It’s is always interesting to me that fire works, grand displays of popping the champaign bottle in the sky, are the core celebration for the Fourth. The big displays are designed to shock and awe, to open the eye of wonder at the spontaneously, yet choreographed explosion. The fire works are reenactments of a battle and the exterior reflection of the joy and wonder of Awakening, the discover of absolute freedom, a freedom that does not depend upon any condition or “king.”

Therefore, our Declaration of Independence is simultaneously a celebration of national birth and our own birth of our Soul from the tyranny of our own thinking and historical conditioning. The Fourth of July is simultaneously an objective and subjective event. Historically we celebrate this Birth once a year in July, but spiritually we should be celebrating it every moment. The Objective world is in time, so we have birthdays, but the Subjective or the Soul is always Now and timeless. The external world is qualified but the free soul has no qualifications because it is spirit or empty (Zen)…or just formless.

Our true free nature is without form. The Eye or Mind that see and knows. Fourth of July is a true celebration of our liberation from the limitations of the world conditioned by judgment and the past. Freedom is liberation from the tethers to the past and grievance, the wounds of the past.

When you can see metaphorically, you begin to see the objective meaning and the subjective meaning. simultaneously. Two contradictory view become simultaneously one and. new Idea is born from the tension between the two views. This new Idea, in this context is my talk. When I see the Fourth as a historical celebration and simultaneously as a celebration of my own freedom from my past, I create a talk or write something. A metaphor hold dissonance together and the feed back of looping energy creates art, or a talk, or healing, or Ia burst of freedom.

Metaphorical logic, metaphorical vision is creative. A creative act or idea is when you hold two contradiction simultaneously, you hold, you suspend judgment, you suspend the need to know…and BAM…a rocket of an idea goes off and you create something with it.

Independence or freedom is a metaphor, is the moment that you transcend contradictory views that are mutually dependent, so you can’t choose one or the other.

The Declaration of Independence is a Single Idea that transcended the grid lock that colonies found themselves in. The double-bind of the colonies was that two commandments were contradictory: (1) obey the king (2) be independent of the king and create a new economy in a far off land. They could not just be an extension of England, not could they be independent of England…so….BAM.

A single Idea took root. Declare Independence….Oh…what an awakening…Oh…what heresy.

The Declaration of Independence is always a MAD idea. Look at The Avatar and the Voyage to Pandorar Jake Sully was caught in a double-bind…so he made the made leap onto the Last Shadow and created a new being that had not existed before. This is the Way the Cosmos works.

Independence is a creative Idea…which is always Mad because it has no reference to existing conditions or the past. A creative idea has no reference to the past, that is why it is free from the past and history. If you want to be free from the suffering of the past, declare your independence from the past and recreate yourself…but you won’t know who you are when you cut your tether to the past and that which defines you. Only the brave dare to leap.