Revelation Mind — Reference Glossary
This glossary was prepared to standardize the Persian-to-English translation of the “Revelation Mind” collection (Articles and Visions).
| # | English Term | Persian Term | Brief Definition |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Contingent Being (Possible existence) | ممکنالوجود | The link between the shapeless space and the shaped space; the human as a being with the capacity for perception and ecstasy (wajd). |
| 2 | Shapeless / Formless Space (Abstract / Content Space) | فضای بیشکل | The abstract space of the mind; free from the constraints of time and place. |
| 3 | Shaped / Form Space | فضای شکلی | The material, sensible world; the realm of time and place. |
| 4 | Ecstatic Reception (Wajd) | وجد | The state of receiving meaning from the shapeless space; a spectrum from a low level (simple sensory encounter) up to very high levels (intuition). |
| 5 | State of Listening | مقام شنیدن | The station of reception, perception, and inspiration. |
| 6 | State of Speaking | مقام گفتن | The station of expressing and articulating perception; the station of prophethood and messengership. |
| 7 | Parable (Ḥekāyat) | حکایت | Passing beyond the shaped mind into the space of concepts and perception. |
| 8 | Narration (Revāyat) | روایت | Remaining within the shaped mind; cognition based on fabricated conventions. |
| 9 | Novelty (Ḥedāthat) | حداثت | Analyzing new circumstances using acquired concepts and perceptions. |
| 10 | Revelation (Vahy) | وحی | The factor that sustains the realm of minds and the realm of image; the link that assigns a mind and an imaginal body to the Contingent Being. Note: in this system of thought it is used in a general, non-prophetic sense. |
| 11 | Inspiration | الهام | The summons of the mind by the Realm of Minds; a reminder of the shapeless identity. |
| 12 | Realm of Minds | عالم اذهان | The shapeless realm; the origin of the mind of the Contingent Being. |
| 13 | Imaginal World (Mundus Imaginalis) | عالم مثال (مُثُل) | The shaped realm in which imaginal bodies are present; distinct from the Platonic definition. Derived from “ʿālam-e mithāl” in Islamic wisdom (Suhrawardi, Ibn ‘Arabi); Henry Corbin rendered it as “mundus imaginalis / the imaginal,” an established term in Islamic studies. |
| 14 | Imaginal Body | بدن مثالی | The formed presence of the Contingent Being in the sensible and imaginal world; derived from “ʿālam-e mithāl” in Islamic wisdom (Suhrawardi, Ibn ‘Arabi). In scholarly English, Henry Corbin rendered this realm as “mundus imaginalis” / “the imaginal,” an established term in Islamic studies. |
| 15 | State of the Name / Cognition | مقام اسم / مقام شناخت | The level at which the mind forms a general concept by abstracting a shared attribute. |
| 16 | Concrete Activity | فعالیت انضمامی | Mental activity bound by time and place. |
| 17 | Abstract Activity | فعالیت انتزاعی | Mental activity free from the constraints of time and place. |
| 18 | Subject | سوژه | The mind's emotional reception in encountering the object. |
| 19 | Object | آبژه | The thing encountered by the mind. |
| 20 | Conscious Mind | ذهن خودآگاه | The shaped mind that, through repeated experience, attributes concepts to the object. |
| 21 | Unconscious Mind | ذهن ناخودآگاه | The abstract space in which revelation and inspiration occur. |
| 22 | Descriptive Expression | بیان توصیفی | Attributing the subject to the object; remaining at the level of praising or blaming the thing. |
| 23 | Analytical Expression | بیان تحلیلی | Attributing the subject to the mind; the object treated as a symbol and schema. |
| 24 | Separation / Longing | فراغ (هجران) | The sense of loss and disappointment following a change in, or loss of, the object. |
| 25 | Reunion | وصال | The pursuit of regaining lost peace and formal arrangement. |
| 26 | Object-oriented (person) | شیءگرا | A person who attributes their mental findings to the object. |
| 27 | Mind-oriented (person) | ذهنگرا | A person who attributes abstract concepts to their own mind. |
| 28 | Education | آموزش | The formation, in a person under upbringing, of a shaped mind that accepts organization. |
| 29 | Nurturing | پرورش | The formation of a self-organizing, questioning mind. |
| 30 | Time-Space Window | پنجرهٔ زمان-مکان | A person's perceptual scope, based on time period and viewpoint. |
| 31 | The Mind's Recognition Space | فضای شناسایی ذهن | The space in which the mind builds chains of cause and effect to analyze events. |
| 32 | Ontological (Existential) Guidance | هدایت تکوینی | The set of actions through which the mind confirms or denies its conscious experiences. |
| 33 | Affirmative / Negative Confirmation | تأیید اثباتی / انکاری | The mind's affirmative or negative response to any shaped experience. |
| 34 | Veil | حجاب | The barrier between the shaped conscious mind and the shapeless unconscious mind. |
