Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.
—PEMA CHÖDRÖN
“I am not the Farmboy! I am the Dread Pirate Roberts!”
Forgive me. I think I yelled that out loud, and for the second time, late one Saturday night. The first time, I was addressing my friends, but the second, I was addressing nothing but cracks in the sidewalk, tossed around by jet lag and heartbreak. It was now three years later, the summer of 2011. I was standing outside a wine bar.
Have you ever looked back and wished everything had been simpler for you? The nostalgic quest for simplicity is a common feature of the best escapist fantasies. Everything would be simpler if the Farmboy could just be the Farmboy forever, remaining in a state of naïveté about his true love. If only the Farmboy had a trust fund, he wouldn’t ever have to leave Florin. Everything would have been simpler if the Buddha—who did have a trust fund, so to speak—had never left his father’s estate, if he had only been happy and awake right where he was. But the Buddha had a lot to learn about the mind and heart, and the Farmboy has a lot to learn about true love. Westley leaves home believing he has already found his true love, that their relationship will be safe until his return. He thinks he must leave to find his fortune in order to marry. In reality, he leaves home to have his ideals of romantic salvation compassionately destroyed somewhere out there on the high seas.
Westley’s ship is captured by the previous Dread Pirate Roberts, and his warrior skills must be honed, sharpened by his fear of death and the abysmal probability of never seeing Buttercup again. He trains under the guidance of what can only be called, in Buddhist terms, a pirate guru. This brutal teacher tells him every night for a year, “Good night, Westley, good work. Sleep well. I’ll most likely kill you in the morning.”
After parting ways with Buttercup of the East Village, I was set loose for five years, about the same amount of time Westley was at sea.1 A lot happened during those five years. I watched The Princess Bride more voraciously than ever before, and even read the book twice. One minor event that complicated my dating life ever so slightly was being named a senior teacher in a Buddhist lineage at age thirty-two, in 2010. This appointment didn’t affect my ability to date: my tradition has no celibacy requirements. In fact, the Shambhala teachings emphasize our need to be fully engaged in the society we live in.
Perhaps a small handful of contemporary practitioners will choose a celibate path. The most famous teacher in our modern lineage, Pema Chödrön, is a nun. Personally, I take to heart as much as I can the credo of my lineage: “Awake in the World.” I measure the success of my practice by how well I am able to work with all the varied aspects of life in society. I have always believed that the fullest expression of a spiritual path involves a balanced engagement with the world. Career, art, culture, politics, friendship, sexual relationships, partnership, and family—all must become part of the journey. A classic Tibetan slogan says simply, “Train without bias in all areas.” This meant, Sanskrit title or not, that I had to be as brave as any other Farmkid while sailing my little rickety ship upon the pirate-infested seas of modern dating.
During the five years between 2008 and 2013, I spent a great deal of time traveling. I taught Buddhism in what a friend jokingly refers to as the “Kale Belt,” the wellness-oriented cities where a good kale salad and meditation have both seen skyrocketing popularity in recent years. Annually visiting places like Seattle, Portland, Austin, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, I had the opportunity to talk to lots of folks, heart to heart, about their spiritual paths.
There are many different methods for teaching Buddhism in both group and private settings. At its core, teaching is always a dialogue. (The original teachings of the Buddha, called sutras, are spontaneous dialogues between curious students and an open-hearted teacher.) Therefore, when I’m not guiding a form of meditation practice, teaching mostly means listening, listening to a lot of people open their own hearts and minds about what it means for them to perceive, feel, and relate to others. During these years, I spoke with thousands of people about how to bring love and heartbreak to the spiritual path. Romantic love remains painfully mysterious to most, if not all of us. When I was home in New York during this time, I dated. I discovered one crucial fact from my own experience and from working with so many others around the country. Whatever the current state of our romantic lives, we are all heartbroken—and that’s not a problem.
Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche spoke frequently about the “genuine heart of sadness,” an awakened tenderness with which we may have lost touch. In our society, sadness is often viewed as a deficiency, a malfunction of the heart valve, a leak in the plumbing of our tear ducts. We don’t give ourselves permission to be soft. We are often taught that sadness is a rupture that needs to be either hidden or fixed. But in the Shambhala teachings, our ability to access this “heart of sadness” is seminal to awakening humanity from its mostly dead state. For the warrior of compassion, sadness is no problem at all, no affliction, no mark of depression. Instead, it is equal parts vulnerability and strength, a woundedness that comes from allowing our experiences to touch us, and a strength that comes from embracing, rather than defending against, the very vulnerability that intimacy uncovers. Genuine sadness is the real power source of every human connection: It is sad to fall in love, it is sad to fall out of love, sad to gain people’s attention and then to lose it again. It is always sad to lose friends, lovers, and family. It is sad to watch children grow. It is sad to mourn someone’s passing. And it is sad—oddly, poignantly, intensely sad—to lose a lover, not to the grief of death, but to the irreconcilabilities of relationships. There is nothing quite like breaking up—the pain of losing someone who remains alive and healthy, existing in the same world as you do. All this sadness is knitted into the fabric of the human condition. When you accept that sadness is a part of any relationship, it can begin to soften and sharpen you simultaneously. Sadness is your greatest strength.
It turned out that all of us interested in mindfulness—in the Kale Belt and beyond—were somehow heartbroken, though each heartbreak was unique. The etchings of wounds and insights were seared upon individual hearts so distinctly. We all shared a longing for meaningful connection. For many of us, this meant pursuing romance and partnership, and grappling with the complexities of that tumultuous pursuit.
During these same years, I was asked to officiate a series of weddings for friends and students, guiding them through ceremonies we co-created, usually a contemporary Buddhist (or, more accurately, Buddh-ish) ceremony that was a spiritual mashup: an homage to the couple’s wishes to support each other and their familial lineages without a traditional religious ritual. Each time I officiated, I felt partly to mostly fraudulent because I was supposedly guiding the couple into a practice of relationship that I hadn’t yet successfully taken on for myself. I, unfortunately, was no impressive clergyman. Not even close.
During this time, I became increasingly confident that spiritual teachings that suppressed or otherwise bypassed the human experience of desire were useless, perhaps even harmful, for my own journey, and therefore meaningless to pass on to fellow travelers on the path. When I was home in New York, I loved to see my friends. Luckily, I had some great Fezziks and Inigos in my life, both male and female. Their trust, generosity, and inspiration kept me sane on the path of teaching. My closest friends were good at undercutting my attempts at profundity with playful jabs. They helped me take on the challenge before me: to guide others down a profound path while still taking a “no big deal” approach to life. This mixture of profundity and no-big-deal-ness is the whole point of Buddhism.
Mindfulness asks that we cherish our moment-by-moment experience, treating each Tuesday morning and Saturday night alike as extra-ordinary. The challenge of awakening in day-to-day life is to treat both the holy and the mundane aspects of life as equally sacred. For me, this extra-ordinariness was hard to find alongside the subtle, often invisible shift in perception of those around you that comes with having a fancy Sanskrit title attached to your name. My best friends were priceless at keeping me grounded.
One summer Saturday night in 2011, I had just arrived home from the West Coast when I met up with a few Fezziks. We drank wine. Two of us were licking romantic wounds, lamenting more ships lost upon the high seas of dating. For me, another Buttercup litmus test had recently failed, the closest I had come to finding her in the three years since Buttercup of the East Village and I parted ways. This time, I had failed someone else’s Studmuffin exam. Or maybe it wasn’t me; perhaps bad timing, that true breaker of hearts across the eons, had failed us both. Now my friends were there to support me. I treated them to a diatribe explaining why I was no longer naïve about relationships. “Seriously, you guys,” I claimed, “I’ve finally gotten over my story line.” My rant was grounded in all kinds of Buddhist rhetoric, and in a frustrated critique of traditional Buddhism’s failure to offer specific tools for navigating modern romantic relationships. “That’s exactly what you should be writing about!” my friend said. She commented on how many classic Buddhist teachings focused on compassion in ways that were psychologically transformative, but how few classic teachings focused on applying compassion to, you know, specific relationships.
Classical Buddhism’s universal approach is, we decided, its greatest strength as well as its greatest weakness. The more general a teaching becomes, the more universal its reach, yet the harder it becomes to discern the application of that teaching to a specific life experience. Compassion for all beings, check. Compassion for this being sitting across the table from you when you realize this second date isn’t going well? Where is the ancient text that describes how to handle that situation? To ghost or not to ghost, that is the question.
