Every child arrives in this world complete. Not complete in the sense of knowing everything, but complete in their essential nature. The five Lataif — the innate qualities of Will, Strength, Compassion, Joy, and Peace — are all present, all alive, all functioning. A newborn doesn't need to learn how to be. They simply are.
So what happens? Where do these qualities go?
They don't go anywhere. That's the paradox at the heart of the Diamond Logos work, and it's the key to understanding the Theory of Holes — a framework first articulated within this tradition that explains, with startling precision, how we come to feel so fundamentally lacking in the very qualities that are our birthright.
The Mechanism: How a Hole Forms
Imagine a young child, perhaps three or four years old, who is naturally expressing their essential Will — that quiet, grounded confidence that says "I am here, and that is enough." Now imagine that this child's environment doesn't recognize or support this quality. Perhaps the parents are anxious. Perhaps the household is chaotic. Perhaps there is criticism every time the child shows initiative.
The child doesn't think about this — they are far too young for that kind of reflection. But something registers in their system. The essential quality of Will becomes associated with danger, with rejection, with the threat of losing love. And so, gradually, unconsciously, the child learns to suppress this quality. Not to destroy it — that isn't possible — but to bury it beneath layers of protection.
A hole is not the absence of an essential quality. It is the place where we have lost contact with it — and filled the gap with something else entirely.
This "something else" is what we call a compensation — a personality structure that mimics the essential quality but operates from a completely different source. Where essential Will is effortless and grounded, the compensation might be stubbornness, rigidity, or an anxious need to control. Where essential Strength is vital and warm, the compensation might be aggression, pushiness, or a brittle toughness that breaks under real pressure.
The Five Holes and Their Compensations
Each of the five Lataif has its characteristic hole and its characteristic compensation. Understanding your own pattern is not an intellectual exercise — it is the beginning of a deeply personal inquiry that can change how you experience your entire life.
White Latifa — Will
When contact with essential Will is lost, the hole feels like a fundamental lack of confidence, a sense that you don't have what it takes. The compensation typically shows up as either forced willpower — gritting your teeth and pushing through — or its opposite: collapse, giving up before you start, because why try when you already know you're not enough?
Red Latifa — Strength
The hole in the Red Latifa manifests as a loss of vitality, of life force. You might feel flat, unable to assert yourself, or conversely, you might overcompensate with aggression and reactivity — mistaking intensity for real strength. The essential quality is neither passive nor aggressive. It is the simple, clean fire of being fully alive.
Green Latifa — Compassion
When the Green Latifa is buried, the heart closes. The compensation is often a performed version of kindness — people-pleasing, saying yes when you mean no, giving in order to be loved rather than giving from the overflow of love itself. The hole feels like emptiness in the chest, a longing for connection that no amount of external validation seems to fill.
Yellow Latifa — Joy
The loss of contact with the Yellow Latifa shows up as a loss of curiosity, of delight. Life becomes functional rather than interesting. The compensation often takes the form of pleasure-seeking — entertainment, stimulation, accumulation — none of which touches the deeper joy that has nothing to do with circumstances and everything to do with the natural radiance of consciousness.
Black Latifa — Peace
The deepest and most subtle of the holes. When the Black Latifa is buried, there is a restlessness that nothing external can resolve. The compensation is often a false peace — numbness, withdrawal, spiritual bypassing, or the construction of a carefully controlled life that avoids anything that might disturb the surface. True peace includes everything. False peace excludes what it cannot handle.
The Way Back
The Diamond Logos approach doesn't ask you to add anything to who you are. It doesn't offer techniques to become more confident, more compassionate, or more joyful. Instead, it invites you to trace the mechanism by which you lost contact with these qualities — to understand the specific hole, the specific compensation, the specific history that created this pattern in you.
When you see clearly how the compensation works — when you feel the hole directly, without running from it or filling it — something remarkable begins to happen. The essential quality, which was never actually gone, begins to resurface. Not because you made it happen, but because you stopped preventing it.
The work is not about becoming who you should be. It is about discovering who you already are, underneath everything you have added.
This is the invitation at the heart of every retreat, every session, every conversation in this work. Not self-improvement. Not spiritual attainment. Simply the return to what was always here — the essence of who you are.