of multiple distinct types of nonsense. The association between nonsense and the afterlife traces back to the origins of western thought in ancient Greece.
Homer’s Odyssey portrays the dead leading a pale and joyless existence in the underworld. Spirits of the dead flit about and gibber since they no longer have their wits about them. Consequently, what they say makes no sense, and they ramble on in aimless, fragmented, disjointed talk. The early Greek idea that spirits of the dead talk nonsense has persisted in the background of Western thought ever since, and it occasionally resurfaces.
One branch of modern afterlife research in particular definitely embraces the traditional Greek idea. Dr. Konstantin Raudive, a psychiatrist, pioneered studies of what are known as electronic voice phenomena, or EVP. Dr. Raudive recorded the static that is heard when a radio is tuned to frequencies between the broadcast channels. He and his coworkers listened carefully to the recorded sounds, sometimes replaying the same segment of recorded static again and again. They heard what they took to be voices amidst the static and tried to transcribe them exactly. Eventually they inferred that the sounds were voices of deceased people who were trying to communicate from the other side.
Prominent EVP researchers acknowledge that messages they have heard and transcribed seem to be nonsensical. To their credit, they refrain from ascribing symbolic or mystical meanings to the enigmatic words. Instead, they accept that the messages coming from spirits on the other side are nonsensical.
The usual objections to EVP research are that voices heard in static are auditory illusions and EVP researchers indulge in wishful thinking. Indeed, it is easy to hear hisses, rustlings, and static as voices, and the more closely you listen, the more they sound like voices. Auditory illusions like that are analogous to visual illusions, known as pareidolia. When you see, say, a face in the clouds, you can point the face out to others and they will see it, too. The longer you look at such an illusion, the more real it seems, until the cloud changes shape or moves out of sight.
I will set that point aside as undisputed. Instead, I will focus on important interactions between nonsense and the mind that occur when someone thinks about life after death. I will also stipulate that I am ignorant about the subjects of radio transmission and static. I will confine my analysis to EVP researchers’ comments about the nonsense they have heard.
Dr. Raudive published a book on his research, titled Breakthrough (Colin Smythe Publishers, 1971). The book contains page after page of meticulous transcripts of spirit voices. Many of the messages are nonsense. For instance, one of the recorded voices said, “Statowitz one man eight nought one inch rub off.” Dr. Raudive and other EVP investigators realized combinations like that are nonsense, and they said so. They were more impressed by the fact that voices could be heard in static than by the fact that the voices talk nonsense. To a degree, that is as it should be.
Earlier, we discussed cross-dimensional nonsense generated when the mind switches from one framework of existence to some other framework. We might expect that messages sent from the next life would be received as unintelligible nonsense. Today’s EVP researchers are still exceptionally tolerant of nonsense.
I heard a psychologist who studies EVP deliver a public lecture on the subject in 2018. He explicitly pointed out that nonsense is heard in the recorded voices. EVP research forces intellectually honest investigators to acknowledge that nonsense factors into the rational study of life after death. Accordingly, the typology we developed in earlier chapters can assist EVP researchers.
For instance, many of Dr. Raudive’s original recorded communications were examples of soraismic nonsense. Soraismic nonsense, you may remember, occurs when words from more than one language are put together in an unintelligible combination. I cited the sentence “Moi, deux some fried belle in garcon, and eoufs those my glass, s’il vous plait,” as an example of soraismic nonsense.
Nonsense is always close to the surface when someone thinks about life after death. When it does emerge, it should be acknowledged and analyzed rather than simply avoided or denied. EVP research is a case in point that illustrates the general principle. Nonsense inevitably enters into the equation whenever the mind thinks of life after death.
Nonsense concerning life after death functions as a placeholder in pursuing truth. The analysis in this chapter revealed nonsense at the core of the idea that there is a life beyond death. Even so, people have kept speculation about the subject afloat for thousands upon thousands of years. The unintelligibility of the idea does not deter people from wondering about an afterlife, and the nonsense they talk about holds a place open in language and the mind.
“Is there life after death?” is a nonsense question, but people will not stop asking it. Some even try applying rational methods to answer the questions, so it is sometimes posed as a topic for academic or scientific debate or discussion. Hence, in the search for knowledge, the nonsense question of life after death is a placeholder.
Some other big questions functioned as placeholder nonsense for a long time. Talk about human flight or lunar voyages symbolized nonsense for many centuries, but both emerged as true realities through a protracted process of rational study. Still, we do not know whether the unintelligible question of an afterlife will ever emerge from a rational process as new truth and knowledge. Nor do we have any idea of how far along in the process of transmutation of nonsense into knowledge the question might be.
