Oh man, I love the blockchain for posing these questions. I especially like these really open ones! I can't wait to see what everyone else has written.

@eaglespirit invites us to consider what freedom means to us. I'm posting early Friday morning in Australia, so if you're reading this and it's Thursday where you are, you have a whole 24 hours to do a #freedomfriday post! Keep an eye on this space as #freedomfriday happens every week! She writes:

We want to hear from you in any way you wish to share your expression of freedom and what you see going on in the world. How do you really feel? What is your heart and soul telling you about freedom? Sing us your song so we can support and rejoice with you.

Last week I wrote about religious freedom, and the paradox of allowing people to have their faith and be able to express it, whilst protecting other people's freedoms too. At the moment, religious institutions have a lot of freedom as they're largely exempt from anti discrimination laws, and that's under review, which is causing much debate here in Australia.

Gang gangs in the gum trees - not an eaglespirit, @eaglespirit, but a bird spirit all the same. All photos that follow are mine, taken in my garden.

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But I've been thinking about this question all week, and whether that's what I want to continue writing about. What does freedom mean to me personally?

Sitting in the damp grass under the warm Spring sun early this week, I felt it - a sense of freedom. It was momentary, but delicious - a soul carressing, wing expanding, heart exploding kinda feeling that could only be described as divine.

And then I thought that freedom isn't about politics or rights, or any of the thing I was talking about last week, but something far deeper, and something I've been working on my whole life. Freedom is freedom from the attachments that make us think 'this' is who we are, dividing us from ourselves and each other as we discriminate and attach to views that constantly fail to bring about any peace at all. They're particular to time, place, culture, and debates like this start wars, and rear their ugly heads over decades, centuries, all time.

They simply obscure us from the true self, the one we spend our whole life trying to find.

A new holland honeyeater seeking a drink in the heat - the basic needs of birds are ours, too

Desire as Entrapment: We Are Slaves

We can't talk about freedom without talking about the things that bind. We're so enmeshed and entangled in this cocoon of our own desires that we don't think beyond the cocoon. We're so entangled in sensory experience, attachments and aversions, we assume things based on our perceived reality, unable to see our true self, right at the centre of all living things.

Cockatoo checking out the vegetable patch. How can I get mad at a cockatoo for being within it's true nature, even if it is looking for fruit I think is mine, all mine?

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We identify with this impermanent body, our changing mind, our intellect and our senses - the big "I am". I am young, old, a mother, a lover. I am angry, righteous, wronged. My beliefs about God or the nature of reality are right and yours are wrong. It's our nature as humans to understand the world in terms of duality - sadness and joy, approval and disapproval, success and failure, light and dark. And we favour one over the other because of the feelings it produces, and believe that this is the way things should always be. We chase after the desires - money, riches, youth, sex, possessions - and think they are permanent sources of happiness, forgetting that duality is the rule - the young woman ages, the rich man loses all his money, the lover leaves like a theif in the night. So we cry 'woe is me!' and this becomes our identity, and we project this anger and outrage outward on others instead of looking within for the ties that bind us to false realities.

The False Illusions of the Self

Most of the crisis we have in our life are based on something we've forgotten - that everything is impermanent. A strong yogi hurts her back, and cannot move for a year. Who is she, if she is not this strong and dancing thing? A husband of 15 years leaves the wife for a younger woman, causing her to question whether she is good enough, pretty enough, loveable enough. A fit man gets cancer, and struggles to reconcile weakness with masculinity and action, an identity that has been his his whole life. In each occasion, crisis acts as opportunity to ask 'who are we, really?'. Each of these instances has happened to someone I know, and more, and it's happened to me too, many times. I feel I'm always cracking open, and have learnt that the 'I' is never constant, and is always changing. This makes life infinitely easier to deal with. Not easy, but easier.

Birds are free because they are never strangers to themselves

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In yogic philosophy, amongst others, this ignorance about who we really are, and attachments to particular identities is called avidya - a misplaced understanding about life. It's known as one of the kleshas or barriers to enlightenment and is a roort cause of suffering. In fact, all the other sufferings can be seen to branch outward from avidya. It's about focussing on impermanent, shifting things, and getting caught up in assumptions, prejudices and discriminatory beliefs.

We chase the unreal, forgetting about the real. We chase illusions and forget the basic rules of nature - that we live, and we die. These rules are inescapable. To think otherwise is to be imprisoned by falsehoods. We forget that what we are, really, is the inablity to experience that our deep connection to others is truth - we fail to recognise that essentially we are spirit, sharing this with the entire universe and every atom in it. That's all. And everything.

These illusions of selfhood weave through every aspect of our life - our culture, our upbringing, our societies and communities and relationships. It's in the things we long for, and the things that terrify us. It's the things we avoid, and the things we chase.

When you start realising that everything you used to form this "I" is a construction of the mind and sensations, you start to see the source of your miseries. When you do that, you've got a far better chance at freeing yourselves from it.

A blue wren in the pigface

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Everything is Nature, We've Just Forgotten This

How do we free ourselves from the shackles of our desires? That's what real freedom is to me. And when I was sitting on the wet grass, with the wedgetails flying over head and the ants crawling across my bare legs, and the magpies picking at worms and the rosellas in the trees, the fairy wrens darting in threesomes, cockies alighting the gums with white - I felt it.

Just for an instant - that I was free, because I was part of nature, not separate from it. The birds were me. The grass was me. The sky was me. And they were I, and there was no 'I', a nanosecond of pure bliss and freedom.

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