Listening Through The Holes

A.H. Almaas

A fundamental idea used in our work is called the Theory of Holes. People, as they are under usual circumstances are full of what we call "holes." Now, what is a hole? A hole refers to any part of you that has been lost, meaning any part of your that you have lost consciousness of. What is left is a hole, a deficiency in a certain sense. And what we have lost awareness of, is of course, our essence. When we are not aware of our essence, it stops manifesting and is lost. Then we feel a sense of deficiency. So a hole is nothing but the absence of a certain part of our essence. It could be the loss of love, loss of value, loss of capacity for contact, loss of strength, loss of will, loss of clarity, loss of pleasure, any of those qualities of essence. There are many of them, But when they are lost, they are not gone forever; they are never gone forever. You are simply cut off from them.

Lets take, for example, the quality of value, or self-esteem. When you are cut off from your value, the actual state of being cut off is a sense that there is a hold left inside you; its empty. then you feel a sense of deficiency; a sense of inferiority, and you want to fill it with value from the outside-approval, praise, whatever. So you try to fill the hold with fake value that comes from the outside.

Everyone walks around with lots of holes, but you usually aren't aware of them. your usually aware of desires: "I want this, I want that, I want this praise. I want to be successful here, I want this person to love me. I want this or that experience." The presence of desires and needs indicates the presence of holes.

Of course, these holes originated during your childhood partly as a result of traumatic experiences or conflicts with your environment. you get cut off from one of those qualities at such times. Perhaps your parents did not value you, that is, they didn't treat you as if your wishes or presence were important; they didn't act in ways that let you know you mattered; they ignored your essential value. And because your value was not seen or acknowledged, perhaps even attacked or discouraged, you got cut off from that part of you, and what is left is a hole, a deficiency.

Later on, when we relate to someone else in a deep way--the deeper it is, the more this happens--we fill those holes with the other person. Some of our holes get filled with what we believe or feel we're getting from the other person. We feel valued because this person appreciates us, and this fills our holes. We don't know consciously that we're filling it with their appreciation, we just feel full when we're with them; we feel valuable. So, when I am with that person, I really feel I am valuable, but unconsciously I feel the other person has my value. the other person not only makes me feel valuable, but whatever the other person is giving me is a part of me, is part of that fullness that I experience.

So unconsciously,I don't see that part of the person that makes me feel my value as separate from me; I see it as part of me, as filling this hole. I don't know there is a hole, I only feel the fullness. If the person dies, or the relationship ends, I don't feel that I'm losing that person, I feel that I'm losing whatever is filling the hole. So, the loss of the person is not felt as a loss of a separate person. It is experienced as a loss of yourself, because unconsciously, you saw that person as filling part of you. In this way, he or she became a part of you, so that losing that person, you experience the loss of a part of yourself, and therefore you feel a hole. That is why it is so painful. It feels like you're being cut, and something is being taken out of you. Sometimes you feel as if you lost your heart; sometimes you feel you've lost your security, your strength, your will--whatever the person fulfilled for you. Sometimes the person gives you will, gives you strength, or support, or love, or value. So when you lost a person close to you, you feel whatever hole you had that the person had filled.

That's one thing people are talking about when they say that "we fit each other." Each person fits the other's holes. This fits into this hole; that fits into that hole; they feel like one thing. they no longer seem separate. But if you do separate them, you;ll be left with a lot of holes. If these two people live together, they'll feel full and complete. They're complementary, they make a unified whole. But another person rarely fills all your holes. You have several people, many activities in your life, and still they don't fill all your holes. There will be some holes left, which keep the dissatisfaction going. And, of course, holes don't get filled completely and perfectly. The moment the other person changes a little, or says something that makes you feel bad, you feel the hole, the deficiency: "Oh, he doesn't think I'm worth anything after all." You feel angry, hurt, because the hole is getting exposed. So the dissatisfaction continues because the person is not always filling you holes perfectly, especially if he's wanting you to fill his holes.

With any change, there's a jiggling around of holes. Some holes become empty, some get filled. The person has to adjust, they have to fill their holes come other way, and this usually means they have to deal with some of these holes--feel their presence and maybe understand them.

So now we can understand more why the loss of somebody who has been very close to you, very intimate with you, is so painful. After being with this person a long time, you're so accustomed to the fit, you believe that other person is part of you. Losing the person is losing a part of yourself.

