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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 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.

I was reminded of this term because last weekend on Saturday night, I spent about 15 or 20 minutes walking through a sand casino in Pennsylvania.

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.

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 who were there, they weren't there together or really one of them was on the machines.

It was the land of hungry ghosts and it sounds extreme, but when we're honest, we realize that for many of us we live with a kind of non dissatisfaction, a kind of a disappointment that our lives aren't turning out the way we wanted.

There's a sense of never arriving, like we're trying to get somewhere and we're not there.

So this hungry ghost can have a whole range of degree.

But along with that is that we have then patterns, again chronic patterns on how we are trying to meet our needs.

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