We had to honor the teachings, but we agreed that we had to figure out this whole modern relationship thing by ourselves. Of course, a teacher or mentor or therapist might help, but they couldn’t go on the date for us. Teachers couldn’t fight duels of the heart for us. That evening, to keep my friends’ attention, like the dork I am, I referenced The Princess Bride. I compared today’s return to Brooklyn from the western Kale Belt to the Farmboy Westley’s returning to his native country of Florin, not as a baby-faced serf, but as an accomplished pirate. Like a Buddhist master, the Man in Black was no longer fooled by appearances, no longer lured by shiny surfaces. He had found his edge, his precision. His mind was sharp, and please pardon my Sanskrit, but no one could fuck with the Man in Black—not Sicilians, not evil princes, and especially not manipulative sirens named Buttercup, temptresses whom the Man in Black had once mistaken for his true love. I was no longer naïve, either, I said. “I’m not the Farmboy anymore!” I exclaimed after a few glasses of wine, raising eyebrows and giggles at the table next to ours. “I am the Dread Pirate Roberts!” It was a night of lightheartedness, just what we all needed.
Eventually my friends left, but I wasn’t quite ready to go home. I was jet-lagged, a state that made me simultaneously drunker and more awake than I intended to be at this hour. I knew my parameters well, and I knew how to keep myself safe. But my heart wobbled out the door.
I walked out into an August night and felt the muggy air, content to be alone, wandering, observant. It was after midnight on a Saturday in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Bars were crowded; people were drunk, sloppy, and loud, grasping after cigarettes and each other. Williamsburg had once again been transformed into the realm of hungry ghosts.
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 the hungry ghost has not learned any of the contemplative techniques related to befriending oneself in solitude. Instead, you chase nostalgia—objects, people, or places that remind you of something that once upon a time gave you a fleeting feeling of satisfaction. And while chasing ghosts, you become one yourself—emaciated, depraved, and cynical about the possibility of true love.2 To paraphrase Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, it is a fool who believes that he can possess his own projections, and the hungry ghost is the most destitute of all fools.
Without trust in basic goodness, we hope for either a temporary savior (to take the edge off our resistance to ourselves for a moment) or a permanent one (to save us from dealing with the mind in general). We grow increasingly susceptible to myths and holograms, the Buttercups draping themselves in red flags. This kind of hope, insofar as it makes us believe that any permanent saviors exist, is always illusory.
Going Beyond Hope: The True Meaning of Emptiness
THE WORD EMPTINESS DESCRIBES A highly misunderstood body of Buddhist teachings. There are many ways to describe emptiness in philosophical terms, and none of them has to do with emotional black holes or the destruction of your sense of purpose. More than a metaphysical term, emptiness is best seen as an embodied experience, a glimpse of spaciousness in the midst of activity, an availability to the moment that comes about from the release of a rigid story line.
Now, a story line is something distinct from a story. Stories have a certain truth, although the perspective from which they are told alters their meaning. Each life has a story, and parts of my story are being relayed here. Your life has a story. It’s not indulgent to tell your story; it is one of the main ways we pass along to one another the insights of human culture. We each experience a series of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings, events and relationships, and we share those, trying to connect and offer an insight or two.
A story line, however, is something very different. A story line is a recurrent thought that only exists in your mind, waiting to be uncovered and confronted in meditation. It’s a cyclical narrative, a groove of thought stuck on a synaptic loop. Story lines create confining structures for how we think, act, and make choices. These loops tightly filter what we perceive, and also how we allow ourselves to experience other people’s stories.
Examined and categorized by ancient philosophers from the Middle Way school, story lines usually have one of two basic structures, either of salvation (hope) or nihilism (fear). Often, a story line contains a bit of both. It’s almost as if story lines are made of mental Velcro, of a stickiness that confines the flow of thoughts to a familiar direction. Looking for a solid point of reference, our story lines miss the fluidity of reality by latching on to one of these two extremes. Each story line overly invests in either hope or fear, reaching for some certainty to cling to, whether that certainty seems positive or negative, blissful or torturous. “If I get this job, I can afford a new apartment, and then I’ll be all set” is an example of wishful thinking. Any story line of salvation ties permanent happiness to impermanent (and uncertain) causes and conditions. Anytime our worthiness as a human being has a big “if” attached to it, we are caught up in a story line of hope, an expectation that only disempowers us.
