Spirit Fire

by Donna Mitchell-Moniak
originally published in the Esoteric Quarterly

In Esoteric Psychology, Vol. 1, the Tibetan writes of the “secret of translation” giving it as the secret of the human kingdom. This is to say, it is the secret hidden within the kingdom of humanity and therefore that which humanity ultimately will reveal to itself, and then through that revelation as some aspect of God, to all creation.

“Humanity is the custodian of the hidden mystery, and the difficulty consists in the fact that that which man conceals from the world is also hidden from himself. He knows not the wonder of that which he preserves and nourishes. … In man, God the Father has hidden the secret of life; in man, God the Son has secreted the treasures of wisdom and of love; in man, God the Holy Spirit has implanted the mystery of manifestation. Humanity, and humanity alone, can reveal the nature of the Godhead and of eternal life.”2

What is this hidden mystery? How is the secret of translation related to the secret of life, or reveal the nature of the Godhead?

With translation one finds two words. Water – Agua. Water means agua. Water is agua; agua is water. They are the same. Translation, then, is the wisdom that two different words, not only can but do, mean the same thing. Spirit means matter, and matter means spirit. One of the mysteries of translation is the fact that spirit and matter are the same from the deepest most real perspective. Somehow, long ago, humanity forgot that both words are speaking of one thing: divine life substance. This loss of truth began humanity on the path of duality: spirit and matter. Then the words became opposites: one ethereal, one dense; one refined, one coarse; one free from limitation, one imprisoned in form.

Part of the secret of translation is re-learning that language and words are not only meant to identify but to open up or into; that is to say, identification with, realization of, or absorption into. Translation becomes relation, a tantra true to the Latin roots of the word relation: a bringing back. Translation would then mean to bring across (trans: across) – to bridge the seeming monumental divide in our minds of words and therefore reality that has not been bridged in eons. Part of the secret of translation is that the relationship always existed. Water has always been agua. Spirit has always been matter, and vice versa.

The beauty and revelation, then, within the human kingdom and each human being is that when the secret of translation has worked its mystery we will be translated into spiritual beings, no longer defining ourselves and all existence through a one-sided interpretation of what is Real. Right now matter is the primary interpretive lens, devoid of the fact that matter is all that spirit is. Lacking understanding of the occult axiom that energy follows thought, humanity has thought itself into partiality, into a ‘desert of the real’ where matter is dense, thick, materialistic, and through our desires is imprisoning. Yet down the ages sages, mystics, shamans, and meditators have professed their experiences of the sameness of spirit and matter.

Another part of the secret of translation is the fact that words are subject to interpretation and that interpretation is based on the subjective. Take for example the Sanskrit word sunyata. Most Sanskrit words require phrases or paragraphs to render their meaning. This word is no different. Sunyata means an openness so complete and unfettered so as to be empty of any thing-ness or characteristic that would condition the openness, or condition any spontaneously arising state or quality of Being-ness. In other words, sunyata is free from this and that, contains no particular thought, yet is a ready medium for the Real to be birthed therein.

Sunyata is used in the ancient Buddhist text, The Prajnaparamita, which has come to the West under the name The Sutra on the Heart of Wisdom. The Western mindset tends toward reduction and so in translating sunyata one word, emptiness, was used instead of a phrase or a concept. Yet emptiness to the Western mind is empty, nothing, a negation. It is a cup poured out; nothing left to drink, be used, or understood. It is a vacancy needing to be filled. This is not sunyata. Yet translation is largely subjective, and interpretation completely so, thus without the first-hand experience of sunyata the Western translators could not convey the Real behind the word. The Western world, then, received a translated version of The Prajnaparamita that was far from the original and one which clung to the erroneous duality of spirit versus matter, instead of what The Prajnaparamita actually teaches: there is only sameness, no difference.

