In the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts, a song

In the Buddhist tradition there's this teaching about something called "The Hungry Ghost" which is a certain way of being or spiritual state.  A hungry ghost is a spirit with a very narrow throat and a huge distended belly; it's always stuffing itself but never filled.  It's a picture of human emptiness and spiritual despair at its worst.

Last year I read a book by Dr. Gabor Maté about addiction, called In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. Maté works in Vancouver's downtown east side, among the most severely addicted population in the country.  In his book, he uses the image of the hungry ghost as a way of talking about addiction.  The addict, he argues, is like the hungry ghost: desperately striving, but unable, in the end, to fill the emptiness inside.

It's a haunting read.  Because Gabor goes on to suggest that in one sense or another, we are all hungry ghosts.  Our addictions are not always as powerful or destructive as those of his patients in Vancouver's downtown eastside, but in their psychology--in terms of what we're looking for in them and hoping to achieve by them--obsessive work habits, compulsive viewing of pornography, impulsive spending, over-indulgent eating and so on are not really that different from the hungry ghosts of the heroin addict.

Here's a Ted Talk he gave a while ago.  Very much worth a listen.

And here's a song I wrote, about my own "hungry ghosts," such as they are:



The ghosts in my head
Are hungry tonight
They haven’t been fed in such a long time

It’s been forty years
And they’re wandering still
With their own empty tears to quench the thirst

Swollen bellies filled with empty dreams
Narrow throats choked with silent screams
Always eating, always empty
I got these ghosts inside of me

The ghosts in my head
Are hurting tonight
Something that was dead came back to life again

They turn wine into water
And bread into rock
Till nothing else matters but feeding them

Swollen bellies filled with empty dreams
Narrow throats choked with silent screams
Always eating, always empty
I got these ghosts inside of me

And it’s so lonely in the realm of hungry ghosts
You can wander round for days
Don’t lose your way in the realm of hungry ghosts
Cause there’s no one there to point the way

Swollen bellies filled with empty dreams
Narrow throats choked with silent screams
Always eating, always empty
I got these ghosts inside of me