| 35 | Identity Crisis | بحران هویت | Confusion arising from the lack of stability and peace within the changing, shaped mind. |
| 36 | Prescriptive Guidance | هدایت تشریعی | Ordering and structuring the shaped mind through analytical experience. |
| 37 | Shari’ah (The path to water or the path to source) | شریعه | A metaphor for the human path toward the shapeless space, undertaken to extract concepts. |
| 38 | Piety / Vigilance | تقوا (انسان محتاط) | Conscious caution in how one affects, and is affected by, the shaped environment. |
| 39 | Illusion | توهم | Relying on initial, imposed conclusions without rational analysis. |
| 40 | Imagination (Khayāl) | خیالپردازی | Predicting and guessing relationships based on the evolution of the shaped mind. |
| 41 | Visionary State (Dreaming) | رؤیاپردازی | Extreme closeness to the shapeless space; a high level of inspiration. |
| 42 | Illusory Mind | ذهن متوهم | A mind with a narrative, imitative life; a delayed or dismissive reaction to analytical questions. |
| 43 | Imaginative Mind | ذهن خیالپرداز | A mind with a planned, shaped experience that welcomes analytical questions eagerly. |
| 44 | Visionary Mind | ذهن رؤیابین | An imaginative mind that attains inspired revelation in imaginal space and predicts the future. |
| 45 | Heart (Qalb) | قلب | The mechanism that converts shaped data into abstract concepts and returns them to shaped space. |
| 46 | Illusory Mental Space | فضای وهمی ذهن | An intermediary space where raw data mixes with prior beliefs and is exposed to distortion. |
| 47 | Space of Will | فضای اراده | The stage at which abstract concepts prepare to return to shaped data. |
| 48 | Levels of Cognition | مراتب شناخت | The sevenfold structure of human cognition, from simple personal experience to the presence of the Heart. |
| 49 | Substantial (Trans-substantial) Motion | حرکت جوهری (تحیّز زمانی) | The horizontal, deterministic course of life through time. |
| 50 | Motion of Meaning (Positional Situatedness) | حرکت معنایی (تحیّز مقام) | The vertical, voluntary course of acquiring meaning and raising the mind's station. |
| 51 | Determinism of Time | جبر زمان | The deterministic nature of the shaped transformations of a human life. |
| 52 | Freedom of Place/Station | اختیار مکان (مقام) | A human's capacity to raise the mind's station through reflection and intellectual experience. |
| 53 | Practical (Subsistence) Reason | عقل معاش | The lowest level of analysis, sufficient for managing daily life. |
| 54 | Law-oriented Reason | عقل قانوناندیش | The intellectual level concerned with discovering laws and theorizing, as scientists do. |
| 55 | Philosophical Reason | عقل فلسفی | The intellectual level that attains universal, comprehensive laws. |
| 56 | Stage of Witnessing (Shuhūd) | مرحلهٔ شهود | The highest level of perception; the meeting of the visionary mind with the “Name.” |
| 57 | Foundational Imprint | بنمایه | The personality-forming layer laid down in the mind from the fetal and childhood periods, through emotional experiences. |
| 58 | Domain (Existential Domain / Paradigm) | ساحت | The domain in which a person lives; the main components of life and their priorities. The author considers this close to Kuhn's “paradigm”; in his own English text (Vision 3) it appears as “the mental realm” and “domains of thought.” |
| 59 | Discourse | گفتمان | The relationship among the components of a domain, which gives that domain a particular identity and function. |
| 60 | Component | مؤلفه | Each of the important constituent factors of a person's life domain. |
| 61 | the "Grown-Up(s)" | آدمبزرگ | A superficial, imitative, competitive person whose goal is enjoyment and pleasure-seeking, as opposed to the meaning-centered human being; not an age-related term but a description of a type of character. |
| 62 | Wayside Sage | راهنشین | A teacher who appears to a person at various points along their path and guides them. |
| 63 | Wayfarer (Sālek) | سالک | A person who consciously walks the path of acquiring meaning and mental transformation. |
| 64 | Spiritual Wayfaring | سیر و سلوک | Passing through stages of mental and spiritual transformation from shaped space toward shapeless space. |
| 65 | Chronotope | کرونوتوپ | The way time and place are jointly represented in narrative, poetry, and art; a tool for analyzing “journey” in a story. |
| 66 | Being-in-itself | بودن در خود | The mode of being of things; an entity that does not undergo ecstasy (wajd) or cognition and has its being within itself. |
| 67 | Being-for-itself | بودن برای خود | The mode of being of the human; a particular mental space constructed for the individual through ecstasy (wajd) and language. |
| 68 | Being / Existent / Non-being | وجود / موجود / عدم | Being means acquiring wajd; an existent is that which has evoked wajd; non-being means the absence of wajd with respect to something. |