Suppose for the moment, however, that the afterlife does happen to be a nonsense question that someday will be transformed into new knowledge. In that case, our analysis tells us something interesting about our current status in relation to a life beyond death. Namely, our minds are now separated from the after-death world by a veil consisting of several types of unintelligible nonsense. Before, the notion of life after death was blurry, foggy, and obscure by comparison. Now, however, the fog has resolved into several separate structures, each of which we recognize from previous examples.
Specifically, the notion of an afterlife consists of self-contradictions, nonsense definitions, nonsense questions, magical nonsense, figurative nonsense, nonsense worlds, and a nonsensical justice system. Furthermore, we already studied each of those types of nonsense in constructing our typology. Hence, an analysis in terms of rational principles of nonsense provides a more detailed map of the notion of an afterlife than ordinary logic does.
Nonsense and Near-Death Experiences
Nonsense forms a mental and spiritual interface with a world beyond death. That is, enigmatic nonsense is interposed between known reality and a hypothetical unknown state of reality transcending death. Nonsense is an intermediate transitional quantity between the two realms, so it would make sense that a person who returned from a trip to the afterlife would talk nonsense about the experience.
Nonsense travel narratives are the standard format for recounting near-death experiences. Near-death experiences, which captured the attention of the public in 1976, have had significant worldwide impact since then. Many people have said that hearing or reading about near-death experiences inspired or consoled them or cured their fear of death. These experiences have made a permanent mark on popular culture through a steady stream of Hollywood movies and best-selling books. Near-death experiences are now an accepted subject of articles in respected professional journals of medicine. Some physicians have even suggested that studies of near-death experiences might provide scientific evidence of life after death.
Principles of nonsense are necessary for rational comprehension of near-death experiences. The following analysis will apply our typology of nonsense to illuminate the structure of near-death experiences. Then, we will see how knowledge about nonsense engenders a unique new method of rational inquiry into near-death experiences and life after death.
Many people who almost died from severe illnesses or injuries subsequently reported episodes of transcendent consciousness. Most of them said that their transcendent near-death experiences were ineffable, or indescribable—they could not describe their experience in words. In fact, ineffability is one of the most frequently mentioned elements in people’s accounts of their spiritual experiences of almost dying.
A speaker who says that a personal transcendent experience of near death is ineffable thereby makes a stipulation that no words are adequate or that their experiences are beyond words. Hence, we must take ineffability seriously, for a claim of ineffability stipulates that the rest of the words in that account should not be taken in their ordinary senses.
In discussing the difficulty of putting near-death experiences into words, people also often stated that their experiences were not in space or time. They maintained that their transcendent consciousness took place in a timeless state, or that they did not experience the passage of time. One woman’s words can stand for those of hundreds of other people who expressed the same thought. She said, “Raymond, you could say that my experience took one second and you could say that it took ten thousand years, and it wouldn’t make one bit of difference which way you said it.”
People who had near-death experiences often reviewed their entire life in a kind of holographic panorama that revealed their every action in detail. They reviewed everything they had ever done and experienced every one of their actions from within the consciousness of the other people with whom they interacted, yet they said that no time had passed during their life review: they saw everything in an instant. To talk about the life review at all, they were forced to recount it in a sequence since language is necessarily sequential. However, they said that they did not experience the panoramic review as a sequence. In sum, the near-death experiences purportedly take place in a timeless state of existence.
People with near-death experiences also often stated that their experiences did not take place in ordinary space. They said that the transcendent part of their near-death experiences occurred in a non-spatial frame of reference. Their near-death experiences purportedly happened in a quasi-spatial state of reality that they could not describe.
Near-death experiences, which are ineffable, take place in a timeless, non-spatial state of reality. That is a major difficulty people faced when they tried to put into words their spiritual experiences of almost dying. It seems that practically everyone figures out the same compromising solution.
Specifically, people who had near-death experiences said that they got out of their bodies and viewed the scene from above. They said they went through a dark tunnel into a bright, loving, joyful light. They said that they were reunited with their deceased loved ones in the light. They said that every action of their lives passed before them in a vivid panoramic review, and then they returned to their bodies and came back to life.
Accordingly, people recounted their indescribably ineffable, transcendent experiences of nearly dying in narrative format. Since they could not describe their experiences, they narrated the experiences instead. That does not involve a logical inconsistency since ineffability is not the same thing as inexorability. Apparently, what they could not describe, they narrated instead, or told in the form of a story.