Another factor arises here: when you experience loss and separation you have the possibility of seeing that what was filling you wasn't really you. If you stay with the hurt and the pain of loss without trying to cover this pain with something else, it is possible that you will feel the emptiness, feel the hole, see the hole. then if you allow yourself to feel the deficiency, the emptiness, you may find the essential part of you that will really fill the hole, from the inside, once and for all. It's not even filling it is just the elimination of the hole and the identifications with the deficiency. In that way, you regain part of yourself. You connect with the part of your essence that you lost, and that you thought only somebody else could provide for you.

It can be very painful. Most people feel a loss of self-esteem when a relationship ends, which is why I;m using this particular example of value. But if you say with that feeling and pay attention, and ask yourself, "How come I feel so worthless, how come I feel like a nothing just because that person isn't around any more? Why do I feel I'm so much less valuable?" IF you stay with that feeling without trying to fill it, and just pay attention and try to understand it, then you will experience the deficiency and the holes. If you understand that deficiency and its source, you might even remember the actual event or pattern of events that brought about your loss of value.

A hole is usually filled with part of our personality that has the memory of what was lost, the memory of the situation that brought about the loss, the memories of the hurts and conflicts. We have to go through the hurts at the deepest level, get close to the hole itself, and then we will see the memory of what was lost. When we see the memory of what was lost, the essence that was lost will start flowing again.

So any deep loss is an opportunity to grow, to understand more about yourself, to experience holes you believe can only be filled by someone else. But people usually defend like crazy against feeling loss deeply. This defense is primarily to avoid feeling the hole. People don;t know that the hole, the sense of deficiency, is a symptom of a loss of something deeper, the loss of essence, which can be regained. They think the hole, the deficiency, is how they really are at the deepest level, and that there is nothing beyond it. They think something is wrong with them, something is basically wrong. The feeling that something is wrong is an unconscious knowledge of the presence of the hole, and people will do anything not to feel that hole, really feel the deficiency. they believe that if they get close to the hole, it will swallow them up. If their work is bringing them, for example, to the hole of love, they might feel threatened by a devastating loneliness, emptiness. Other holes will bring up what feels like a threat of annihilation. No wonder they don't want to go near it! But in our work we have seen a surprising thing: when we stop defending against feeling a hole, the actual experience is not painful. We simply experience empty space, a feeling that ere is nothing there--but not a threatening nothingness--a spaciousness, an allowing, This spaciousness allows essence to emerge, and it is essence and only essence that can eliminate that hole, that deficiency from the inside.

You might have anger as a result of a deficiency, especially as a defense against feeling a hole. Most feelings, most emotions, specifically those that are automatic and compulsive, are the result of holes. When there are no holes, there are no such emotions. What are these emotions? There's sadness, there's hurt. There's jealousy, anger, hatred, fear. All of these are the result of holes. If you have no holes, you don't have any of those emotions. You have only essence. That;s why such emotions are sometimes called passions or false feelings, or pseudo-feelings.

Our whole society is set up to teach us that we should get our value, from the outside. We talk about how wonderful it is to do things for other people, or to fall in love, or to have a meaningful profession--things like that. Society is arranged in general for people to fill each other's holes. Civilization as we know it is a product of the false personality. It is the product of the false personality, and it is the home of the false personality. IT is what sustains and nourishes the false personality.

We can sometimes feel the quality of iron in our own defenses: the harness, the determination to protect ourselves. So this is one way of viewing the present time--all defenses against holes.

Allowing ourselves to tolerate the holes and go through them to the other side is more difficult now because everything in society is against this. Society is against essence. Everybody around you, wherever you go, is trying to fill holes, and people feel very threatened if you don't try to fill yours in the same way. When a person is not trying to fill his holes, it tends to make the people feel their holes. So it's becoming more and more difficult to do the work. And the work is also becoming more and more needed.

That is why it is important to have a community of people involved in the same task of self-understanding. You have the support of many people who are allowing themselves to feel the holes instead of filling them. It is very difficult, almost impossible, for one person alone to do this because everything in his environment is against it.

Many people earn their livings by filling other people's holes. Many businesses are there to fill people's holes. I have no moralistic attitude about filling holes. I don't think it is a sin, that it is bad. I don't think you should feel guilty about it, or punish yourself about filling holes. Sometimes you fill your own holes, sometimes you fill someone else's holes. So what? let;s talk about understanding things. I'm not building a religion around holes. You can look at everything you do in terms of the work, in terms of holes or filling holes. You will see that all the time you're either filling a hole or you are tolerating a hole, or you are experiencing the real thing that was lost. This is going on all the time, at every moment. In this work the holes you deal with get bigger and bigger.

