| ONE DESIRE AFTER ANOTHER Katie is a divorced social worker. In many ways she's well off. She has family money and two well-educated and hard-working daughters. But Katie is obsessed with food and losing weight. In other words, her Hungry Ghost is in charge. Because Katie doesn't recognize its demanding presence, she responds to the Hungry Ghost as if she were an intimidated employee determined to please a tyrannical boss. She eats bags of cookies and cartons of ice cream and then signs up for the latest weight-loss scheme (the all sweets diet, the new mail-order mineral diet). Or she devours boxes of candy and then buys all the new low-fat cookbooks. But whatever she tries or gets is never enough. Her Hungry Ghost makes sure of that. DRY DRUNKS The Hungry Ghost has a cousin, the Dry Drunk. (There's no specific reference to the Dry Drunk in Buddhist texts, but the idea behind it is there.) Instead of trying to compulsively fulfill one desire after another, Dry Drunks compulsively want to control their desires through abstinence or substitution. Instead of attachment to more and more, the Dry Drunk is fanatically attached to self-deprivation or to different kinds of attachments. The Dry Drunk mentality is similar to that of the Hungry Ghost. The feelings are extreme because the level of attachment is so strong. A Dry Drunk previously hooked on sugar, for instance, now avoids sugar altogether. On the surface, it looks like the desire for sugar has been eliminated, but in fact, the desire for sugar is as strong as ever. That desire says, "I still want sugar. Give me sugar." The Dry Drunk responds by saying ,"Shut up and be quiet. No more sugar for you!" The combination of demanding self-deprivation and unacknowledged attachment is often the perfect setup for binge eating. The Hungry Ghost demands sugar because it's what the Dry Drunk insists it can't have. No matter who wins the battle, there are no winners. If there's a binge, the Hungry Ghost gets reinforced to want more and more. If there's no binge, there's usually some kind of desire substitution. Now the Dry Drunk eats only sugar-free foods, like sugar-free ice cream, candy, soda, and gum. But this is no permanent solution. The source of the problem--the attachement to desire--is still in the driver's seat, so there's still suffering. GETTING TO THE ROOT OF DESIRE Keep in mind that the Buddha was a realist. He said, "Recognize desire, and see it clearly. You need to learn about desire and how it works." There are three types of desire, all related to each other. 1. Sense Desires. These desires demand that you satisfy the five sense: seeing, touching, tasting, feeling, and smelling. You crave the pleasure these senses offer; the more the better. If one cookie tastes good, two would be even more satisfying. 2. Avoidance Desires. This is the desire to get rid of what's unpleasant. You pull away from things that cause pain or discomfort. You want to get rid of your potbelly, thunder thighs, thick waist, or flabby arms once and for all. 3. Becoming Desires. With these desires, you want what's missing. You experience a feeling of inner emptiness that you want to fill up, so you want somethiing new like a digital scale or another kind of teakettle that doesn't make so much noise. Once you've learned to identify your desires, the next step is to identify your attachment to them. Attachments are often compared to the roots of a tree. You can cut down a tree thousands of times, but if the roots remain strong and healthy, the tree will still grow back. In other words no matter how many times desires get sastified, new desires pop up to replace the old ones. Similarly, you can cut back a desire, like wanting chocolate, but if the attachment at the root of the desire is healthy and firmly planted, one desire will be substituted for another. The Dry Durnk will find alternative desires and become attached to those. For instance, the Dry Drunk will convince you to eat jelly beans instead of chocolate, carrots instead of cashews, English muffins instead of bagels. It is easy to confuse attachment to desire with the object of it. The common tnedency is to pay attention to what you want. But this is a trap. What you want is endless. It's the Hungry Ghost that can never feel satisfied. You need to see the Hungry Ghost but not get distracted by what it wants. Here are some examples of how to distinguish attachment to desire from the object of it. ATTACHMENT OBJECT OF DESIRE I want to lose weight. I need to keep off the weight I lost. I can't stand how much money I waste on junk food. I love romantic, candlelight dinners. I'm terrified of parties where there is a lot of tempting food Let's look at the first example: I want to lose weight. This desire to lose weigh is not a problem in and of itself. If there's an attachment to the desire to lose weight, the rest of the story is predictable. The Hungry Ghost keeps searching for the perfect diet or the perfect body weight and then never feels satisfied. It always wants more. In other words, whatever you do eventually stops working and you're back to square one again. The key is to see that "I want to" (the attachment desire) and "lose weight" (the object of desire) are two very different beasts. Although it may feel as though these two are inextricably combined, they are not. Suffering doesn't come from the object "to lose weight." "To lose weight" is neutral. It has no power, and it feels no pain. Suffering comes from the feeling of wanting. This wanting is what hurts, not your weight. Suffering is caused by your wanting, and wanting is your attachment to desire. The experience of wanting is to want, and what you want changes ceaselessly. What's more, the number of objects to want are limitless. If the object to lose weight wasn't there, the Hungry Ghost within would want something else. The Hungry Ghost has no loyalty to what it wants, it just wants one thing after another. CONTINUE BACK TO PAGE 1 |