The secret of translation reveals that all words are powerful because words are quanta of quality, encapsulations and derivatives of the ultimate spirit-matter. We know that quanta means ‘packet’, a little bundle of energy and quality. Words are this. In describing something we might say ‘blue’ and the listener understands the quality being spoken of. Or we might say ‘hot’ and in a variety of contexts ‘hot’ will be understood correctly: a hot temper, a hot pepper, a hot day, a hot color. Blue and hot are quanta of particular energy and quality felt and known subjectively. For this reason words are powerful.3

Life is energy. And life is known through quality. Thus a further aspect of the secret of translation is that life lies within the sound of the word. And that life is released or kept imprisoned by the sounding of words. ‘Words of Power’ are such because the one who speaks them is conscious of this deeper meaning. The white magician knows well that word is spiritual essence; and furthermore, that word is merely a re-formulation thus translation of spiritual essence into some other state or form. Spirit becomes matter, matter becomes spirit. The formulation changes, not the essential nature. Thus vehicle or form appear or seem to disappear.

This is the significance behind the “Conferrer of Names”4. Adam, naming all the animals, was such in the book of Genesis. The animals in some sense did not completely exist until he named them. This is because a name not only contains quality and a quantity of life-essence-energy but honors the uniqueness and specificity of the quanta of quality that is a person, place, or thing. For instance, the name ‘eagle’ brings qualities to our mind as well as an image. ‘Eagle’ acknowledges and therefore ‘names’ qualities such as a particular presence in flight, strength, laser-like vision, detachment, and beauty. Naming or describing something (an object, a mood, impression, or thoughtform) gives that something more concrete expression and allows it to express life. Equally it brings more of its already expressed fullness into our awareness; like trying to find a word inside our head that expresses a thought exactly. When we find the right word our thinking clears, an image arises within our thought process, and we can convey that thought more accurately. The quanta of quality that was seeking translation from inside us has been named, rendered, and therefore ‘seen.’ We have been the conferrer of name; we have found the power within a word to release the spirit in the form.

Words are powerful, and there is no speech without transmission. Transmission is the Life-stream within thought, and thought is a manifestation of spirit-matter. Transmission, using the term in the traditional way of ‘oral transmission,’ is a telepathic rapport which, due to the inability of the student, usually needs to include verbal teaching. When transmission works well it is the life within the words that blossoms in the mind of the student. Thought and word has conveyed the life essence. This was possible because the teacher saw and was at-one with the life-stream of the student. This could be done because they are one and the same. The teacher merely worked with the student’s essential nature and used a form that the student could cognize. Equally a teacher might use a hindrance or an obscuration within the student so that he can work with recognition and change. Thus transmission has led to translation, translating the matter lived as a hindrance into the liberation of spiritual emerging.

Thought exists because spirit must create form for its expression. However, form is not separate from spirit; it is merely the outpicturing or the skin of spirit. We have the choice of looking beyond or within the cover. This is similar to learning a language. At first the new words are just letters strung together or new hieroglyphs needing to be memorized. The form stands out and seems impenetrable. The life-stream-energy and the quality that these new words reveal are unknown to us. But as we learn, that which was esoteric and hidden becomes exoteric and obvious. And it was there all along! We just did not know how to relate. We had not been ‘brought back’ to what was inside the form of the new words.

One of the secrets of translation, then, is that no form is just form; no presentation is only what it seems. This reveals the “mystery of manifestation” and therefore that which man, as God the Holy Spirit, is to understand. Yet this might only be the skin or outside of the revelation. The further mystery is that all manifestation is the work of translation, the rendering of some quanta of spirit in a particular form. Therefore all, in fact and factually, is divine. There is nothing that is not. Spirit IS matter. Matter IS spirit. They are the same from the beginning. Translation is the magical process that binds energy and quality with time/space, thus is a thing designated, given a life, and duration.

