Ultimately, the process drives the student to despair of ever attaining enlightenment by logical reasoning alone. The sudden illumination supposedly awakens the mind to a spiritual reality that transcends logic. The koan “What did your face look like before your mother and father were born?” uses nonsense to confront students with deep spiritual questions of personal identity. Koans show that nonsense questions can be a powerful instrument for consciousness-raising and spiritual transformation.
Glossolalia, or speaking in unknown tongues, uses meaningless, unintelligible nonsense to induce a state of ecstasy. Early Christians sometimes would spontaneously break out into a bout of glossolalia. Some Christians still practice glossolalia and surround it with a loose system of religious doctrines, Bible quotations, and folklore.
Believers maintain that talking in unknown tongues is a supernatural event in which the Holy Ghost talks to God through them. They believe that glossolalia is a more perfect form of language than human speech. They also say that glossolalia is the purest form of prayer.
Supposedly God understands glossolalia perfectly, but the unintelligible speech leaves Satan mystified. Therefore, believers talk in unknown tongues to God so that Satan will not overhear what they are saying.
Some believers talk in unknown tongues as a protective charm. I once saw a Christian high-wire walker who spoke in unknown tongues for self-protection. I watched him on television as he jabbered away meaninglessly while walking on a cable that stretched from a church steeple to the rooftop of a nearby building.
Analysis by linguists shows that glossolalia is a haphazard mixture of nonsense syllables from the speaker’s native language. Believers hold that glossolalia is an actual, but unknown, language. Hence, talking in unknown tongues meets our criteria for a mock language.
Talking in unknown tongues does not require being religious or attending a church service. An ecstatic experience is not needed to start talking in unknown tongues. What is required is letting go of inhibitions. However, prolonging the nonsensical speech eventually does bring on a fascinating state of ecstasy. I know because I once jabbered myself into a truly amazing state of consciousness by talking in unknown tongues.
This kind of analysis opens the way for a novel comparative method of investigating transcendent consciousness. Psychologists and neuroscientists face great difficulties in studying spiritual and transcendent states of consciousness. Consciousness is a private experience while science requires repeatable experiments that are testable by independent observers. Our structural principle of nonsenses may make it possible to distinguish between different states of spiritual consciousness.
We saw that various spiritual practices make use of nonsense of various types to induce various changes in conscious experience. Our structural principle says that each type of nonsense follows some rules and breaks others in its own distinctive combination. Glossolalia and koans are spiritual practices that use nonsense to raise consciousness. Glossolalia, you will recall, follows phonetic rules by selecting nonsense syllables from the speaker’s own language. Meanwhile, the speaker shuns grammatical rules and must avoid meaningful combinations of nonsense syllables. That is an impressive mental balancing act, and it is no wonder that glossolalia induces states of ecstasy.
Koans, by contrast, generally respect the grammatical rules of language. Koans are also made up of meaningful words and they are usually interrogatives. The trouble with koans is that the words are not combined in ways that make sense; koans do not ask intelligible questions. A student who applies reason assiduously and relentlessly to such nonsense questions is eventually lifted into a transcendent cognitive state beyond logic.
Here are two different spiritual practices using nonsense. They can be differentiated by referring to their distinctive patterns of rule following and rule breaking. That, in turn, can serve as an independent standard for comparing different states of spiritual consciousness. Glossolalia produces a particular state of spiritual consciousness. Koans presumably produce a different particular state of spiritual consciousness. People’s personal descriptions of the experiences of glossolalia and koans can be compared and correlated with corresponding differences in following rules and breaking rules. Perhaps these differences can also be correlated with differences in brain activity as revealed by CAT scans and nuclear magnetic resonance imagers.
Nonsense is often used for putting indescribable, seemingly transcendent experiences into words. If we are to believe mystics, ordinary language is unsuitable for describing transcendent consciousness. The English philosopher A. J. Ayer says, “If a mystic admits that the object of his vision is something which cannot be described, then he must also admit that he is bound to talk nonsense when he describes it.”56
Mystical experiences are said to be ineffable, or indescribable. Mystics say that there is a profound disconnect between ordinary language and transcendent experiences. When mystics try to put their experiences into words, they say, “I just can’t describe it” or “There are no words to describe it” or “It is impossible to describe this experience.”
Ineffability was the primary characteristic American psychologist William James used to define mystical experiences. William James was right; ineffability is a striking characteristic of mystical consciousness. Anyone who has listened to people talk about their transcendent experiences would be familiar with phrases like “I can’t describe it” and “impossible to describe.”
How do these phrases function in mystics’ accounts of their transcendent experiences? We need to know that detail since ineffability is a core defining characteristic of mystical consciousness. After all, mystics’ words about their experiences are our sole source for comprehending ineffable mystical consciousness.
Saying that one’s mystical experience is ineffable affects everything else the speaker might subsequently say about that experience. That is, saying that one’s experience is ineffable establishes a special context for listeners’ reception of the rest of the speaker’s words. Specifically, it appears that we are not supposed to take the speaker’s other words about the experience in their ordinary literal meanings.
William James noted that starkly self-contradictory expressions are common in the writings of eminent mystics. As examples, he cited “dazzling obscurity,” “whispering silence,” “the Soundless Sound,” and “the teeming desert.”57 Self-contradictions like these seem to somehow correspond to a universal mystical intuition of a transcendent unity underlying all things.
Self-contradictions are not the only type of nonsense that people use as they try to find words for expressing their profound transcendent experiences. In a later chapter, we will analyze some different patterns of nonsense that people talk when they try to recount other kinds of transcendent experiences. That will be further proof that rational principles of nonsense are a useful adjunct to ordinary logical principles for thinking about transcendent experiences.
Nonsense purportedly figures into some core religious ideas and beliefs. In Language, Truth, and Logic, A. J. Ayer writes that “all utterances about the nature of God are nonsensical…If the assertion that there is a god is nonsensical, then the atheist’s assertion that there is no god is equally nonsensical.”58