Deflating Hungry Ghosts

Gabor Mate wrote "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts", a book about the struggles of heroin addicts he worked with in Canada. He is a doctor of psychology and yet even he had to admit that he had a strange compulsive shopping habit. When the stress of his work became too overwhelming, he went to his favorite music store and purchased many expensive classical CDs he didn't even need. He just bought them to feel good about himself for a few hours but then he didn't feel so good when the credit card bill came at the end of the month.

An addiction or a compulsive habit is a note to oneself that one has to do some homework and that a lifestyle change is in order. There is certainly a huge spectrum; for some this struggle is about cigarettes, eating or coping with annoying shopping habits; others have to fight life-destroying substance abuse. When you listened to the hardships of Dr. Mate's patients you realized why many of them fell into a big hole. His patients were often abused as children or sometimes simply abandoned by their parents. True therapy for them requires the apparent mission impossible, to discover that unconditional love that we all deserve late in life. 

Dr. Mate's compulsive shopping habit was harmless in comparison. Yet he felt distraught and embarrassed himself. How can it be, he asked, that someone with his academic training could fall into the same trap! He understood his imbalance perfectly well. Buying classical music was his attempt to bring some order and structure in his chaotic world of battling other people's addictions. Who knows, perhaps the solution for him would be to change to a less stressful job. Perhaps the CDs were the price to pay for his saintly mission.

Below I have sketched out the vicious cycle of a compulsive habit or an addiction. The tensions created by the hungry ghosts build and build until the sufferer finally gives into temptation yet again. After an euphoric release of the tension comes the void, the state of emptiness that makes you quite vulnerable to go for it again. But if you somehow make it through the withdrawal symptoms you reach some sort of balance. Unfortunately, sooner or later the temptation comes back. Perhaps it is a stressful situation; maybe some memories trigger the desire that slumbers inside. Your willpower eventually runs thin and you need to find release yet again. A new cycle starts ...

    

                                     Release

   Tension                                                         Void

                                      Balance

Shadow work is different than the commitment to never do it again. It is the process to understand the tensions that hide within you and to release them. Every demon has an authentic demand that appears in distorted form. The heroin abusers want to feel the peace, love and connection during the euphoric high that is so elusive in their real lives. Dr. Mate wants to experience the order and clarity that his missing in his chaotic therapy work. What message have the hungry ghosts in store for you? 

This soul-searching process is quite similar for every spiritual traveler. The objective of the Way is not just about experiencing peace, love and happiness all the time; it is the art of letting go everything that stands in our way of experience God. Hurts of the path, regrets, repressed desires, or the need for forgiveness; you name it. Letting go of psychological wounds requires time, but you can save a lot of time if you accept this phase and stop beating yourself up over it. Start seeing shadow work for what it is, the beginning of the journey back Home. Understand the psychological process that is at work and enjoy seeing the hungry ghosts deflate in front of your astonished eyes.

The Journey Back to the Garden of Eden

It is a biological fact that once you have climbed out of the mother's womb you can't climb back. The Story of the Tree of Knowledge was exactly that. We left our subconscious connection with God and nature and became aware of our own creative powers. Alas, with the gain of powers came a loss of innocence, a break with our God-connectedness.

When we spend all day getting drunk, stuffing our face, having sex orgies, working ourself to death, or maxing our credit card on stuff we don't really need, we in fact try to climb back into our mother's womb. We want to lose consciousness and experience this feeling of connectedness with artificial means. It backfires as we all know and after a brief feeling of orgasmic bliss we feel even more alienated and irritated. Yet, if we spend time in meditation instead, with people we love or on creating things that are meaningful to us, we in fact are going back to that original state with proper means. 

By the way, we are not saying that sex, alcohol, dancing, working hard or indulging in things we care for is not part of the Way. Drowning out the 'here' with the help of artificial means in order to be 'there' is the problem;  meaningful work, celebration and exaltation is the Way! It is a free joining of a Force that flows through you rather than a desire to escape the here and now.

Living in the Now - walking the Tao as we call it - is the experience of finding this God connection that we once lost. The meaning of life is communicated to us when we experience that divine connection just as in the olden days. We experience life and know that it is "good" without getting entangled in the good versus evil battle at all. 

A spiritual path is the journey Home. We have tasted from the Tree of Knowledge and we now create freely in our Mother's garden. Heaven on earth is right here in front of us. Learn to center yourself as the yin and yang of life unfolds and you can experience Her Presence all of the time. 

The Field

I am at the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas in January 2005. At one of the 300 exhibitors booths on the floor of the Sands Expo Center is Tiffany Holiday, a woman who performs in pornographic movies. She is kissing and touching another female performer, and a crowd of men gathers around. There are rules for how much sexual activity can take place on the convention floor, and the two women are pushing the boundary. The crowd engages them to go further.

The other woman leaves, and Tiffany begins to simulate masturbation, all the while talking dirty to the men gathered around her. The crowd swells to about 50 men. I'm stuck in the middle holding a microphone for a documentary film crew. Emboldened by the size of the crowd, the men's chants for more explicit sex grow louder and more boisterous. Holiday responds in kind, encouraging the men to tell her what they like. The exchange continues, intensifying to the point where the men are moving as a unit-like a mob.

Men's bodies are pressed against each other as each one vies for the best view of the woman's breasts, vagina, and anus. Many of the men are using cameras, camcorders, or cell phones to record the scene. It's difficult not to notice- not to feel- that the men pressed against me have erections. It's difficult not to conclude that if there weren't security guards on the floor, these men would likely gang-rape Tiffany Holiday.
(Robert Jensen, Getting Off Pornography and the End of Masculinity.)

Robert Jensen experienced this scene and referred to the excited crowd as mob. Yet, reading about this experience it felt more like a trance. It was as if all the male spectators were caught in a massive dark energy field, and, as the author alluded to, things could have gotten out of control very fast. History is full of scary field stories, like the lynching of presumed criminals or even genocides. Adolf Hitler deliberately created these dark power fields during rallies. The crowd had to gather late at night in massive stadiums, at a time when the will power of the spectator was naturally weakened from the fatigue of standing for hours. After a passionate nationalistic speech he cried "Do you want the total war?" and all they could cry in unison was "yes!"

All these examples are of course dark ones, even though the idea of an energy field of like-minded people doesn't have to. When you go to a rock concert you are caught in an energy field. The experienced artists know that and deliberately manipulate this field. So you could say that whenever like-minded people gather they create a field. You can have economic ones like housing or equity market bubbles, a fashion fad, a shared corporate culture or a community. You could even think of positive fields like a spiritual community, a church or a school.

The field is something you can observe when you are very sensitive and silent.  You can observe the trigger when it touches you and you can feel that your behavior changes as you join a different set of people or go to different kind of place.  When you join a field totally, you can observe that your behavior changes accordingly.  Sometimes you get completely transformed by this field to the degree that you cannot recognize yourself any more.

Say you go to the shopping mall. You feel that impulse to buy, so you end up buying more than you ever need.  When you go home and when you don't look at your shopping bags for a couple of days and open them later, you are in amazed and wonder how you could have purchased so much stuff. As you join the mall you get sucked in by the mood of the like-minded shoppers and the clever store and mall arrangements of the advertisers. Being part of the field happens to all of us. We think we are doing things  out of our own free will but actually are under some kind of spell.  When you are carried away, it is like you are being hypnotized.  No one can force you against your will to join a field but you can be lulled into something in the same  way the guys at the LA Adult Entertainment Expo were.

By Christian and Su Zhen