In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

by Gabor Maté

A barrier for many people when it comes to twelve-step work around addiction is step two, evoking a higher power: {We} came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. The resistance is natural if the Power is identified as the god by whom the child felt betrayed.

“What kind of God would let my grandparents be murdered in Auschwitz?” I used to ask, scornful of anyone who accepted the fairy tale of a good and all-powerful Lord. Like Serena, I thought it was the death of a grandparent that embittered me—but I see now that an even greater loss was the loss of faith within my heart.

“The depressed person is a radical, sullen atheist,” wrote the French psychotherapist Julia Kristeva.1

Early stress is a potent inducer of addiction not just because it impairs brain development and emotional growth but also because it destroys a child’s contact with her essential self and deprives her of faith in a nurturing universe.

“I don’t believe in God,” a Narcotics Anonymous member told me, “but at least with step two I’ve accepted that I’m not Her.”

“When you know yourselves, then you will be known,” Jesus told his followers, “and you will understand that you are children of the living father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you dwell in poverty and you are poverty.”

Even as they speak to eternity, the great teachers employ the language of their particular time, place, and culture. The real wisdom is not in the literal meaning but in the spirit of their words.

Basically, all emotions are modifications of one primordial, undifferentiated emotion that has its origin in the loss of awareness of who you are beyond name and form. Because of its undifferentiated nature, it is hard to find a name that precisely describes this emotion. “Fear” comes close, but apart from a continuous sense of threat, it also includes a deep sense of abandonment and incompleteness. It may be best to use a term that is as undifferentiated as that basic emotion and simply call it “pain.”3

Addiction floods in where self-knowledge—and therefore divine knowledge—are missing. To fill the unendurable void, we become attached to things of the world that cannot possibly compensate us for the loss of who we are.

when I neglect that which is eternal within me, I detach from the authentic source of my strength and lose my voice. That, I find, is how it goes in life.

That, ultimately, is the origin of the addiction process, since the very essence of that process is the drive to take in from the outside that which properly arises from within. If we “prefer not Jerusalem”—the “City of Peace” within—above our worldly delights, we fixate on external sources of pleasure or power or meaning.

is no accident that in all major religions the most rigidly fundamentalist elements take the harshest, most punitive line against addicted people. Could it be that they see their own weakness and fear—and false attachments—reflected in the dark mirror addiction holds up to them?

Our material culture tries to explain even unselfishness as arising from selfish motives. It is often asserted, cynically, that people who act in kindly ways, without any benefit to themselves, are doing so only to feel good. Neuroscience does not support that view: the brain area that lights up as a person performs an altruistic act is not the circuitry activated by pleasure or by the anticipation of reward.

who we are. There is a quality or drive innate in human beings that the Austrian psychiatrist Victor Frankl called our “search for meaning.”

It is no coincidence that addictions arise mostly in cultures that subjugate communal goals, time-honored tradition, and individual creativity to mass production and the accumulation of wealth. Addiction is one of the outcomes of the “existential vacuum,” the feeling of emptiness engendered when we place a supreme value on selfish attainments. “The drug scene,” wrote Frankl, “is one aspect of a more general mass phenomenon, namely the feeling of meaninglessness resulting from the frustration of our existential needs which in turn has become a universal phenomenon in our industrial societies.”

We have seen that addiction arises out of dislocation. The absence of meaning is yet another dislocation that we human beings, spiritual creatures that we are, cannot well endure.

While often expressed as a rational rejection of traditional religious belief, much of people’s resistance to the higher power concept is really the ego’s resistance to conscience and to spiritual awareness, to the part of us that recognizes truth and wants to honor it. The grasping ego fears its own annihilation in bowing to something greater, whether to “God” or to the needs of others or even to one’s own higher needs.

“Each carries within himself the all,” wrote Joseph Campbell, “therefore it may be sought and discovered within.” According to this seminal American writer and lecturer, all heroic myths are prototypes of what is the greatest journey of all, the quest for spiritual truth inside the soul. There is only one story, Campbell showed, only one quest, one adventure, what he called “the monomyth.” And there is only one hero, though he or she may appear at different times in different cultures in a thousand guises. The hero is the human being who dares descend into the darkest depths of the unconscious—to the very source of our creative power—and there confronts the monsters thrown up by the fright-stricken infant psyche. As the hero pursues the journey, the phantoms and dragons all vanish or lose power or even become allies.

Infants come into the world fully present and alive to every possibility, but they soon begin to shut down parts of themselves that their environment is unable to recognize or accept with love.

There are people who are not addicts in the strict sense, but only because their carefully constructed “personality” works well enough to keep them from the painful awareness of their emptiness. In such a case, they’ll be addicted “only” to a false or incomplete self-image or to their position in the world or to some role into which they sink their energy or to certain ideas that give them a sense of meaning. The human being with a “personality” that is insufficient to paper over the inner void becomes an undisguised addict, compulsively pursuing behaviors whose negative impact is obvious to him or to those around him.

“For there is nothing lost but may be found, if sought.”8

The ego’s tragic flaw is to mistake form for substance, surface illusion for reality. As long as the ego rules, we are all like the Hebrews who wandered the desert on their way to the Promised Land, “a stiff-necked people.” We keep rejecting truth, bow to the Golden Calf, and scorn what would save us. As the present state of the planet indicates, we’re not fast learners, we human beings. Each generation must absorb the same lessons over and over again, groping its blind way through the realm of the hungry ghosts. The truth is within, which is why outward-directed attempts to fill in the void created when we lose touch with it cannot bring us closer to the serenity we long for.

Spiritual awakening is no more and no less than a human being claiming his or her own full humanity. People who find themselves have no need to turn to addiction, or to stay with it.