The following talk is given by Tara Brock, meditation teacher, psychologist and author.

Thomas Stay and welcome.

In Buddhist cosmology, there's a term that I think is really powerful and it's called

the realm of the hungry ghosts.

It's a psychic realm and it's a description really of us in certain states.

The beings in it are depicted with these narrow, narrow necks and these huge bellies which

really are reflecting this endless desire for satisfaction and this incapacity to ever

really be satisfied.

The grasping and addiction that we get caught up in.

So it's really that space of living in that chronic sense of something's missing.

I need something more to be okay.

When I was reminded of this term because last weekend on Saturday night I spent about

15 or 20 minutes walking through a sand's casino in Pennsylvania and you might wonder

what was I doing in a casino.

I was at a wedding and a lot of the guests were in that hotel.

So Jonathan and I decided we just have a sociological experience of our culture.

So we wandered through and the most notable thing to me and it was packed Saturday night

was that nobody was happy.

There was a sense of there was either this intense focus and being pumped up and this wanting

you could feel are this kind of deflation or angry or in some way defeated.

There was very little eye contact possible.

I mean even couples that were there they weren't there together really.

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