Fire Never Touches Wood

When I was down in Miami working on the musical I became fixated on a new dharma course about the emptiness of the mantra. We're 3 yrs into this global pandemic and there's been this surge in people doing the Medicine Buddha mantra to heal. The monk Geshe Michael wanted to clarify something radical 'mantras don't work.' Of course then this begs the question 'then why are we doing them?' And then he unfolds this amazing discussion about the nature of reality and how things play on each other according to Buddhist logic from Master Nargarjuna. It was incredible to be down in Miami dealing with shutdowns and panics over this musical and to retreat into wisdom. There's some mind-bending logical analysis of fire and wood. It's hard to describe it but it's logical syllogisms that are so unusual and yet so obvious that stops the minds in its track like 'Wait, that's been going on the entire time.' 

In logic fire never touches wood. There is no fire inside wood, but also there is no fire outside of wood so you can't start a fire in mid-air. The two things appear to be connected and yet they're not entirely and yet they're not entirely unconnected. And it becomes a 'what came first: chicken or egg' analysis of the way we perceive things in the world. Well what does that have to do with prayers and mantras. Mantras don't work...if you chant to cure cancer and the cancer does go away, the chanting has long since ceased when the cancer is cured. And when you're Medicine Buddha chanting or praying to God... the cancer is still there. So -like fire and wood- there is no connection between the two and yet there is no complete separation. The two things never touch each other. And if they don't touch each other, how can one logically say that one thing influences another thing if they don't ever meet? And yet my mind creates the connection. The same thing with the seed and the plant. Two separate things. There is no exact point when a seed becomes a flower. One can never find the moment when what we define as a 'seed' suddenly becomes a 'flower.' And yet there seems to be a clear link between the two b/c flowers aren't popping out in mid-air. Flowers don't magically appear. And yet not all flower seeds become flowers. There is a magic ingredient or glue which connects cause-and-effect in our reality. 

Every single thing in the 'cause and effect' universe has this magical element b/c there is no direct connection between wood and fire, or seed and flower, or a child and their adult self. Something seems to happen. Even biologist agree that you replace every cell in your body within 7 yrs. There is no part of the visual image of me as a child that connects to middle-aged me now, and yet there 'appears' to be a connection because I'm able to recognize myself, others recognize me. Thus...it's all a mental image. Like flipping the pages of a cartoon flip book and getting a character that seems to be moving, our mental images operate like the individual pages of that flip book. Each mental seed paints an individual page and then there's another mental seed which activates 'the flipping' which connects the different moments in our reality together. We know this b/c when we lose that glue that connects moments together we lose our senses or have dementia or Alzheimers. When that continuity is knocked free it's like ripped pages falling out of a flip book and scattering on the ground. Each cartoon frame is a split second of reality glued together. So a fire never burns the wood, just like a child never becomes an adult. 

A mantra or prayer never touches the cancer or covid. Yet the activating ingredient is the deeds we do...that's what glues it together, that's what makes it possible for a prayer or mantra to be 'activated' from just a single cartoon cell to a series of actions that leads to covid being cured long after the mantra has stopped existing. 

I probably relistened to some of these classes while driving around 6 or 8 times. Then meditated on them at night. And still I am not doing it justice. 

https://www.theknowledgebase.com/en/nagarjuna-nov-2021/