Magick Without Tears

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.)