# The Thook > The Thook are an enigmatic Association civilization whose appearance cannot be remembered after contact ends, a quality Bashar's people adopted for gentle contact and which listeners are invited to contemplate for its effect on consciousness. - Canonical: https://sassani.app/topic/the-thook # The Thook The Thook are an enigmatic civilization, brand new to the Association of Worlds at the time of the session, whose defining quality is the one thing about them no one in the Association can explain. While any member of the Association is in their presence — meeting them, talking with them — the Thook can be seen and described as plainly as anyone you know. The instant contact ends and you turn away, you cannot remember what they look like. Of the entire Association, only one other civilization retains the memory of their appearance once out of presence, and the Thook have an agreement with that civilization that it will not be revealed, because keeping this ability intact is vital to them. Whether the forgetting is a quality of the Thook's physicality or something they do to the consciousness of whoever meets them is, deliberately, left unknown. ## A civilization you can describe only while looking at them Bashar presents the Thook as something the Association has never encountered before — "absolutely startling," with no prior analogue. The contradiction is the teaching: every ordinary marker of a meeting works normally while it is happening, and then the visual memory is simply gone. The ships, however, can be described — long, needle-like, pointed at both ends, slightly bowed in the middle, with no straight lines — because that memory survives the turning away. Only the pilots do not. Bashar frames the sharing itself as purposeful: contemplating the enigma is expected to do something to the listener's consciousness — "it will take you to a very interesting new doorway. We're not going to tell you what it is yet." The point of naming the Thook is not classification; it is the effect that trying to wrap your mind around them has on the mind that tries. ## The forgetting technique Bashar's people adopted The Thook are not introduced in isolation. In a later exchange Bashar names them again as the source of a technique his own civilization learned and now uses in the slow formation of open contact with humanity: appearing physically to some people, and then allowing the encounter to be forgotten so that it does not disrupt the person's normal life, while leaving the encounter present in consciousness as something that can be recovered. The Thook's quality, reframed as a method, becomes a way to make contact gentle rather than destabilizing — present enough to seed remembering, never so forceful that it overrides a person's day-to-day reality. The same exchange turns the technique into a practice. Because the encounter has already happened, pretending it in the imagination — letting a picture of a face-to-face meeting unwind, without needing it to be literally accurate — is enough to gather the energy of it. Done in a relaxed state, fragments of the imagined scene begin to take on a life of their own: an image of the beings turns and looks in a way the imaginer did not direct, and the moment reveals itself as actual recollection with a lucid, realistic quality. The endpoint Bashar names is specific: one day the person blinks, thinking they are coming out of the imagination, and the beings are still standing in front of them. ## Practical implications The Thook are offered less as a subject to believe than as an object to think about. Bashar asks the listener to imagine looking at a friend and, the second they turn away, having no ability to describe them in any way — and to notice what contemplating that does to consciousness. No claim is made about what the listener should conclude; the contemplation is the assignment. For someone drawn to the contact angle, the practice Bashar describes is remembering through imagination rather than collecting evidence. Pretend an encounter that has already happened, use the imagined scene as a symbol to gather the energy of it, and watch for the moment a detail takes on a life of its own — a sign, in his framing, that memory rather than fantasy has surfaced. The boundary he sets is that the technique is for the person's own remembering; it is not a procedure for forcing contact, and the forgetting side of the method exists precisely so that contact, when it occurs, does not override ordinary life. ## Representative passages When we are interacting with them physically, they are physical… We can see them as you would see each other. We can communicate with them… We can see them very plainly, and we know exactly what they look like. When we are not in their presence, we cannot remember what they look like… It is a true enigma, for we do not even know whether it is simply a quality of their physicality or something that they inherently do to our consciousness, we do not know.— Bashar, The Thook (the-thook#text) We have learned a thing or two from them. And so, part of the idea of slowly forming contact with all of you is that we are using that technique to actually appear to some of you physically, but then allow you to forget so that it doesn't interfere with your normal life… the sooner you will create the appropriate state in which to meet us again without forgetting.— Bashar, Msbecka3 Youve Already Met Us (msbecka3-youve-already-met-us#qa-1) ## Related - [Open Contact](https://sassani.app/topic/open-contact) - [Extraterrestrials](https://sassani.app/topic/extraterrestrials) - [Association of Worlds](https://sassani.app/topic/association-of-worlds) - [Imagination](https://sassani.app/topic/imagination) Markdown twin of https://sassani.app/topic/the-thook. The HTML page is the source of truth.