The Hole in the Soul

When I’m spiritually asleep there’s always a feeling that something is missing. There’s a hole in my soul that I don’t know how to fill. I try to change my life so that things feel right, but nothing works. If I really pay attention, however, it becomes obvious that I’m longing for love. Without love my life is empty and meaningless.

The Buddha taught that the unawakened life is permeated by a type of suffering he called dukkha. Dukkha is an underlying unease and discontent. An existential SOS that arises from the knowledge of death. A fundamental sense of separateness from others. An alienation from the world. …

This perpetual sense of discomfort and alienation is hard to avoid because it arises from the fact that we are conscious individuals. To be conscious is to be separated off from the oneness of life as an observer of the world. We suffer from dukkha when we believe ourselves to be only a vulnerable human being, which is inevitably distressing. …

Deep down, most of us know that only love can fill the hole in the soul. Only love can set us free from the debilitating dukkha that lurks in the shadows on even our sunniest days. Only love can truly mitigate all that is bad in life and allow us to truly celebrate all that is good.

We all crave love as if it’s rare and hard to find, but there is no shortage of love if we look within to the source of that love. The truth is, we live and breathe and have our being in an ocean of love. And when we understand this we can smile wryly at the irony of the human condition with wise Kabir who writes: “I laugh when I hear that the fish in the water is thirsty.”
_{Tim Freke, The Mystery Experience}