On the other hand, there are our fearful story lines, based on cynicism. Cynicism makes us fall into the trap of overgeneralizing painful and disappointing experiences from the past. “All politicians are corrupt” or “Nobody is ever going to look upon me the way Buttercup of the East Village once did” are examples of story lines based on fear, both of which have been synaptic loops caught within the mind of yours truly.
When pop culture leads us astray, its narratives cause whole groups, even whole generations, to invest in fixated story lines of hope or fear. Our rom-com culture gives us one huge aspirational story line, an undercurrent regarding what we idealize in romantic relationships. The rom-com story line usually involves the combination of hope for soul mate salvation and reaching for a higher social status in a competitive and unsafe world.
At the other extreme, our culture has many cynical story lines. We all know the cynic. The cynics arrive with their middle fingers blazing at all the naïve romantics out there. The cynic would rather vomit than hear someone regurgitate another soul mate fantasy. The cynic doesn’t believe happiness is achievable, and says things like “Love is a fabrication of capitalism,” while hosting anti-Cupid poetry readings in a basement on February 14. Cynicism often feels like a smarter bet than naïveté, because at least the cynic has started peeling away the falsehoods of wishful thinking.
For that hopeful Farmkid in all of us, the story line always involves an idealization of safety. Salvation story lines include one awakened feature: admiration. Admiration is the most crucial aspect of desire for another person because it brings you closer to basic goodness. In admiration, you see the good in another person and long to incorporate their qualities and presence into your own world. If you take that admiration too far, you end up mistakenly believing that your own worth relies on claiming ownership of that other person’s goodness, their power. “If I just got this good situation” becomes “If I just got this good person,” and you forget the essential fact that you can’t take possession of another person’s goodness. This is why you were attracted to that person in the first place, not to possess them, but to connect with another being who has a different perspective on the world. If you are going to avoid the hungry ghost realm in dating and partnership, your story line of salvation must be offered up for annihilation. My own dating life was a beautiful, uncomfortable practice of repeatedly watching my hopeful story lines perish.
I’ll Most Likely Kill You in the Morning
“GOOD NIGHT, WESTLEY. GOOD WORK. Sleep well. I’ll most likely kill you in the morning.”
The Farmboy encounters a truly brutal guru, the previous Dread Pirate Roberts, who isn’t the original Dread Pirate Roberts, just as there is no original warrior of compassion. The narrative of a brutal teacher is a classic one, woven throughout both Eastern and Western tales.3 Despite his tough-love approach, it’s pretty clear that Westley’s guru cared for him deeply, because he surrendered his title and ship to Westley once the Farmboy’s training was complete. With a good teacher, a lifelong practice of meditation can feel similar. If you meditate enough, if you drop your various story lines (both large and small) enough times, you begin to see impermanence more clearly. Impermanence is never a particularly comfortable truth to observe, at least not at first glance. Dropping even a small story line always feels a bit brutal, often like death itself. This is why meditation is never quite as pleasant as we “hoped” it would be. First you see the impermanence of perceptions and sensations, then you see the impermanence of the body, then the impermanence of thoughts and emotions, and eventually you begin to see the impermanence of your view of reality. The more you practice, the more it seems that there is this internal voice, full of humor and gentleness, saying, “Thank you for meditating. Good night now. Sleep well. I’ll most likely kill your ideas about reality in the morning.”
Luckily, my human teachers have always been exceptionally kind. I’ve never experienced even a moment of “brutal guru.” They’ve never put me through any gauntlet where I feared my own death, although they do expect that I practice consistently, and that I keep showing up fully for the trainings to which I have committed myself. Without a doubt, my own master of brutality, the one who forced me to work with my fear of annihilation, was not a person but an activity. My own brutal guru was dating.
When you drop the story line of perceived hopes, you grow deft and skillful, because you begin to see the flexibility of any constructed ideology about who you think you need to be. Freed from the Velcro of the story line, you gain more room to maneuver. In the long run, this release will make you more flexible, more confident, and more capable of honest connection. Many of our perceived limitations are due, originally, to the constraint of a story line about reality. So when Westley reincarnates as the Man in Black, it’s clear that his training with the previous Dread Pirate Roberts was incredibly useful. He is no longer the Farmboy. He is a warrior. And that warrior can do lots of things that seem inconceivable to the other characters, simply because he believes he can.
