200 
MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS 
history of the evolution of the species. The foetus displays 
essential 
characteristics 
of insect, reptile, mammal (or 
whatever they are) in the order in which these classes of 
animal appeared in the world's history. 
Now J want to put forward a thesis-and as far as I know it 
is personal to myself, based on my work at Cefalu-to the 
effect that the mind is constructed on precisely the same 
lines. 
You will remember 
from my note on "Breaks" in 
meditation how one's gradual improvement in the practice 
results in the barring-out of certain classes of idea, by classes. 
The ready-to-hand, recent fugitive thoughts come first, and 
ftrst they go. Then the events of the previous day or so, and 
the preoccupations of the mind for that period. 
Next, one comes to the layer of reveries and other forms 
of wish-phantasm; 
then cryptomnesia 
gets busy with 
incidents of childhood and the like; ftnally, there intrudes the 
class of "atmospherics," where one cannot trace the source 
of the interruption. All these are matters of the conscious 
rational mind. 
The structure of the mind reveals its history as does the 
structure of the body. 
(Capitals, please, or bang on something; that has got to 
sink in.) 
Just as your body was at one stage the body of an ape, a 
fish, a frog (and all the rest of it) so did that animal at that 
stage possess a mind correlative . 
Now then! In the course of that kind of initiation 
conferred by Sammasati , the layers are stripped off very 
much as happens in elementary meditation (Dharana) to the 
conscious mind. 
(There is a way of acquiring a great deal of strange and 
unsuspected knowledge of these matters by the use of 
Sulphuric 
Ether, 
[C2 Hs]2 0 , according to a special 
technique. I wrote a paper on it once, 16 pp. 4' 0 , and fearing 
that it might be lost had many copies made and distributed. 
Where is it? I must write you a letter one day.)