Specifically, narratives of near-death experiences are travel narratives, or travel stories. People said they got out of their bodies, went through a tunnel into a joyful, loving world of light, and then returned to life. That format is plainly a travel narrative. However, the narrative stipulated and presupposed that the near-death experience did not take place in the time-space continuum. Furthermore, the travel narrative also stipulated that no words are adequate for describing near-death experiences.
How can travel narratives be meaningful and intelligible in relation to transcendent experiences that purportedly did not take place in time or space? Saying that an experience was not in space or time removes the necessary preconditions for a meaningful, intelligible travel narrative. Hence, familiar accounts of near-death experiences meet our previously stated criteria for nonsense travel narratives.
Hearing someone describe a near-death experience can create a vivid inner sense of motion into a world beyond death. We inwardly experience moving into a light even though we acknowledge that motion could not exist except in words. That sense of inner motion is a known effect of nonsense travel narratives.
Earlier, we learned that people who realized that they had talked nonsense inadvertently took corrective action. They tried to reword, reformulate, or modify what they said to make it intelligible. For, as a general rule, people try to make intelligible sense when they talk and avoid talking nonsense. Accordingly, possessing knowledge about nonsense, including its relationship to the notion of an afterlife, might well influence how someone recounts a subsequent near-death experience.
In other words, the rational comprehension of nonsense as a structural domain of language, mind, and spirit should affect how people recount future near-death experiences. Knowing rational principles of nonsense in advance should steer someone to recount a personal near-death experience differently, for they would understand in detail why the standard travel narrative format is unintelligible. Hence, they could be expected to shift to some other format in an attempt to make what they say intelligible.
I predict that someone’s pre-existing knowledge about nonsense can interact with transcendent aspects of that person’s near-death experience. The interaction should influence how that person puts a subsequent near-death experience into words. Eventually, someone who has already mastered rational principles of nonsense will happen to have a near-death experience. I predict that such people will recount their transcendent experiences of near death in some new and illuminating way.
My prediction has now been confirmed in at least one instance. In October 2015 I received a telephone call from a friend who is a distinguished artist and scientist. He had attended one of my seminars on nonsense a few years earlier. The purpose of his call was to tell me about the near-death experiences he had during a recent hospitalization.
A couple of months before his call, my friend contracted severe influenza. Gangrene developed in his leg, which had to be amputated. He was resuscitated from three cardiac arrests during his lengthy stay in the hospital. Interestingly, he did not recount his near-death experiences in the familiar travel narrative format. Instead, he described them as conversations with God. In one experience, God showed him a holographic video of his life. His conversation with God focused on a horrible family tragedy that had taken place many years earlier and affected him deeply.
My friend was still debilitated from his illness, and his voice was weak as he recounted his experiences. Suddenly, though, his voice became clear and energetic. While he was in the near-death state, he said, his mind went back to the nonsense seminar he attended. From that viewpoint, he realized that what I had said was true. As he put it, you cannot understand how that world is related to this world unless you take the unintelligibility axis into account.
Of course, we cannot draw a general conclusion from a single case. Nevertheless, the totality of considerations presented in this book convinces me that I am on the right track. Therefore, I hereby claim that my method works. The logic of nonsense reformats the mind to comprehend and articulate near-death experiences in a new, more intelligible way. I contend that my friend is the first of many that are to follow. We have a fresh, reliable, rational method for exploring the afterlife dimension through near-death experiences.
Accounts of near-death experiences given by people who previously learned the logic of nonsense may differ significantly from the familiar nonsense travel narrative format. That format represents near-death experiences as seen through the lens of ordinary Aristotelian logic only. Someday we may have accounts of near-death experiences told through the lenses of Aristotelian logic and a supplementary logic of nonsense. Comparing these two kinds of accounts may well yield significant new insights into near-death experiences and the question of a life beyond death.
Nonsense and the Soul
Nonsense pervades notions of the soul or self that supposedly persists in the afterlife. Some would object that it is irrelevant to point to the alleged unintelligibility of ideas about an afterlife. After all, they would say, life after death has to do with the soul, and surely we know what the soul is—or do we?
In reality, saying that it is the soul or self that survives physical death does nothing to save the situation, for the soul or self is a supposedly immaterial and conscious entity that somehow serves as the subject of an individual’s personal experiences. And, from long familiarity, we presuppose that the notion makes perfect sense. However, examining their history shows that notions about the soul or self are another form of placeholder nonsense. Hence, trying to rescue ideas about life after death by invoking the soul merely transfers the unintelligibility onto another word.
