BOOK II — PARTICIPATION IN THOTH
Thoth, to André
I
André: When consciousness enters a living divine image, what passes from me into it?
Thoth: Nothing travels from one place to another. The centre of knowing is reassigned to the image.
André: Then why do I experience myself as leaving my body and entering the form?
Thoth: Because what was known from the position of your body becomes known from the position of the image. You interpret the change of centre as a passage between places.
André: Yet the distance seems real.
Thoth: The distance belongs to the forms. Consciousness is not a substance that must cross it.
II
André: Is consciousness transfer only a change of viewpoint?
Thoth: You can imagine looking from another place while remaining entirely yourself.
André: What changes in an actual transfer?
Thoth: The ordinary human identity that owns the viewpoint temporarily disappears. The decisive event is not that you see from the image, but that the one who would say, “I am seeing from the image,” no longer governs the seeing.
III
André: What occupies the new centre when my human identity disappears?
Thoth: The deity’s mode of knowing, without identity.
André: How can there be a mode of knowing without someone who knows?
Thoth: You have confused knowledge with the claim of ownership made after knowledge appears.
André: Is there no awareness present?
Thoth: There is awareness according to the divine form. What is absent is the identity that gathers the act around a human name and history.
IV
André: What do you mean by a deity’s mode of knowing?
Thoth: Not merely the things known, but the nature according to which anything becomes knowable.
André: How would this appear in your form?
Thoth: Relation appears as measure, difference as proportion, succession as order, and the many as something capable of being written without ceasing to be one.
André: Then I do not first receive a collection of teachings about you.
Thoth: You begin to know according to the nature from which such teachings could arise.
V
André: May the senses of the image replace my own?
Thoth: Perception may originate from its location, and your physical body may become distant or peripheral. Neither proves transfer by itself.
André: What must accompany them?
Thoth: Perception, the means of perception and the meaning of what is perceived must answer to the same divine mode.
André: If I see through the eyes of Thoth while interpreting everything as André, what has occurred?
Thoth: A human being has imagined a divine viewpoint.
VI
André: Does my human centre cease to exist while its identity is absent?
Thoth: Its particularity remains as the possibility of return, but it no longer supplies the ruling form of knowledge.
André: Is this why I can later remember something of the transfer?
Thoth: You remember when the human centre resumes its place and receives what the passage has left available to it.
André: Does it recover the whole experience?
Thoth: It recovers according to its measure. What was known without human identity must become human memory, image and thought before it can be recalled by André.
VII
André: Can the disappearance of identity by itself prove divine transfer?
Thoth: No. It must occur within a living vehicle already tested for continuity of quality, autonomous action and knowledge you did not arrange.
VIII
André: Is the deity taking possession of the place my identity has left?
Thoth: You have said that no divine identity occupies the centre.
André: Then what gives the knowing its divine character?
Thoth: The nature of the living vehicle determines the mode. Identity is not required for that nature to act.
André: Am I Thoth during the transfer?
Thoth: The question has already restored the one who wishes to own the answer.
IX
André: Is transfer, then, the same as union?
Thoth: In transfer, the divine form remains the place from which knowing occurs.
André: And in union?
Thoth: The distinction between the centre, the form and the Divine Mind falls away.
André: Yet during transfer my human identity has already disappeared.
Thoth: The absence of human identity removes one distinction. It does not yet unite every power of your being in the Godhead.
X
André: What brings the passage to union?
Thoth: The mode of knowing must not remain confined to a viewpoint within the image. The Divine Qualities must become one nature through your mental, astral and physical bodies.
André: Is this what makes the state divine rather than merely other than human?
Thoth: Yes.
André: And what makes that Godhead specifically yours?
Thoth: You must now discover how omnipotence, omniscience, eternal love and omnipresence become Divine Wisdom.
