hungry ghosts
The Seba library treats Hungry Ghost in 8 passages, across 3 authors (including Trungpa, Chögyam, Maté, Gabor, Epstein, Mark).
The torture of the Hungry Ghost Realm is not so much the pain of not finding what he wants; rather it is the insatiable hunger itself which causes pain.
Trungpa locates the defining suffering of the Hungry Ghost Realm in the structural quality of craving itself rather than in any particular failure of satisfaction, establishing the phenomenological ground for all subsequent depth-psychological deployments of the term.
, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, 1973thesis
so long as we stay in the hungry ghost mode, we’ll never know. We haunt our lives without being fully present. My medical work with drug addicts in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside has given me a unique opportunity to know human beings who spend almost all their time as hungry ghosts.
Maté argues that chronic addiction represents the most concentrated expression of the Hungry Ghost mode, situating the Buddhist cosmological category within a clinical and epidemiological context.
, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction, 2008thesis
Many Westerners require a combined approach of psychotherapy and meditation precisely because the hungry ghost realm is so strongly represented in their psyches. This is a phenomenon that is new to the recorded history of Buddhism: never before have there been so many Hungry Ghosts engaged in Buddhist practice.
Epstein identifies the Hungry Ghost realm as the psychic condition most characteristic of Western practitioners, arguing that its prevalence demands a synthesis of psychoanalytic and contemplative technique unprecedented in Buddhist history.
, Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective, 1995thesis
The mind of the addict is beset by constant worry, soothed only by the addictive substance or activity. The hunger and the urgent drive to satisfy it are ever present, regardless of circumstances.
Maté traces the addict’s perpetual hunger to early developmental programming, connecting the Hungry Ghost phenomenology to neurobiological encoding of scarcity and deprivation.
, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction, 2008supporting
its completion returns us to a state of impoverishment, of unrest, of separateness, desire, or tension. Freud’s description of pleasure elucidates a basic Buddhist concept, namely, that the pursuit of pleasurable sensory experiences leads inevitably to a state of dissatisfaction
Epstein draws a structural parallel between Freud’s discovery of pleasure’s inherent incompleteness and the Buddhist account of sensory craving, providing a psychoanalytic analog to the Hungry Ghost dynamic.
, Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective, 1995supporting
If there is pain, then one will hallucinate pleasure, by contrast.
Trungpa explains the hallucinatory fantasies of the Hungry Ghost as a compensatory instinct generated by pain, elaborating the psychological mechanism by which the realm perpetuates itself.
, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, 1973supporting
The three dominant brain systems in addiction — the opioid attachment-reward system, the dopamine-based incentive-motivation apparatus and the self-regulation areas of the prefrontal cortex — are all exquisitely fine-tuned by the environment.
Maté grounds the Hungry Ghost’s developmental etiology in neuroscience, identifying the brain systems whose environmental shaping produces the biological substrate of insatiable craving.
, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction, 2008aside
Hungry Ghosts: The Realm of Addiction
The title and table of contents of Maté’s work formally identify the Hungry Ghost realm as the organizing metaphor for the entire clinical and theoretical argument about addiction.
, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction, 2008aside