First, the smaller holes, and then the bigger holes, until you get to the biggest hole of them all, which is the loss of everything. It's called death. Right? When you die you lost everything. You have to accept that hole to get back everything. So one of the last holes is the loss of the body itself. To experience physical death is exactly like that. You experience a big hole, a black, dark, empty hole.

You try to fill that hole with the body. If you let the body go, at least in your consciousness--I don't necessarily mean that you die physically--then you'll suddenly see the complete you, which is really you, the one you usually try to substitute your body for. Most people think they are their bodies.

One of our deepest identifications is with the body. That is one reason why we have desires and cravings for physical pleasures, pleasures of the body. I think the basis for the deepest craving, the craving for physical pleasure, is hole. The hole is the absence, the cutting off from the real pleasure, the essential pleasures.

Of course, nobody wants to believe that one. "If I let go of that one, what will be left for me? If i don't eat cookies twice a day, have sex every other day, and do this and that, how am I going to enjoy myself?" But this is one of the last holes to be explored. In the beginning we need to experience the holes that have to do with love, compassion, value, strength, will, peace--things that we try to get from the outside.

In your life, you do whatever you do, and you just study what's happening. That's all you need to do, study it to understand it. One of the ways the work was done in the past was to retire into a monastery to renounce everything totally. The point was not really to reject everything, it was an attempt to experience holes. In time, of course, such practices took on a moralistic, religious sense--the idea that it's bad to have certain kinds of external contact. The purpose of such retreats is to allow yourself to feel the holes and not fill them, to see what they are all about.

One more thing about the theory of holes. As i said, the holes get produced when you're a child. When you're a baby, you have no holes, you're complete when you are born. As you grow up, because of your interactions with your environment and certain difficulties your encounter, you get cut off from certain parts of yourself at different times. Every time you get cut off from a certain part of you, a hole manifests. the holes then become full with the memory of the loss and the issues around the loss. after a while, you just fill in the holes. what you fill the holes with are the false feelings, ideas, beliefs about yourself, strategies for dealing with your environment. These fillers are collectively called the personality--the false personality, or what we call the false pearl.

So the false personality, as you see, is a result of losses of parts of the self. but after a time, we think that is who we are. everybody thinks thats who they are, the fillers. the false personality is trying to take the place of the real thing. Thats why we do a lot of work here on understanding our personalities. our work leads to studying the history of the development of our false personality until we are finally able to experience the memory of the situation in which the particular hole formed. in this way you can regain your essence, part by part, until your complete.

As you see, I'm saying these things in a very general way. We can be much more specific. We can look at each quality, see when it is lost, and what results. Sometimes combinations of qualities get lost. for instance you might lose your strength, you will, and your love, and these would be a composite hole. so a whole psychological perspective can be built around this understanding--the psychology of holes which is the psychology of the personality, of the false pearl.

the false personality is mechanical in the sense that, after you lose an essential quality of yourself and there is a hole, your personality automatically tries to fill it with false qualities from the outside. then that part of your false personality is formed. the actions of the personality are two pronged. one prong is always attempting to avoid the hole, to avoid pain, and to experience pleasure. this is automatic. and the other prong of the personality is always attempting to fill the hole as soon as something happens to expose it. this is also automatic. we need to observe ourselves closely. most people are so identified with their attempt to fill the holes that they don't think its possible not to do it. A person who is trying to get someone to love them doesn't know there is an alternative. he thinks thats the best thing to do, and cant imagine anything else. most people never questions these things. its so mechanical, they say that the way they are, that is reality, thats how things are. when your feeling low, get somebody to praise you. what else can you do? if your feeling unlovable, find somebody who likes you. people,e usually identify with these patterns so completely that there is no chance of change. to begin to work on such a pattern, first you need to observe it happening over and over, and to see that it doesn't work, really. people generally don't come to work here until they have begun to see that their way doesn't work. otherwise, they don't come. they believe in their strategies so completely that they think if they just get better at it and do it a few more years, it will work. maybe they haven't found the right person, or they haven't found the right situation yet. if they just make a little more money, things will work out.

it takes a long time for people to understand this, that trying to fill the hole doesn't work. even as your listening to me now, your trying to fill holes through some understanding. some of you are already believing that the words I'm saying are going to fill the holes. "If I just know what the story is, then things should be better." What I'm saying is effective if your starting to feel your holes, which means if your starting to feel your emptiness. if your filling it with words or ideas, your just filling it again. I think this perspective helps us to see an overall view of society. The hole is taking over! Most of the work of our society is attempting to fill holes in people.