The Dharma of the Princess Bride by Ethan Nichtern

Author:Ethan Nichtern
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The Hungry Ghost Realm … of Dating

ANYONE WHO WANTS TO UNDERSTAND the desperation of modern romance should spend a post-midnight Saturday in a place like Williamsburg. Perhaps more than any other neighborhood in any other city, Williamsburg is the epicenter for the reemergence of the term hipster in the first decade of the twenty-first century, a sweeping identification that thrives on nondefinition. One thing is clear: the term is undoubtedly less visionary than its usage by the Beat generation and many others in the 1950s and ’60s. For the vast majority of my twenties and thirties I have called this neighborhood my home base. Early on Saturday nights, it becomes an arena of hopeful desire, brimming with potential energy, the streets humming and thrashing with anticipation. It’s as if thousands of desire batteries have all been charged to 100 percent and set loose upon one another. Early on a Saturday night, Williamsburg feels like a zone of heroic gods and goddesses. In order to experience its restaurants and bars, Farmkids wander from far-off kingdoms across the seas, places like France and Brazil. They even come from much more improbable kingdoms across two seas, such as … New Jersey. They come to locate their Buttercup or Studmuffin for the evening. Later, as the night wears on into intoxication and shipwrecked wishes, you can watch the streets descend into the realm of hungry ghosts.

“Hungry ghost” is a translation of an ancient Buddhist term, preta. It describes a psychological space where grasping has become an act of exponentially increasing desperation. This mental realm is composed of beings who have no relationship to their own confidence. They live in a Mad Max desert of their own making, chasing mirages, unable to satisfy or even feed themselves. The hungry ghost realm is considered a lower karmic realm. Karmic realms are not physical places per se, but rather collective states of mind. This means that the hungry ghost realm comes about due to a deeply obstructed sense of self. We become hungry ghosts when we lack self-confidence and run out of faith in our own resourcefulness. This leads to a cyclical grasping after the “other.” As the desperation of this cycle increases, it creates exhaustion, a loss of trust in our resilience and ability to encounter what we need. As your reality becomes increasingly unsustainable, you chase hallucinations in a stripped-down desert. The hope of finding anything that qualifies as a long-term solution to dissatisfaction becomes increasingly frustrated, hollow, and illusory. But, out of habit, the chase continues, because chasing is all the hungry ghost knows how to do.

At last, in the particular hungry ghost realm of a late Saturday night out, there is no one left to call, no bar you haven’t been to, no app whose membership you haven’t swiped your way through multiple times. A moment like this, when hope is exhausted, would be a great time to practice loving-kindness meditation, if only you could remember to aim yourself toward caring thoughts. But

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.