The fire of wisdom can burn away illusion

To practise Tantra is to plummet into wisdom-fire.  The word ‘fire’ is used because fire transforms solidity into emptiness and shows us the empty nature of the material world.  Fire is a fascinating element – it’s both tangible and intangible.  You can’t pick it up – you can only pick up what it’s burning. It’s intangible and yet it destroys or devours tangibility.  It has great power to transform substance, yet it seems to be substanceless.  So wisdom-fire as a Tantric term carries the sense in which wisdom; that is to say primordial wisdom, can change the world as we perceive it quite radically.  The fire of wisdom can burn away illusion – it can reduce our own hard and substance-orientated concepts to ashes. 

p12, Wearing the Body of Visions, Ngakpa Chögyam, Aro Books, 1995, ISBN 1-898185-03-4  

This is here, that is there

With the arising of the elements comes the arising of time and space.  As soon as anything arises within primal space – co-ordinates come into being: ‘this is here, that is there. I look at this, then I see that. I see this on the background of that. I experience things in sequence.’  When there is no arising from primal space, time and space cease to exist.  In that condition these terms have no meaning.  The elements create direction out of their own intrinsic nature and time comes into being as the basis of their interpenetrating diversity.  From this essential visionary perspective, time exists as the flux that links endless focal points of tangible and intangible experience.

p75, Wearing the Body of Visions, Ngakpa Chögyam, Aro Books, 1995, ISBN 1-898185-03-4