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