This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Wanting and Contentment; Dharmette: Realms (2 of 5): Hungry Ghost Realm. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Dharmette: Realms of Existence (2 of 5): Hungry Ghost Realm; Guided Meditation: Wanting and Contentment; Dharmette: Realms of Exsistence (2 of 5): Hungry Ghost Realm - Kim Allen

The following talk was given by Kim Allen at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on March 04, 2026. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Nice to see so many people coming in. Welcome. We'll go ahead and get started, and as others join, they can just move into our field. So the teachings this week are around this Buddhist set of teachings called the realms of existence. And they are worlds that are created by our emotions and thoughts, by our mind states. And what happens is that we tend to enter and live in that world for a while. That's why they're named this way. And we can observe this in our experience, right? There are views and worlds that we enter into, and while we're there, it's kind of a complete world, and we feel like it's reality. But then later there's a shift, and we're in a different world of some kind, and we can look back and see how we had fallen into a particular way of seeing things. So this is interesting to start observing this in our practice. And so we're pointing to this teaching this week, and we'll have more to say about it in each of the talks.

So today's world, as we're heading into the meditation, is the world that arises from feelings of wanting or feelings of lack. And as before, when we looked at the world of conflict yesterday, we'll see that there's a certain way that this world feels, and we can experience that, and then there's kind of a potential in it to move into a different direction, to shift into a contrasting space that is much better. It's kind of an escape from that world. But you have to see the world to escape from it.

Guided Meditation: Wanting and Contentment

So let's meditate. Finding your posture for sitting, allowing yourself to settle in, closing the eyes perhaps, feeling the body in whatever posture you're in, sitting or lying down. Maybe taking a long, slow, deep breath in and really allowing your lungs to fill, and then exhaling fully. Really letting the lungs empty, maybe even lingering at the end of the outbreath so that we exhale a little more. And then allowing the breath to become natural again and sensing into the balance of the body. So feeling where you're sitting, your weight against the chair or the cushion or the bench or the bed, and just seeing if you can find a place that feels balanced and where there's the least amount of internal muscle effort holding you up.

Letting the body be straight and then softening in around that uprightness, that straightness. Softening the eyes and the eye sockets. Softening the face, the jaw, softening down and letting the shoulders drop. And as the shoulders drop, maybe imagining the neck being able to straighten a bit more. Sometimes I imagine a little space between the very top vertebra and the base of the skull. That naturally straightens the neck a bit. Letting the arms be gentle and then down through the torso. Sensing into the chest area, upper back, softening down into the belly. If you can, even sensing down into the very base of the spine, just allowing there to be a natural curve in the lower spine. So it feels like the hip joints are well seated into the ball and socket there. I find that makes a difference in how well the energy can flow in the body. And softening the legs and down to the feet.

And then just an acknowledgement that bodies are bodies, and there may be pain or stiffness or illness, and none of that prevents us from being present. But we can invite mental ease around how the body is. Not always comfortable. Sensing into the natural sensations of the breathing. Breathing in, breathing out. Just so that we have a clear connection to the present moment of a natural body function. It doesn't matter if your breath is currently shallow or deep, fast or slow. There isn't a wrong way to breathe. Just giving the mind that simple, repetitive, rhythmic object. It helps the mind relax, balance, to just follow along with the breath.

Seeing if we can put the mind into a state where it's willing to receive the breath. So, it's not like we feel like we're the ones doing the breathing, but can the breath just be something that we receive in and out the way you're receiving sounds? The sound of my voice or the sounds around us. Sounds just come, and we receive them. The breath just comes, and we receive it.

And it's natural that the mind will become distracted. Sometimes we notice that we're thinking or remembering. And for this teaching, we'll notice that leaving the present moment somehow has to do with thinking that there's something better. It would be better to think about that thing I need to do later than to just be here with the breath. It would be better to try to ruminate on this problem that I've ruminated on before. Noticing this movement of mind where we create a different world than the one that we're in. We're in the world of sitting here meditating in whatever room you're in, or maybe some of you are even outside. But we leave that for a world that we create where we're getting something. We're going to have lunch later maybe, or being something. We're stepping into our role as parent or friend or employee and thinking about that world. And just noticing what that's like.

And mostly we'll stay with the breath, the body. But if we can, catching that movement of wanting something else. And sometimes we are moving toward wanting something. We want some kind of a sense pleasure. We want some kind of an identity. And sometimes we're moving away. We want not to have something. We're moving away from a painful knee in this moment, or we're moving into a world where we're trying to make it so that we don't have a certain identity. How can I make this person not see me in the way that they're seeing me, for example. Either way, there's kind of a rejection of reality. This moment or how things are is not enough. Can we catch the dukkha¹ around that, the contraction in the mind associating with rejecting what is actually happening?

And sometimes when we are observing this movement of wanting or a sense that this is not enough, we can return to the breath, the body, or the present moment with a renewed or heightened sense of contentment. Actually, it's nice just to be in here with this. Venerable Anālayo² says, "Contentment is always available." At the very least, we can be content that we're getting to practice, that we're getting to meditate. And you sense the settledness, the okayness of this because it's what's real right now.

