The fundamental need that every single person has is to “fill the hole”. We struggle to name “the hole”, but it exists inside all of us. It manifests itself in different ways for different people, depending on their genetics and conditioning and environment, but it’s the same hole. It’s that feeling that you are irrevocably alone, that nobody truly understands you, the feeling that life is almost impossibly hard sometimes and happiness is, at best, fleeting, often associated with the bottle or the needle or fucking or falling head over heels in love. For others the hole is filled with the need for speed, the adrenaline rush, the feel of wind whipping across their face, or the feeling of risk associated with betting it all on the roll of a dice, a horse, or a hand of cards. For others it’s the feeling that is only satiated by yoga, hiking, riding, church, weightlifting, playing chess or some other activity that tunes out their mind for a while and let’s them lose themselves in the moment. And, sadly, for many it’s the feeling they get from losing themselves in work, particularly sad for those who don’t actually get any genuine fulfillment or enjoyment out of their work, but use it simply to cover up the hole.

So… what causes the hole?

The hole is what happens when we forget our true nature. It’s calling us back to remember who and what we really are. We weren’t born with the hole – it was something we learned as children and perfected as adults.

The hole starts to form when, from the day we are born, our parents tell us that we have a name. Even though we don’t understand the concept of name and identity for a couple of years, the conditioning starts at birth. We are programmed by our parents first, then by society as a whole, to believe that we are somehow separate from the rest of the universe, with bodies and minds and souls and free will and individual responsibility and all of the pressure that those concepts carry with them.

The truth, of course, is that none of these things are true. You are now what you have always been and will always be. You are the entire universe, experiencing itself. The universe is one thing, one entity, and all of the separation that we perceive is merely an illusion of the mind and the senses. Once we understand that our perspective has been misguided, that we are not separate but are, in fact, the entire universe, the hole disappears and becomes… whole.

It’s all a matter of perspective.

Remember that films “Honey I Shrunk The Kids!”? Let’s imagine for a moment that you were shrunk down small enough to fit inside a human cell. You can see all of the organelles doing their jobs, moving about, building new cells and doing whatever organelles do. It might look like each of the organelles was an individual organism with its own sense of purpose and destiny and perhaps even free will. If you zoomed out a level, the cell itself could be considered an organism, being born, creating a new version of itself through mitosis, and eventually dying. So which is the ultimate organism? The organelle or the cell? You zoom up another level and see the human that the cell makes. That human doesn’t care about individual cells. It doesn’t think of them as unique individual organisms with lives and deaths and an individual existence. The human thinks of itself as the ultimate organism, as the only life and death cycle that matters. But of course, if we zoom out another level, there is a planet of humans and other organisms making up the meta-organism of the planet. Zoom

out another level and we see the solar system as a cell, with Sol as the nucleus and the other planets revolving around it like particles. Keep zooming and we see the solar system as a tiny component of the galaxy and the galaxy as a tiny component of the universe.

I know you feel special. I know you feel like you are in control of your life. I know because I used to think like that too. However the truth is far more interesting and life without the hole is much more enjoyable. I’m sure the organelles and the individual cells would think they were special too if they were sentient and self-aware. But being self-aware doesn’t make you any more of a separate entity that the organelle is.

According to cosmologists, about 13.8 billion years ago the entire universe was the size of an atom. Consider that for a second. Everything that has ever existed or ever will exist – all matter and energy across the entire universe – was once compressed down into something much, much smaller than this dot on the page. Does that dot appear to you like billions of things? Or just one thing? Imagine that dot expanded a thousand times in size. Would it still be one thing? What if it expanded a million times? Or a trillion, trillion times? (It still wouldn’t be as big as the universe, by the way.) It would still be one thing. So, too, is the universe, no matter what your senses or your mind tells you.

Zooming back down to cell size again, let’s keep doing and zoom down even smaller. The cell is made of molecules. The molecules are made of atoms. The atoms are made of sub-atomic particles that, according to quantum physics, are really “probability waves” that occupy all of space and time until observed. If you are made of something that occupies all of space and time, what does that make you?

Infinite. Timeless. Without beginning and without end. How does that correspond with your day-to-day reality of seeming to be a body-mind that makes decisions and lives a life with a beginning and an end?

It’s all a matter of perspective. What seems to be is not necessarily what is. The people on my television appear to be real – but I know it’s an illusion. They are just coloured dots on a screen, too tiny for my senses to perceive from a distance. The sky appears to be blue, but again it’s an illusion, caused by the short wavelength of blue light being scattered around the atmosphere. We have learned that these events, while appearing obvious to our senses, are in fact not the truth. The same applies to our feeling that we are special, separate individual entities. It’s another illusion of the senses, not supported by science.

Letting go of this illusion and accepting the truth – that you are the WHOLE universe – will fill the HOLE – once and for all.