Of course, many profitable New Age spiritual messages make you believe that your story line is the only thing holding you back from success. These prophets of hope tell you that if you change your attitude or adopt a new mantra, everything you want will magically appear for you. We still have to deal with physical limitations as well as the limitations of others, and with the greater limitations of timing and coincidence. Believe me, it is more than just a story line that stops me from being able to dunk a basketball. Dropping the story line that I’m not good at basketball will not make me able to dunk, and anybody who tells you it will is selling something. Dropping my basketball story line just makes me able to show up on the court and see what happens. Given that romance is a game that no one really knows how to play, all you ever have to do is show up and see what happens. Nothing changes when you drop your romantic story line, except your willingness to be present. And if you are willing to be present, slowly but surely, things can start to shift.
When Pema Chödrön talks of annihilation, she is not talking about the annihilation of your body, or the annihilation of self-confidence, or the annihilation of belief in true love. She is talking about the process of a story line dissolving, a very limiting story line called “me.” In meditation, as story lines dissolve with each breath, you begin to feel the indestructibility of the mind itself, the ability of your awareness to accommodate whatever might happen next.
Some mornings in my meditation, I notice some variation on the story line “Today is going to suck.” In any meditation technique, you have the opportunity to submit your story line for a gentle annihilation, simply to let it be, and come back to the moment at hand, opening up to the direct perceptions of the moment embodied in a breath or a phrase of compassionate intention such as “May I be free from suffering.” Story lines, when they become fixations, can turn into self-fulfilling prophesies.
Every time I sit down to meditate, I set an intention to drop at least one of my story lines. Some mornings, I feel clear and present; other days, my practice is plagued by nervous melodramas regarding unfinished projects, the e-mails yet to write, the parade of people I worry will be disappointed by my failures both imaginary and real. Sometimes my story lines include the fear of difficult conversations I need to have. Other times, they are full of regret for yesterday’s missed opportunities or earlier life choices. “I wish I had become a painter instead” is one of my favorite loops of lament. I notice that thought, then drop the story line of escapist salvation and return to the breath, or else come back wholeheartedly to the phrase of compassion I am attempting to generate.
Dropping a story line is almost always uncomfortable. It represents something counterhabitual, a momentary cessation of the mind’s engrained momentum. On a subtle level, story lines offer comfort similar to that provided by harmful physical substances. Learning how to drop a story line is one of the true redemptions embedded in mindfulness practice. When you drop your story line and come back to your senses, an amazing thing happens. You survive. For just a moment, you realize you don’t need the narrative at all. All biological and mental systems work just fine without it. You can survive, perhaps even thrive, without provoking the claustrophobic loop of that thought pattern again and again. In surviving the annihilation of a story line, you gain a few extra drops of confidence regarding your mind’s ability to deal with, and gain useful insight from whatever thoughts or emotions might come visit you next. This ability to survive the death of a story line is your real indestructibility, your awakened mind. Perhaps the best place I have ever found to practice dropping the story line, other than my meditation cushion, is while dating.
Dating Kills the Story Line
DATING IS A LOT LIKE a shared meditation. By showing up to the ceremony of a date with another person and treating it as a practice, you repeatedly let go of thought patterns stuck in a loop. With each new interaction, you get to watch beliefs about self and other rise and fall, rise and fall, and then wither away. If you drop your expectations, dating can be the best arena for witnessing story lines about what you are worth and what you need from another person. Only within their circular context can these beliefs convince you they are so necessary for your survival. When you drop the story line of salvation, you discover the indestructibility of your heart and mind. We call this discovery Buddha Nature. Anyone who goes out on a date would do well to remember the Buddha Nature of both participants.
Here’s how I survived my time dating: I finally came to view dating as a practice, and not just any practice, but the ultimate practice of dropping the romantic story line, my Buttercup myth. Just like in meditation practice, I had to drop my story line on dates and in relationships, again and again and again. Repeatedly dropping the Buttercup story line over time allowed me to show up a little more openheartedly, chancing the possibility of a new connection.
