Instruction Manual for Your Mind

Teresa of Avila wrote a wonderful guide for the woman or man turning to the interior road or path. There are so few guides like this for those who, being drawn inward, are not easily drawn to Buddhist or Eastern traditions for help along the way. The reasons are legion, but if you read some of the reviews of the particular translation of The Interior Castle linked above, you'll get an idea of some of the obstacles.

One is principled ignorance. American Christianity deliberately avoids the interior path, EXCEPT as intercessory prayer and an extremely narrow kind of meditation. This prayer is ALWAYS directed outward/upward to the triune God. The meditation is ALWAYS and ONLY an intellectual focus on Biblical text.

Another obstacle, which amplifies and colludes with the first, is a less principled but perhaps thereby more complete ignorance of the history of human consciousness as it relates to language and the meanings of individual words. This ignorance is especially evident in the reviews referred to above. One reviewer, censuring the translator for translating "sin" as "missing the mark", says, "When Teresa wrote 'sin', she meant 'sin'."

That's the most ridiculous claim I've ever heard. The more obvious response to this unabashed stupidity is that in fact the original meaning of the greek word for sin means exactly "missing the mark". But this response alone misses the mark. The essential impulse behind a new translation of a work such as The Interior Castle is that the meanings of words change. It's as simple as that.

Unless you're steeped - indoctrinated - in the language of 20th century American Protestantism, the reader has no idea was is meant by the word "sin". If the reader IS well versed in the language of 20th century American Protestantism, then they have no idea what Teresa meant by the word "sin", which is even simplifying it further since Teresa didn't write in English, or even Latin, but Spanish. Even if she HAD written in English, it would have been English as it existed in 1579-1580, like this piece of writing from that period, which is difficult enough to determine what it SAYS, much less what it MEANS:

"Then as there was no art in the world till by experience found out: so if Poesie be now an Art, & of al antiquitie hath bene among the Greeks and Latines, & yet were none, vntill by studious persons fashioned and reduced into a method of rules & precepts, then no doubt may there be the like with vs. And if th'art of Poesie be but a skill appertaining to vtterance, why may not the same be with vs aswel as with them, our language being no less copious pithie and significatiue then theirs, our concepts the same, and our wits no less apt to deuise and imitate then theirs were?"
[found here. It is unrelated to my topic, and is just meant to illustrate that language changes through time]

The result is that there are few maps of the interior journey for Christians because, for them, THERE IS NO INTERIOR (only the direct LEAP to God the Father), which belief is secured by the ignorance of the nature of meaning.

Thus is The Interior Castle a joy to find - especially, or more likely only, Mirabai Starr's transaltion. Her translation is thus both a map of the interior journey, that speaks a language that MEANS SOMETHING to someone of the 21st century.

By the way, this isn't a pitch for Catholicism: I suspect that some of the rabid reviews on Amazon were posted by Catholics, though that's just a guess. Catholicism does recognize the streams in the history of Christianity that express and espouse the interior journey, but they are just as ignorant of the history of language and human consciousness, as a general rule.