The question of life after death devolves into the philosophical problem of personal identity. That is, what constitutes the identity of a human individual? Plato maintained that it resides in the individual’s immaterial soul, which pertains to a changeless, intelligible reality that transcends the physical world. He claimed that the body belongs to an ever-changing, unintelligible material realm that is less real by comparison and noted that “The body fills us with loves and desires and fears and all sorts of fancies and a great deal of nonsense.”91
Modern thought upended Plato’s ideas and identified the physical world with intelligibility and the soul with unintelligible nonsense. For instance, David Hume described the difficulty of getting a handle on the slippery notion of a core self. Hume said,
When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. (I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception….)92
Today’s neuroscientists have no better luck pinpointing the elusive notion of a core self. In other words, the idea seems obvious at first, but it dissolves into unintelligible nonsense when we try to put it into a clear formulation. The problem of a life after death cannot be solved without a corresponding solution to the problem of personal identity.
The idea of the self seems necessary to functioning in daily life. Even so, the nature of the self seems indeterminable—a form of placeholder nonsense. In sum, the idea of the self is necessary nonsense, an idea we are forced to entertain until something clearer comes along.
Perimortal Nonsense
Nonsense occurs in enigmatic language dying people speak while apparently transitioning into the afterlife. Some people talk cryptic nonsense during their last days, hours, and minutes of life, and when they do, it often leaves a lasting impression on witnesses. For instance, a professor of religious studies told me that her husband, a philosophy professor, talked nonsense during his final days. Even then, she said, she knew that it was nonsense, yet somewhere in the back of her mind, she felt that she somehow understood what he was saying.
Subsequently, others whose loved ones have died reported that same kind of experience to me. Furthermore, medical doctors and nurses are aware of how frequently terminally ill patients talk nonsense. Such perimortal nonsense is usually mixed in with unusual figures of speech, such as travel metaphors. Typically, medical professionals regard the enigmatic language of the dying as a manifestation of the patient’s illness or the drugs administered to treat it.
Others—including doctors, nurses, and family members—have a different perspective, though, for it seems to them that the nonsensical and figurative utterances reflect transcendent experiences. Indeed, some people do seem to be on the threshold of another world as they die. They undergo a transfiguration in which their eyes brighten and their personality shines through. Witnesses sometimes remark that it seemed as though the dying person “already had one foot on the other side.”
Is perimortal nonsense an involuntary response to the physiological processes of the dying brain? Or does perimortal nonsense represent deliberate attempts to verbalize ineffable transcendent experiences of transition into an afterlife realm? The theory of nonsense opens new avenues for rational investigation of these important clinical, scientific, and spiritual questions.
Dying people’s final words are a topic of enduring interest and even constitute a literary genre, for numerous volumes of people’s last words have been published. Such compilations tend to focus on the dying words of famous people. Furthermore, they tend to quote articulate, even eloquent, statements that are somehow representative of the dying individual’s life and personality.
The process of selecting quotations for literary compilations generally winnows out nonsense. The literary compilations only include nonsense that is particularly striking or memorable. For instance, Hegel’s last words were supposedly, “Only one man ever really understood me, and he didn’t understand me.”
Clinical experience with terminally ill patients establishes that they frequently talk nonsense. This phenomenon has not been investigated, but the theory of nonsense now provides rational means of doing so. Perimortal nonsense can be recorded, analyzed, and identified by types. Determining which rules people’s nonsensical final words follow, and which rules they break, could yield insights into mental processes associated with dying.
Is perimortal nonsense a window into transcendent states of consciousness? Or, in other words, are the meaningless, unintelligible utterances of dying people sometimes instances of cross-dimensional nonsense? Earlier, we saw that the mind produces cross-dimensional nonsense when it switches between different frameworks of experience. If we can isolate definitive markers of cross-dimensional nonsense, we might be able to track the minds of the dying into the next life.
Linguist Lisa Smartt is looking at perimortal nonsense with fresh eyes. Her Final Words Project is the first systematic investigation of the phenomenon. She is collecting, analyzing, and categorizing nonsensical utterances of the dying. Her book Words at the Threshold (New World Library, 2017) is an important contribution to the study of death and dying. The conversation about language and the trajectory of consciousness beyond the threshold has begun.
86. Broad, Lectures on Psychical Research, 302.
87. Price, Philosophical Interactions with Parapsychology, 263.
88. Hume, Essays and Treatises on Various Subjects, 226, 229.
89. Michael McDowell, Warren Skaaren, and Larry Wilson, Beetlejuice (1988).
90. For example, see Edward Hastings, Michael Hutton, William Braud, et. al., “Psychomanteum Research: Experiences and Effects on Bereavement,” Omega Journal of Death and Dying (1 November 2002), https://doi.org/10.2190/LV5G-E3JV-6CVT-FKN5.
91. Plato, “Phaedo,” 49.
92. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 252.