Nothing, and I mean nothing, that happens in the process of dating has much to do with whatever any of us expected to happen. Let’s be honest, from the standpoint of our hungry ghost tendencies, dating is a nightmare. For the hungry ghost, a date is the meeting of two zombies, each attempting to cannibalize the other’s basic goodness, each craving deliverance from the recurrent feelings of rejection and conditional happiness that never seem to land anyone exactly where they hoped. If you are caught up in a story line, then dating is a festival of painful projections.
Each new interaction brings your story line about your own desirability and worthiness right up to the surface. If you treat every rejection and miscommunication as yet another wave crashing against your confidence, you will be swept overboard quickly, drowning in resentment and sorrow. And if your story line includes the toxic and self-torturing belief that you should already be an expert, that you should know how to do this relationship thing by now, even though many of history’s greatest spiritual masters were themselves rendered clueless by romance, then you are going to quickly become a cynic.
Perhaps, in an enlightened society, where human dignity is reaffirmed within more compassionate and caring social rituals, each date would start with a bow, a mutual acknowledgment of each other’s basic goodness. The first thing you might say to each other is “So, this is really hard, right? Let’s try to be decent humans to each other, okay? I promise that I will not hungry ghost on you. Please don’t hungry ghost on me.” Dropping your story line and showing up, opening yourself to the possibility of either connection or rejection, is about the most transformative thing a human being can do.
Return to the Human Realm
THE DESTRUCTIVE GRASPING OF THE hungry ghost realm doesn’t only create metaphorical effects, but also conditions our cultural experience. One of the most powerful ways to understand interdependence is to see how the mind and the outer world slowly come to reflect each other. Human minds, and the shared culture that those many minds create together, are completely interdependent, which is why we never meditate alone. As I write this, stories of sexual assault against women mount, creating a shockingly pervasive “rape culture” that has unfortunately affected many of my own female friends. The hungry ghost culture has also affected many of my male friends in a variety of harmful ways, as we fall prey to the destructive myth that the way to get what you want is through physical or psychological aggression and gaslighting, either toward another person or toward your own being. And then there are all the various manipulations at work in the porn industry.
Even when no physical violence is present, the hungry ghost realm still pervades this world. Romance is widely viewed as a profit-maximizing commodity, something for which to design a new app. Weddings are not simply a ceremony of community, but an excuse for vendors to jack up their prices. At our worst, our entire world has become fooled by narratives of romantic and sexual salvation, crafting a culture that all too often values the myth of possession over the process of connection. Mindfulness is what allows us to bring romance and sexual desire back into the human realm.
I remember wandering the streets of Williamsburg into the wee hours that summer night in 2011, witnessing interactions rather than participating in them. My mind leaned back into a careful observation of a more privileged subsection of the human race, a group that included me. The streets were still vibrant with people, and their passion batteries still had just a little juice left, charges amplified by fermented substances, running on fumes of intoxication. These people were sacrificing tomorrow’s equanimity for tonight’s desperation. Thankfully, some people I witnessed seemed fully content, lucidly present and awake with friends or lovers. Others were still up in their god realms, flirting their faces off within bubbles of bliss, bubbles doomed to pop, because that’s what bubbles do. Some people were in hell, arguing painfully with each other in public, even coming to drunken blows. Some hungry ghosts were salivating, chasing Buttercups, a fantasy that dissolved as last calls approached once again at bars. Maybe some people were chasing the much deeper myth we all chase, the fairy tale that it might be possible to avoid dying alone, stuck with our oldest frenemy, our own minds.
There’s another, brighter side to this sad story, one that coexists with the tragedy of the hungry ghost realm: the true hopefulness of being a human, the possibility of seeing desire as an opportunity to awaken. Real hope lies not in salvation, but in connection. No matter how insecurely we chase ghosts, we are still human, and humans can always return to the present moment and connect with each other. I saw this side of our culture, too, as I wandered the late-night streets of my neighborhood. Many people were thriving in the human realm, celebrating their connections. For many, Saturday night was a way to let go of the fantasies of work and status and just show up, to celebrate with each other. There is no reason you can’t be a warrior of compassion in the field of romance. There is no reason that even Brooklyn, that hipster kingdom, can’t become an enlightened society, too.4
Eventually I arrived at home that night. I felt more clear than ever before that Buttercup had always been a dream. I spread out, by myself, in bed. I slept well, and in the morning I reincarnated, arriving once again into the day. Before I meditated, I opened my laptop and watched The Princess Bride for the nth time, content this Sunday to watch it all alone.