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 are complete when you are born. As you grow up, because of your interactions with your environment and certain difficulties you encounter, you get cut off from certain parts of yourself. Every time you get cut off from a 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 fill in the holes. What you fill the holes with are false feelings, ideas, beliefs about yourself, and strategies for dealing with your environment. These fillers are collectively called the personality, or what we call the false pearl. So the false pearl is a result of losses of parts of the self. After a time, we think this is who we are. We think we are the fillers. The personality is trying to take the place of the real thing. That’s why we do a lot of work here on understanding our personalities. We study the development of our personality until we are finally able to experience the memory of the situation in which that particular hole formed.

Today we will discuss a fundamental idea used in our work here. It’s called the Theory of Holes. Under usual circumstances, people are full of what we call “holes.” What is a hole? A hole refers to any part of you that has been lost, meaning any part of you that you have lost consciousness of. Ultimately what we have lost awareness of is our essence. When we are not aware of our essence, it stops manifesting. 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, any of the qualities of Essence. There are many of them. However to say we have lost parts of Essence does not mean they are gone forever; they are never gone forever. You are simply cut off from them. Let’s take, for example, the quality of value or self-esteem. When you are cut off from your value, the actual experience is a sense that there is a hole inside that feels empty. You feel a sense of deficiency, a sense of inferiority, and you want to fill this hole with value from the outside. You may try to use approval, praise, whatever. You try to fill the hole with fake value. We walk around with lots of holes, but we usually aren’t aware of them. We’re usually aware of desires: “I want praise. I want to be successful. I want this person to love me. I want this or that experience.” The presence of desires and needs indicates the presence of holes.

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 are complete when you are born. As you grow up, because of your interactions with your environment and certain difficulties you encounter, you get cut off from certain parts of yourself. Every time you get cut off from a 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 fill in the holes. What you fill the holes with are false feelings, ideas, beliefs about yourself, and strategies for dealing with your environment. These fillers are collectively called the personality, or what we call the false pearl. So the false pearl is a result of losses of parts of the self. After a time, we think this is who we are. We think we are the fillers. The personality is trying to take the place of the real thing. That’s why we do a lot of work here on understanding our personalities. We study the development of our personality until we are finally able to experience the memory of the situation in which that particular hole formed. We can look at each quality, see when it was lost, and what results. Sometimes combinations of qualities get lost. For instance, you might lose your strength, your will, and your love, and these would be a composite hole. So a whole psychological perspective can be built around the psychology of holes, which is the psychology of the personality, the false pearl.

When merging love is lost, there is left in its place a vacuum, an emptiness, a hole in the being. Merging love of essence is a fullness – something is there. It is a delicate, soft fullness, a substantial presence. So its loss leaves an experience of absence, a lack, that is acutely and painfully felt by the child… Thus the child learns not to feel the loss and the consequent emptiness. He learns to fill the emptiness, to cover it up, to bury it. He not only relegates it to the unconscious, he actually fills it with all kinds of emotions, beliefs, dreams and fantasies.

…the main islands of self-representations, besides forming the sense of identity, function to fill the holes of essential losses.

We saw in Chapter Three, in our discussion of the theory of holes, that a hole gets filled by a sector of the personality that is related to the lost aspect of essence. We also saw that this sector of the personality is related to its particular aspect of essence by the unconscious memories of the experiences and situations that led to the loss and of the emotions involved in those experiences. In fact, this sector of the personality has in it the memory of the essential aspect itself, and so it is intimately connected to this aspect of essence. Its beginning and development contain the memory of the lost aspect, but the memory is mostly repressed. To remember it consciously involves confronting the painful situations that instituted the repression.

We will see that as each aspect of Essence is lost, a certain hole or deficient emptiness is created. This is then filled by the development of a certain sector of the personality, a part of the personality determined by the particular aspect of Essence lost, and by the specific childhood situation or situations that led to its loss.

Our understanding that the personality of ego is an imitation of the essential person, the person of Being, can be made more clear by what we call our “theory of holes.” This perspective, which was developed in detail in our books Essence and The Void, states that whenever an essential aspect is missing or cut off from one's consciousness there results a deficiency, a hole, in its place. This hole is then filled by a part of the psychic structure that resembles the lost essential aspect. One fills or covers the deficiency with a false aspect in its place.