98 
MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS 
form rather than on its substance. But we are not considering 
poetry, or poetic prose; all we want is intelligible meaning.) 
It does not follow that a passage is nonsensical because 
you fail to understand it; it may simply be too hard for you. 
When Bertrand Russell writes "We say that a function R is 
'ultimately Q-convergent 
Q' if there is a member y of the 
converse domain of R and the field of Q such that the value 
of the function for the argument y and for any argument to 
which y has the relation Q is a member of Q." Do we? 
But you do not doubt that if you were to learn the 
meaning of all these unfamiliar terms, you would be able to 
follow his thought. 
Now take a paragraph from an "occult teacher." 
What's more, I'll give you wheat, not tares; it seems 
terrifyingly easy for sound instruction to degenerate into a 
'pi-jaw'. Here goes! 
To don Nirmanakaya's humble robe is to forego eternal 
bliss for self, to help on man's salvation. To reach 
Nirvana's bliss but to renounce it, is the supreme, the 
final step-the highest on Renunciation's Path. 
Follows a common-sense comment by Frater O.M. 
All this about Gautama Buddha having renounced 
Nirvana is apparently all a pure invention of Mme. 
Blava tsky, and has no authority in the Buddhist canon. 
The Buddha is referred to, again and again, as having 
"passed away by that kind of passing away which leaves 
nothing whatever behind. " The account of his doing this 
is given in the Mahaparinibbana Sutta; and it was the 
contention of the Theosophists that this "great, sublime 
Nibbana story" was something peculiar to Gautama 
Buddha. 
They began to talk about Parinibbana, 
super-Nibbana, as if there were some way of subtracting 
one from one which would leave a higher, superior kind 
of a nothing, or as if there were some way of blowing