And sometimes if the tendency toward wanting is persisting in the mind, there's also kind of an aikido move, a shift where we can shift into a skillful kind of wanting. If we're going to want, how about wanting to be free? Wanting to be free of dukkha, of a contracted mind, free of dissatisfaction. The Buddha said this kind of wanting and desire for dharma or for freedom is a skillful desire. It's based in saddhā³, a quality of faith or trust. It still has some discomfort in it, but it is part of the path. It's okay to want to be free. So seeing if you can let the mind rest free of wanting, free in whatever way your mind can become free of wanting.

And in the last few minutes of this sitting, we can use another form of skillful wanting, which is aspiration. We can perhaps aspire that for today or whatever remains of the day, to move through the world with more freedom around our tendency to want things, to think that something else or something more would be better. To free the world from our demand that it be different. What would it be like to have a bit more openness around that mind state, not be pulled around like a bull by a nose ring? How much more available we would be for others. How much more possibility there would be for love and care even for ourselves and also for others. And how much more flexibility we might have around seeing different options, being creative, seeing new possibilities without the limitation of the lens of wanting. We can aspire to try that out and add that energy into this world which so much needs it. May all beings be free.

Dharmette: Realms of Existence (2 of 5): Hungry Ghost Realm

Dharmette: Realms of Exsistence (2 of 5): Hungry Ghost Realm

So this week we are taking on a Buddhist teaching called the realms of existence. And these are projected worlds from the mind and then worlds that we end up living in. And some of them are definitely challenging, definitely filled with suffering, and other ones give us different possibilities than that. And the point is not to avoid all of these worlds in some kind of a suppressive way, but to really get to know how each one of them operates for us. How is it that it gets generated and we get sucked into it? We buy it essentially, buy into it. And my hope in this week is of course to explore each of the five worlds that are described in the Pali Canon⁴ teachings, and also to get a handle on what this teaching is. How does it fit in with other more standard teachings that we might have heard? Because it is related to the Buddhist cosmology, and you're not being asked to buy into it as a sort of the truth of how things are. I know some of us are refugees in a sense of being asked to believe in things that didn't make sense. But I don't think the Buddha meant it that way. It's meant as a teaching and it's expressed in these kind of dramatic or image-related ways because that speaks to us at a pretty deep level actually. So we'll talk about the teaching itself in addition to each of the realms that we're looking at. Yesterday we looked at the hell realm or realms, the realm of conflict, of aversion, of anger, those kinds of things.

And I wanted to read a quote that's from one of the Pali Canon teachings that talks about these five realms and how they're situated in the teachings. And the context is that this is a sutta⁵ that's about the Buddha's lion's roar, his declaration of why he's a Buddha. What does he know that allows him to claim that he is awake? And so one of the things he says in this teaching is that it's because he knows all of the five realms and how people get there. So he says, "I understand hell and the path and way leading to hell. And I also understand how one who has entered this path will on the dissolution of the body after death reappear in a state of deprivation, in perdition, in hell." And then it says the same kind of thing for the other realms: the animal realm, the ghost realm, the human realm, and the deva⁶ realm. So the point is that he understands these worlds. He had to look at them in his own heart before he was awake. And then it said also that he looked at them kind of out in the world when he was having his awakening moment. He saw other beings going through this also. This is the quality of the Buddha that's called loka-vidu⁷, which means a knower of the worlds. And this is what it refers to. He knows—you could think of them as the cosmological worlds, or you could say he knows everything about how the heart operates, everything about how we get bound up in dukkha and how we can get out of it, what paths we're putting ourselves on with certain thoughts and actions. And also that makes him then able to teach how we can make different choices along the way.

So, whether or not you think in terms of rebirth, I think it's clear enough that these different mind states we're talking about operate even within this life. And we cycle through them under various conditions. And this teaching points in general to how reactive emotions drive us to wander from state to state. And this is this word called samsara⁸. Samsara you may have heard like the world of endless turning on through dukkha. It's not that samsara is this world, the earth that we live on, and nibbana⁹ is some other place that we're going to get to go to someday maybe. Samsara is an action of the mind. It's a quality. The verb saṃsarati means to wander. And so samsara, the noun, is the wandering on that the mind does. And it wanders from world to world that it creates. And when we're in a different world, we can look back and see that we used to be in some other world, but we may not see that at the moment. And that's the whole key is we have to see in the moment that we've entered a certain world or a certain view and have a choice about that. And otherwise it just wanders and wanders and wanders cycling through different mental worlds. And the teachings are pretty stark about this. They say there's no discernible beginning to our wandering. You just can't find the beginning point of it. So it becomes then all the more important that we be able to see it. And that's the beginning of the path. So, we're not going to gain 100% full control over these worlds. That's not really in the cards until we're fully awake, but we can start to get a handle on it in a sense, and we can be a little less stuck, a little less obligated to fall in.

