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. – A. H. Almaas, Diamond Heart Book One: Elements of the Real in Man, Ch. 2
There is another reason why when we start perceiving our essence, we start seeing it in other places where it doesn’t exist and tend to idealize and admire situations or people who don’t have what we believe they have. The reason is that when our essence is lost in childhood, when our parents didn’t see our value, didn’t value us for just being there, our own value was lost. The essential aspect of pure, absolute value is gone. A deficiency results, leaving a hole in the place of that loss. When an essential state is cut off, the result is what we call a hole, a deficiency, a lack. We attempt to fill that hole by trying to get value from the outside, instead of seeing that the value was ours to start with and that we were just cut off from it. But there is an even more difficult complication, which is that one way to fill the hole is to make a false value, to pretend you have value when you don’t feel that you really do. It’s too painful to feel the absence of value, so most people create false essence to cover up that feeling of lack. This is what the personality consists of—false qualities of Essence. We call the personality the “false pearl.” Each person retains the memory of what was lost and will try to imitate it, try to act, believe, and feel in ways that are so close to the essential states that after a while the person fools herself and other people as well. Some people do this more than others, and some people are better at it than others. The personality is really nothing but an impostor trying to take the place of Essence. These false qualities of Essence—what we call the crystallization of personality—are what we see in most of the people around us who are considered successful. Everyone else believes they’ve got it made. They appear to have genuine qualities of confidence, compassion, self-assurance, and self-esteem but, for the most part, these are false qualities. Just as these people have convinced themselves that these false qualities are real, they convince almost everyone else as well. – A. H. Almaas, Diamond Heart Book One: Elements of the Real in Man, Ch. 9