In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

by Gabor Maté

Knowing oneself comes from attending with compassionate curiosity to what is happening within. Methods for gaining self-knowledge and self-mastery through conscious awareness strengthen the mind’s capacity to act as its own impartial observer. Among the simplest and most skilful of the meditative techniques taught in many spiritual traditions is the disciplined practice of what Buddhists call “bare attention.” Nietzsche called Buddha “that profound physiologist” and his teachings less a religion than a “kind of hygiene.” When the Buddha seeks to liberate the soul from resentment, Nietzsche wrote, “It is not morality that speaks thus; thus speaks physiology.” Many of our automatic brain processes have to do with either wanting something or not wanting something else—very much the way a small child’s mental life functions. We are forever desiring and longing, or judging and rejecting. Mental hygiene consists of noticing the ebb and flow of all those automatic grasping or rejecting impulses without being hooked by them. Bare attention is directed not only toward what’s happening on the outside, but also to what’s taking place on the inside.