Knock, knock, knocking on heaven’s door
I was reading this article on Psychology Today — What to Do When You’re Feeling Empty Inside — and it struck me that what modern psychology is circling around has been directly articulated in A.H. Almaas’ Theory of Holes for nearly fifty years.
Avoid or Fill
The article highlights research showing how feelings of emptiness often lead to impulsive behaviors — overspending, reckless sex, self-harm, or frantic distraction. This makes sense from a neurological perspective: the brain reads emptiness as threat. Its strategy is blunt and binary:
- Avoid the hole (numb out, dissociate, distract).
- Fill the hole (grab for something — food, sex, substances, affirmation).
But both strategies fail. They assume the hole is a defect, something wrong with us, when in fact the hole is an opening. What’s left unexamined is that emptiness itself may be meaningful — even intelligent.
Almaas’ Theory of Holes
Almaas reframed this decades ago: the “hole” is what we feel when we lose touch with an essential quality of Being — love, joy, will, peace, strength. Where essence once flowed, there is now absence.
The ego can’t stand this. It immediately mobilizes to either wall it off or fill it in. But Almaas points to another possibility: curiosity. Not the ego “entering” the hole, as if transformation were a task to accomplish, but curiosity that allows us to relax around the hole and become intimate with the space itself.
Curiosity opens a subtle shift. The hole is no longer a barren gap but a living spaciousness, already part of our true nature. The impulse to fill subsides because the hole reveals itself as more than lack.
Why the Ego Fears the Hole
For ego, emptiness feels like annihilation. If I stop avoiding or filling, won’t I dissolve? And in a sense, yes. To rest with the hole without defenses is to discover that the very structures of ego soften and thin out. What the ego misperceives as death is in fact the return of Being.
This is why impulsivity feels so urgent. Avoidance and filling are strategies to preserve the ego’s coherence. But the cost of those strategies is perpetual disconnection from essence.
From Concept to Experience
It’s one thing to understand emptiness conceptually. It’s another to experience it directly. The transformation doesn’t happen in the head — it happens in the immediacy of felt experience.
Phenomenologically, a hole is not an idea but a texture in your being. It may show up as a hollowness in the chest, a sinking in the belly, a vacancy in the forehead. The mind may rush to label it — “I’m empty, I’m broken” — but the raw experience is subtler.
The shift begins when you set aside the concept “I am empty” and bring gentle attention to how the emptiness feels in the present moment.
- Is it heavy or light?
- Sharp or diffuse?
- Still or restless?
- What happens when you soften around it, without trying to repair it?
This isn’t about doing something heroic — “entering the hole” as an act of egoic agency. It’s about letting curiosity draw you closer. Curiosity relaxes the impulse to avoid or fill. It allows intimacy. And in that intimacy, what seemed like absence begins to show itself as presence.
From Fear to Wonder
The Psychology Today article encourages readers to notice emptiness before reacting impulsively — a valuable first step. Almaas extends the invitation further: don’t just notice emptiness, be curious about it. Allow the space to unfold.
So the real choice is not avoid or fill. The real choice is fear or curiosity. Fear drives the ego’s defenses; curiosity reveals the qualities of essence that were never truly gone.
And here lies the paradox: the emptiness we dread is not our undoing but our homecoming.
John Harper is a Diamond Approach® teacher, Enneagram guide, and student of human development whose work bridges psychology, spirituality, and deep experiential inquiry. His newest book, Nurturing Essence: A Compass for Essential Parenting, invites parents to rediscover the soul beneath behavior. He is also the author of The Enneagram World of the Child: Nurturing Resilience and Self-Compassion in Early Life and Good Vibrations: Primordial Sounds of Existence, available on Amazon.