In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts

DdC · 02-03-2010, 10:07 PM

“In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts”: Dr. Gabor Maté, Physician at Vancouver Safe-Injection Site, on the Biological and Socio-Economic Roots of Addiction and ADD

Dr. Gabor Maté is the staff physician at the Portland Hotel Society, which runs a residence/harm reduction facility and North America’s only supervised safe-injection site in Vancouver, Canada, home to one of the world’s densest areas of drug users. The bestselling author of four books, we speak to Dr. Maté about his latest, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, which proposes new approaches to treating addiction through an understanding of its biological and socio-economic roots. Maté also discusses his work on attention deficit disorder and the mind-body connection. [includes rush transcript]

The Vancouver Experiment By Matthew Power
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2010
Nonprofits like the Portland Hotel Society, which runs Insite, have utterly reimagined the streetscape of the Downtown Eastside, retrofitting pockets of urban decay into a kind of social-services campus for drug addicts and the indigent. "The main goal is creating these environments where people can begin to heal," says PHS Executive Director Liz Evans.

**SageTree** · 02-04-2010, 08:52 AM

Nice

More Dharma explained through Western eyes.

Preta (Hungry Ghost

Quote:

Preta, प्रेत (Sanskrit) or Peta (Pāli), Chinese: Èguǐ 饿鬼, Tibetan: yi.dvags, ไทย: เปรต, is the name for a type of supernatural being described in Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, and Jain texts that undergoes more than human suffering, particularly an extreme degree of hunger and thirst. They are often translated into English as "hungry ghosts", from the Chinese, which in turn is derived from later Indian sources generally followed in Mahayana Buddhism. In early sources such as the Petavatthu, they are much more varied. The descriptions below apply mainly in this narrower context.

Pretas are believed to have been jealous or greedy people in a previous life. As a result of their karma, they are afflicted with an insatiable hunger for a particular substance or object. Traditionally, this is something repugnant or humiliating, such as human corpses or feces, though in more recent stories, it can be anything, however bizarre.

Etymology

The word preta is Sanskrit, derived from pra-ita-, literally "(one who is) gone forth," and originally referred to any of the spirits of the deceased - compare the English use of "the departed". It later became confined to a type of unhappy or malevolent spirit, and as such it was taken up by Buddhists to describe one of six possible states of rebirth.

Description

Pretas are invisible to the human eye, but some believe they can be discerned by humans in certain mental states. They are described as human-like, but with sunken, mummified skin, narrow limbs, enormously distended bellies and long, thin necks. This appearance is a metaphor for their mental situation: they have enormous appetites, signified by their gigantic bellies, but a very limited ability to satisfy those appetites, symbolized by their slender necks.

Pretas are often depicted in Japanese art (particularly that from the Heian period) as emaciated human beings with bulging stomachs and inhumanly small mouths and throats. They are frequently shown licking up spilled water in temples or accompanied by demons representing their personal agony. Alternately, they may be shown as balls of smoke or fire.

Pretas dwell in the waste and desert places of the earth, and vary in situation according to their past karma. Some of them can eat a little, but find it very difficult to find food or drink. Others can find food and drink, but find it very difficult to swallow. Others find that the food they eat seems to burst into flames as they swallow it. Others, if they see something edible or drinkable and desire it, it withers or dries up before their eyes. As a result, they are always hungry.

In addition to hunger, pretas suffer from immoderate heat and cold; they find that even the moon scorches them in the summer, while the sun freezes them in the winter.

The sufferings of the pretas often resemble those of the dwellers in Naraka, and the two types of being are easily confused. The simplest distinction is that beings in Naraka are confined to their subterranean world, while pretas are free to move about.

I'm in no way saying karma gives people what is coming to them, I merely mention this to bring more light to the places this term hails from, besides this "phrase":

Quote:

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, it’s a Buddhist phrase. In the Buddhists’ psychology, there are a number of realms that human beings cycle through, all of us. One is the human realm, which is our ordinary selves. The hell realm is that of unbearable rage, fear, you know, these emotions that are difficult to handle. The animal realm is our instincts and our id and our passions.

Now, the hungry ghost realm, the creatures in it are depicted as people with large empty bellies, small mouths and scrawny thin necks. They can never get enough satisfaction. They can never fill their bellies. They’re always hungry, always empty, always seeking it from the outside. That speaks to a part of us that I have and everybody in our society has, where we want satisfaction from the outside, where we’re empty, where we want to be soothed by something in the short term, but we can never feel that or fulfill that insatiety from the outside. The addicts are in that realm all the time. Most of us are in that realm some of the time. And my point really is, is that there’s no clear distinction between the identified addict and the rest of us. There’s just a continuum in which we all may be found. They’re on it, because they’ve suffered a lot more than most of us.

May all beings be happy.
May all beings be safe.
May all beings be healthy.
May all beings be at ease.

Namaste`
SageTree

02-03-2010, 10:07 PM	#1 (permalink)
DdC Decade Yahookan Join Date: Feb 1999 Location: Santa Cruz,CA,USA Posts: 2,117 Blog Entries: 5 Thanks: 51 Thanked 607 Times in 399 Posts	In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts “In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts”: Dr. Gabor Maté, Physician at Vancouver Safe-Injection Site, on the Biological and Socio-Economic Roots of Addiction and ADD Dr. Gabor Maté is the staff physician at the Portland Hotel Society, which runs a residence/harm reduction facility and North America’s only supervised safe-injection site in Vancouver, Canada, home to one of the world’s densest areas of drug users. The bestselling author of four books, we speak to Dr. Maté about his latest, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, which proposes new approaches to treating addiction through an understanding of its biological and socio-economic roots. Maté also discusses his work on attention deficit disorder and the mind-body connection. [includes rush transcript] The Vancouver Experiment By Matthew Power Posted Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2010 Nonprofits like the Portland Hotel Society, which runs Insite, have utterly reimagined the streetscape of the Downtown Eastside, retrofitting pockets of urban decay into a kind of social-services campus for drug addicts and the indigent. "The main goal is creating these environments where people can begin to heal," says PHS Executive Director Liz Evans.

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