| 69 | Impressibility / Impression | طبع / انطباع | The mind's being affected by an object on first encounter; the first sensory copy formed in the mind. |
| 70 | Idea / Representation | تصور (ایده) | A mental copy formed from the initial impression, which remains in the mind even in the object's absence. |
| 71 | Association of Ideas | تداعی تصورات | The calling-up of stored ideas together in the mind, leading to reasoning, thought, and imagination. |
| 72 | Unveiling / Unfolding | انکشاف | Passing from presential knowledge to acquired knowledge; the revealing of resemblance, succession, causality, and necessity among ideas. |
| 73 | Presential Knowledge | علم حضوری | Direct, unmediated knowledge arising from an unmediated encounter with a thing or experience, prior to conceptual mediation. |
| 74 | Acquired Knowledge | علم حصولی | Mediated knowledge arising from ideas and concepts abstracted from presential experiences. |
| 75 | Ascending Arc (Arc of Ascent) | قوسِ صعود | The mind's course from form and experience space toward abstract concepts; an elevating movement. |
| 76 | Descending Arc (Arc of Descent) | قوسِ نزول | The return of acquired concepts from abstract space of mind into the form (or shaped) space in the material world such as language for transmission to others |
| 77 | Intersubjective | بینالاذهانی | The shared repository of ideas among the members of a society, which is the basis for social agreement and communication. |
| 78 | Signifier and Signified | دال و مدلول | The signifying relationship of linguistic signs to the meaning to which they refer. |
| 79 | Hall of Mirrors | تالارِ آینه | The author's metaphor for the mental space in which ideas are reflected and dialectic and thought take place. |
| 80 | Dialectic | دیالکتیک | The encounter of two mental images, or two minds, leading to understanding and the construction of new meaning; intra-mental or inter-mental. |
| 81 | Purification and Instruction | تزکیه و تعلیم | Two stages of the teacher's guidance: first, fully listening to the person's suffering and narrative; then, root-level instruction in concepts. Exactly per the author's English text. |
| 82 | Vision | ملاقات | The general title for any session with the teacher; according to the author, life itself is essentially nothing but an “visionary encounter” with truth and phenomena. |
| 83 | Intellection / Ratiocination / Imagination | تعقل / تفکر / تخیل | Three levels of mental activity that rely on the association of ideas; respectively: pure reasoning, argumentation, and the creative rearrangement of ideas. |
| 84 | Resemblance, Contiguity, Causality, Necessity | مشابهت، تقارن، علیت، ضرورت | The fourfold principles linking ideas in the mind (echoing Hume's principles of association — resemblance, contiguity, causation) that make unveiling and understanding possible. |
| 85 | Zone of Awareness | منطقهٔ آگاهی | The region of the mind where, once language is established there, cognition and thought begin. |
| 86 | Denotative Language / Expressive (Symbolic) Language | زبان دلالتی / زبان بیانی | Two stages in the evolution of language: first, referential, object-oriented signs (this, then that); then symbolic language that points beyond itself to the abstract. |
| 87 | Enveloped (wrapped within an idea) | مُنطَوی | Meaning that is folded and hidden within an idea, and must be unfolded through dialectic. |
| 88 | Realm of Meaning (Realm of Content) | عالم معنا | The shapeless realm which, in the narrative of Vision 10, is used in place of “Realm of Minds”; the origin of the teachers and the narrator. |
| 89 | Realm of Concrete (Realm of Form) | عالم ماده (مادی) | The shaped, earthly realm in which the narrator and human beings have bodily presence; as opposed to the Realm of Content. |
| 90 | Intra-mental / Inter-mental Dialogue | گفتگوی درونذهنی / بینذهنی | Two kinds of dialectic: first, between the mind and its own images in the “Hall of Mirrors”; second, between two different minds, to give determinacy to concepts. |
| 91 | Guide (Pathfinder), Vanguard | راهنما، راهدان، قلاووز | A master who knows the method of spiritual wayfaring and acts as a trailblazer to guide seekers on the path |
| 92 | social withdrawal / social antagonism | جامعهگریزی / جامعهستیزی | Two extreme consequences of a mismatch between time-space windows in social interaction. |
| 93 | Parabolist | حاکی | One who recounts; a person who has transcended shaped appearances and stands in the state of parable. |
| 94 | Copy | روگیری | The primary perception of a human's encounter with an object, which is physiological and material, occurring through the brain and nervous system. |
| 95 | Duplicate | روگرفت | Following impression, a representation is formed in the mind, which is abstract and is called a duplicate. |
| 96 | Impression | طبع | Signs printed on paper; used here metaphorically to represent something being imprinted on the human mind. |