So, let's look at today's world. Today's world is the hungry ghost, the realm of the hungry ghosts. Another of the deprivation realms. And also another one with kind of a creative name and image. So this is the realm of wanting, of grasping, of miserliness, of never enough, never-enoughness. And hungry ghosts are pictured as creatures that have huge bellies and tiny throats. And the Buddha often taught in terms of these stark images that are meant to be something that we can feel into. So the idea is that the belly makes them hungry and wanting things, but the throat is so small they can't really get enough food to satisfy themselves. And so this is the world when we're caught in thoughts like, "I don't have enough," "I can't get enough," or "there won't be enough." It's a painful world. Do you know this world? I think we all know this in some way. And it comes ultimately down in the heart, it comes from the root of greed. And greed doesn't just mean gross acquisition. It can also mean lack. It can mean an anxious sense that everything is going to go away. It's also related to the mind states that are associated with addiction. There's a sutta⁵ that says where the Buddha is talking about getting things, and he says for humans even a shower of gold coins would not feel like sufficient wealth. And when I read that I thought about how it's been shown that people who win the lottery are initially very happy—there's a big rise in their well-being—but then after a year or two years maybe they pretty much return to their previous level of happiness before they got the money. And it's like this, right? It's an increase to get something and then there's a settling back into the baseline level we were at before, and it's like this for many of the things that we acquire just maybe in smaller amounts. So we're not stuck with the baseline level we're at, by the way. That can be changed. But the acquisition is not ultimately satisfying for us. So greed and wanting are springing then from a kind of inner poverty. And they in turn construct a world that is shriveled, that is impoverished, and that feels like it's not enough. Now some people who are greedy are quite wealthy and their world looks outwardly like it's very lavish in some way. But if there is operating in them still this hungry ghost mind state, then even a lavish world is hollow in some way or hollowed out. And we can feel when we're moving into that. To be clear, like I said in the meditation, there are healthy kinds of desire. It's not that every time we want something—"want" is a broad word—that it's a bad thing. We can desire or wish for or intend for things that are healthy for us and that can be helpful. We're talking now about a world that is coming clearly from a constricted or contracted place of not enough.

So, as before, the way not to be pulled into this world is to have enough clarity and awareness that we can see it arising and have some choice about whether or not we enter it. And so, we can start to investigate, in order to have that ability, we can start to investigate: okay, what are the patterns of tension in my body that are associated with grasping, with wanting, with anxiety? And what are some of the views that are operating when I'm wanting something? And there's a wide range of them. It could be, "This is the one that's going to do it. If only this were true, if I had this or this changed to be the way I want it, then I would be happy." That's a common one. Or various competitive views: "I need to have more because these other people... I want to have as much as these other people and I should have that," or something. So getting to know these movements in our heart without pretending that they're not there. You know, "Oh, that's kind of an ugly view. I don't really want to have that." But instead to be willing to open to them, open to that world. Okay, what is that like? Let them show up and be seen so that we'll be able to recognize it and properly have compassion for that way of thinking and not have to enter into it.

There's a teaching story about people who have locked elbows such that they can't bend their arms, and they're in a room with a bountiful table overflowing with delicious food. But because they can't bend their arms, they're not capable of eating. And they suffer a lot in that situation. And then one of them realizes the escape, which is not that their elbows become unlocked, but the people realize that they can feed each other, right? And then they have access to all of it. So, one of the hidden gems of the hungry ghost realm is the discovery of generosity. It's not that we didn't know about generosity or that we didn't already enjoy being generous. I know we may have already heard that teaching and understand it and live that way. But when we're in the hungry ghost mind state, if we fall into that, we actually don't have access to the ideas about generosity. We don't value generosity from that mind state. We think that if we give we won't have enough, or maybe the thought of giving doesn't even occur to us, can't enter our mind. So investigating the hungry ghost realm gives us a different perspective on generosity. We see much more deeply how valuable it is. We see that generosity is one of the things that will prevent the mind from falling into the realm of greed and wanting. It's protective actually.

And then there are other hidden gems also. There's the hidden gem of contentment, which we looked at during the meditation. We can feel when there's the tightness of wanting that if we look around and realize that we actually have enough in this moment, it is complete. There's an easing of that contraction, isn't there? And relief of that dukkha. Even if we're dying, when the body is literally not able to sustain itself as it's about to break down, even so each moment could be unfolding with a sense of completeness. It's unfolding just as it should based on the conditions that are present. But even then there can be completeness. This moment is it. This is it. Can we be here for it? For its full completeness in this moment. I'm not saying this is easy. But by noticing lack of contentment, how we want things not just that aren't here, but that can't be here—how could it be different than how it is at this moment?—then we can relax much more deeply into our heart. So I wish you deep contentment, real contentment. A heart that is content is free to be generous and free to be compassionate and wise. So dipping into the hungry ghost realm helps us find the escape from it. And we'll continue on with the other worlds in the coming days. Thank you.