In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

by Gabor Maté

There is a quality or drive innate in human beings that the Austrian psychiatrist Victor Frankl called our “search for meaning.” Meaning is found in pursuits that go beyond the self. In our own hearts most of us know that we experience the greatest satisfaction not when we receive or acquire something but when we make an authentic contribution to the well-being of others or to the social good, or when we create something original and beautiful or just something that represents a labor of love. 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.”

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.

Trauma in the strict sense is not required for a young human being to suffer the loss of essence, the sense of oneness with all that is. 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. As a consequence of that defensive shutdown, says the psychologist and spiritual teacher A. H. Almaas, one or more essential qualities such as love, joy, strength, courage, or confidence may be suppressed. In its place, we experience a hole, a sense of empty deficiency. “People don’t know that the hole, the sense of deficiency, is a symptom of a loss of something deeper, the loss of essence, which can be regained. They think the hole, the deficiency, is how they really are at the deepest level and that there is nothing beyond it. They think something is wrong with them, something is basically wrong.”7 Such thoughts are not necessarily conscious but may take the form of unconscious beliefs. In either case, we develop behavior patterns and emotional coping mechanisms to cover up the emptiness, mistakenly believing that the resulting traits represent our true “personality.” Indeed, what we call the personality is often a jumble of genuine traits and adopted coping styles that do not reflect our true self at all but the loss of it.

Spiritual work and psychological work are both necessary to reclaim our true nature. Without psychological strength, spiritual practice can easily become another addictive distraction from reality.

Therapy strives to make the deficient self stronger by uncovering the sources of a person’s emotional pain and releasing the rigid defensive patterns built up against it. Spiritual exploration ploughs the same ground but is less concerned with “fixing” or improving things than with rediscovering what is whole and has not been absent, just obscured. As Edmund Spenser wrote, “For there is nothing lost but may be found, if sought.”8 What form of spiritual seeking a person chooses is determined by place, culture, belief, and personal inclination.

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.