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Lost in Translation
Dec. 9th, 2023 01:42 pmA lot of learning the ancient Greek language is inseparable from understanding the ancient Greek culture: for example, the word for "buy" is related to the word "agora;" the word for "sex" is related to the name "Aphrodite;" the word for "quarrel" is related to the name "Eris." If you don't understand what the agora, or Aphrodite, or Eris meant to somebody back then, then you can't understand the words: the agora wasn't merely a marketplace and Aphrodite isn't merely the archetype of sexuality—these are larger concepts, square pegs that don't fit into the round holes of modern English, and so simply saying that "ἀγοράζω" equals "buy" is a gross trivialization.
I think that mystical experience is like that, whether it be channeled writing (e.g. the G. Vale Owen scripts) or direct gnosis (e.g. Emmanuel Swedenborg's books) or whatever. The spiritual worlds are vast, and to write them down in words is impossible. Human language describes human experiences, and so it is inevitable that we don't have words for super-human experiences; but more than that, any translation from spiritual experience to human experience has to map not only to words but to cultural constructs that are encoded in those words.
A good example of this is that I find a lot of written mystical texts in English to be useless, because the worldview of English-speaking cultures is fundamentally a Christian worldview; the language presupposes this, and the assumptions are baked in to it. So if I am reading about, say, Lorna Byrne's mystical experiences, I have to account for a double-translation: she is translating her spiritual experiences into a Christian worldview just to merely be able to put it into words, and so when I read it, I need to not merely translate the words to experiences, but I need to try and generalize from her Christian model to try and get to the bigger reality that is hinted from it (since I am not a Christian and do not, cannot, subscribe to that worldview). But this is impossible: if translation is treason, then a translation of a translation is beyond treason, it is trash. If the original is like a live flesh-and-blood person, a translation is like a mere photograph, and a translation of a translation is more like a Picasso.
And let it not be thought I am just picking on Christianity here: we have many records of Greek mystical experiences, and they are likewise fraught. One simply can't understand the spiritual worlds by using human models.
Let me contrive a little example: very often, accounts of what heaven is like say that people go to various buildings and do God's work of making things or helping people or what have you. This strikes me as a very industrial, Western view of how a person in heaven lives, where one goes to a place and does a particular, specialized task for some kind of reward. Yes, there must certainly "work" of a sort in the spiritual world, but I can't imagine heaven to have anything remotely related to the "work" we do here on earth! I could very easily see somebody from a different culture treating heaven as constant sex—because isn't part of sex to know something completely, without barriers? And isn't that the kind of knowledge one has of things in heaven? This is not something that can be taken too literally, of course—there are no bodies in heaven!—but as an analogy, a translation of an experience, I can see it being valid. But of course if one said such a thing in an English-speaking context, even the few who are inclined to read of mystical experiences would decry the supposed mystic as speaking strictly in terms of wish fulfillment.
If one walks their own path to divinity—and so many of us here do, I think; not for nothing does Manly P. Hall call it "the way of the lonely ones"—then they are necessarily withdrawing themselves from the cultural context in which they are situated. And if one does so, then no account of spirituality can possibly fit them: it will always be lost in translation. The only experience that can fit into an isolated, idiosyncratic worldview is one's own; and so we must develop our spiritual eyes to see for ourselves.