The Tibetan often mentions transmutation as an evolutionary process within all planetary kingdoms. It is a process of fire and being purified, thus leaving a reinforced duality – pure and impure, gold and dross. This is a significant part of the Path. Translation, however, in working with the reality that spirit is matter, calls forth the divine essence regardless of the appearance or lack thereof, like Jesus calling Lazarus forth from the tomb. To all onlookers, Lazarus was matter, dead, without spirit. To Jesus, matter is divine life expressing, and He could call forth the essence that expressed through the outer appearance of Lazarus. Later Jesus would do the same for Himself at the resurrection; He would translate his body into pure light. It was still His body, still the form of His outer expression, yet He expressed His spirit-matter.

Translation is the secret for the human kingdom because all of us are apprentice white magicians. To translate is to work magic. To render spirit intelligible for others in some form is to work white magic. To illumine that form as a presentation of spirit, not apart from the spirit that created, indwells, or releases the form, is to work white magic.

This brings us to our lives. If in fact spirit is matter and matter is spirit then our joyful duty is to translate the current state of all that is within our sphere of influence into a more correct translation of the same. This is similar to moving from sunyata translated as ‘emptiness’ to sunyata translated as ‘openness’. We could begin with our vehicles. What would be a more accurate and therefore revelatory expression of each of our vehicles? Is our body being treated as the temple that it is? Are its needs acknowledged and understood? Or have we interpreted in our minds that our physical body is the least of concerns or relegated it to an inferior part of our incarnation? What of our emotions? Do we understand that the full translation of them would be sentient compassion and empathy? Like a Sanskrit word, has our emotional body been translated in way that does not account for its complexity and spectrum of expression? And what of our mind? Mind eventually will become, as matter becomes spirit, expanded beyond any expression that the mind can imagine. It will become consciousness itself, released from a 3rd aspect presentation into a 2nd aspect presentation and expression. Meditation is the tool of translation for the mind.

“It should be remembered that this process, as it goes on in consciousness, produces (surely and inevitably) corresponding changes in mechanism and structure, and in sense perception through the apparatus of the body. … I lay emphasis upon consciousness as the pre-disposing factor, and on the developed sense of awareness which produces an inner demand for improved equipment.”5

The Tibetan, then, gives us something that really tilts our head! “… when a man really understands the elevating power of the aspiration, he can begin to work with the secret of translation. (Aspiration) is a scientific process, governing evolution itself.6

We remember, of course, that this same teacher has told us that “will and breath are synonymous terms.” Aspiration, containing the root of spirit (spiritus), is not only a scientific thus occult process, but governs evolution itself. In other words, evolution is the work of revealing the spirit within matter, thus revealing that spirit is expressing itself through matter, thus that matter IS spirit. Translation. Aspiration breathes the life that is within the form, and thus seems to breathe new life into the form. But this is just another case like Jesus and Lazarus. When we know, deeply, that the form is spirit expressing, then we can call forth the fullness of the spirit through that expression.

For a final thought on translation we look to esoteric astrology. The keynote for the disciple in the air sign Aquarius is “Water of life am I poured forth for thirsty men.” The translation is that water is life, air is life, life is Life. The words, though different from one level, mean the same thing from a higher triadal point of reference. Water is the buddhic plane; air is the buddhic plane; Life resonating is the buddhic plane. In this way, the keynote speaks of the Bodhisattva vow and the essential realization that as long as anyone or anything is left suffering in the delusion of duality, there is thirst. The one who is at-one is Life, is the substance of Life, and is not separate. The one who is at-one is spirit-matter. Ignorance is translated so that it can be recognized as suffering. The two mean the same thing: ignorance = suffering. One is not cause and the other the effect. They are the inside and the skin of one thing.
Aquarius, a sign of circulation and circulatory flow, provides the quality of flow within all seeming forms of density. Density is not necessarily hard or fixed. When we know how to speak its language, translate its properties into word-realities that are not born of opposites, then density will be understood as flow – water-air-spirit-matter.

On that day duality will be translated into wholeness. Then the keynote of Aquarius might be reworded into a more correct ‘translation’ of the quality of Aquarius celestially: “Waters of Life poured forth. Thirst no more.” And the secret of translation will have worked its magic within the kingdom of humanity. There is nothing lacking. All is here now.