We wished to be special. Our reality of perfect oneness with God made that wish impossible. So we fell asleep and dreamed it so. In the dream, we made up a huge elaborate thought system to make the separation seem real and therefore our specialness. The thought system, which we used to learn to make our wish seem to come true, included our turning God into a vengeful and fearful father and turning our Self into a vulnerable, powerless and shabby, but very special loner version of our former glorious being.

Our plan, to be special, culminated in the seeming existence of a shabby self, that we now believe we are, being caged in a perceptual prison of our own making. We made a prison of a made-up world and a made-up self where we hide from a terrifying God made available to us by our fantastic new wrong-minded thought system where all of our beliefs are upside-down and backwards.

In our cage, the shabby self we think we are, makes a world for itself. There are two types of shabby selves. One is the atheist. One is the martyr. The atheist is afraid of abandonment by God and the martyr is afraid of retaliation from God. The atheist deals with the fear of abandonment by declaring itself God. If it is God, how can it be abandoned? The martyr deals with its fear of retaliation by declaring itself a martyr who is being unjustly accused and must attack in righteous defense.

The atheist makes its cage into a palace, a home fit for a king. The atheist attempts to bring order to chaos. The atheist is the happy, unstable fixer. The martyr makes its cage into a fortress, a home to attack from and be defended in. The martyr can attack in anger and lose hope in despair. Is your shabby self an atheist or a martyr or a combination of both?

There are no other people in our cages. Just egos that we have made of others, ghosts, that we interpret as figures from the past. We have no relationships in this prison because it was made from the idea of aloneness. In a way that is our comfort.

Looking at our personality self we made from this perspective, can help us to begin to confront the shabby self’s seeming reality. If we can learn from the Holy Spirit why and how we made these shabby selves and look at them with His reason, we will ultimately be able to let go of them; they are not real and are a block to our awareness of love’s presence. Not to mention, we made them to replace our Self.

This cage we made, of a made-up world and a made-up self, that we each inhabit individually, would forever be our home if not for the tiny spark of the Holy Spirit being placed in our minds by God. This shabby self, alone in a cage, is the logical outcome of the thought system we made-up. It is a literal dead-end. This cage, which we made to experience specialness, has one more outstanding attribute. It is guarded by our trusty savior from our wrathful Father, the ego. We handed over the keys and are now policed by an entity that has zero interest in our release.

That we made-up a happy fiction to cover up the fact that we live in a cage alone, is hardly surprising. That happy fiction, that “Truman Show” reality, has us all staying in our individual “comfortable” cages pretending that we are doing things, going places, seeing things, making choices and being in relationship with others. Why would we attempt to escape a prison we do not even know we are in?

For those of us who know, why would we remain? Until we tire of the show, it goes on. We are addicted to it. Until we bottom out, most of us will remain in our denial. We have thought of our cage as salvation, even if it is costing us our remembrance of God, and have yet to change our mind. The Holy Spirit will patiently wait for that “there must be another way” moment to which we must all come. We will be shown that better way, when we are ready.