The defensive posture of ego attempts to compensate for the qualities it is missing by mimicking them. Hameed often said, “The ego is not original; it always borrows from the real and makes believe that it is the original owner.” As ego appropriates the true qualities, it falsifies them, and they become limited or defensive. For example, our love is more self-centered, and kindness is a strategy to quell pain rather than embrace it. Fake strength or false will are hardened versions of essential qualities that always have openness but can be sturdy at the same time. The poignant loss of a false quality is inevitable, but working through the associated distortions is the key to unlocking the truth. When we don’t deny the emptiness, avoid it, or try to transcend it, understanding the emotional content associated with each hole eventually opens us to a more clarified sense of spacious emptiness. As false ideas and feelings become more transparent, the emptiness clarifies to a spacious emptiness, such that the hole can form a portal to the essential realm. An area in consciousness swept of history and assumptions about reality is like a window that is open to the arrival of the elixir, with its specific colored qualities of essence. – Karen Johnson, The Jeweled Path: The Biography of the Diamond Approach to Inner Realization, Ch. 9