BOOK I — THE PREPARATION OF MIND
Thoth, to André
I
André: You told me that before a thought is stated, something has already appeared. Where does it appear?
Thoth: In imagination.
André: Must it appear as an image?
Thoth: It may appear as an image, a sound, a movement, a space, an action or a meaning that contains them without showing them separately.
André: Why call all of these imagination?
Thoth: Because imagination gives perceptible form to what has not yet become a thought.
II
André: Does imagination produce the knowledge that appears through it?
Thoth: It can produce combinations from what you already possess. But when it participates in Divine Mind, it translates knowledge already present there.
André: Why must Divine knowledge be translated?
Thoth: It has no need of translation for itself. You require it because you know from a particular human centre.
André: Then what is whole in Divine Mind enters me as form.
Thoth: It enters your perception as form. Do not mistake the form of its entrance for the extent of what entered.
III
André: If my imagination makes the image, is the image not mine?
Thoth: The form is made in you. It does not follow that you arranged the knowledge disclosed by it.
André: How can the form be mine while its meaning is not?
Thoth: You may know every letter in a sentence you did not compose.
André: Then the symbols available to me are an alphabet.
Thoth: And imagination brings that alphabet into relation with knowledge. Sometimes you arrange the letters from memory or desire. Sometimes they translate what your thought did not know beforehand.
IV
André: What first tells me that the image translates more than my prior construction?
Thoth: It reveals knowledge you did not arrange.
André: Is surprise enough?
Thoth: No. A disordered mind may also surprise itself.
André: What must the image reveal besides novelty?
Thoth: An order you did not place there. It may join what you held apart, disclose a consequence you had not followed, or show that your question excluded its own answer.
André: Then what is new is not merely the content.
Thoth: Often it is the relation that makes the content knowable.
V
André: How shall I know that this order is not an expectation I had concealed from myself?
Thoth: Move what the expectation holds fixed.
André: How?
Thoth: Change your emotional position. Reverse the relation. Widen the logic through which you interpret it. Speak to the figure instead of deciding beforehand what it means.
André: What must remain through these changes?
Thoth: Not necessarily the same picture. The relation it revealed must continue to make sense.
André: Can a true image change, then?
Thoth: A faithful translation may use another sentence without changing what was said.
VI
André: If the image is a translation, is it less real than the knowledge behind it?
Thoth: Is a translation unreal because it is not the original speech?
André: No. But it may be inaccurate.
Thoth: This is the question you should have asked. The image is real as an occurrence. How much reality its interpretation contains depends upon how much of the knowledge it preserves.
André: Does the feeling of reality prove this fidelity?
Thoth: It proves the intensity with which the image is present. Intensity and fidelity are not the same measure.
VII
André: If the knowledge is in Divine Mind, why can the image be false?
Thoth: Because a translation may fail without the source becoming false.
André: What most fundamentally distorts it?
Thoth: Imbalance among the elemental powers.
André: And expectation, desire and fear?
Thoth: These act through the powers by which you think, feel and will. Imbalance allows one part of you to speak as if it were the whole.
VIII
André: How does each power alter what is received?
Thoth: Fire may receive a meaning and make it immediately a command. Air may explain it before it has been understood. Water may bend it towards desire or fear. Earth may fix a living symbol as a literal fact.
André: Are the elements, then, obstacles to knowledge?
Thoth: Without Fire, knowledge would have no force in you; without Air, no distinction; without Water, no living relation; without Earth, no stable form. Error begins when one power claims the whole translation.
IX
André: If the elements are balanced, will imagination become infallible?
Thoth: Balance gives each power its proper part. It does not abolish your human measure.
André: How, then, shall I prepare imagination to translate clearly?
Thoth: Learn how the four powers live through your bodies, how one conceals another, and how they may be brought into proportion.
André: Is this what I must ask next?
Thoth: The next work is to make Fire, Air, Water and Earth one clear human instrument.
