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.