Cooked

"If you immediately know the candlelight is fire, the meal was cooked a long time ago."

If I cross my eyes - though they're not really eyes - and squint, I can almost understand the koan now. All possible meanings superimpose themselves in my sight that isn't really sight. Some are gruesome: radiation cooked my body - did Oma foresee that back on Kheb? Some meanings are deep and some are literal, some are human and some alien, some are even Goa'uld. I understand every single meaning the phrase has ever had - could ever have - and yet...

I still don't get it.