Kayla Weir’s Reviews > In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction > Status Update

“I’m not describing a technique here: it is not what we do that has the greatest impact but who we are being as we do it…
Any person who wishes to make a difference in the life of the addict should first conduct a compassionate self-inquiry. They need to examine their own anxieties, agendas, and motives. “Purity and impurity belong to oneself,” the Buddha taught. “No one else can purify another.” ”

“One of the greatest difficulties we human beings seem to have is to relinquish long-held ideas. Many of us are addicted to being right, even if facts do not support us.”

“Drugs do not make the addict into a criminal; the law does.”

“Addictions can never truly replace the life needs they temporarily displace. The false needs they serve, no matter how often they are gratified, cannot leave us fulfilled. The brain can never, as it were, feel that it has had enough, that it can relax and get on with other essential business.

“There is no such thing as a good addiction. Everything a person can do is better done if there is no addictive attachment that pollutes it. For every addiction—no matter how benign or even laudable it seems from the outside—someone pays a price.”

“ If I’ve learned anything, it’s that I have to be responsible for my own fear of emptiness. The fear is not personal—on the contrary it’s pretty much universal—but I got the void I got, and it’s not going anywhere. When I can recognize that, I don’t make the mistake of confusing it with who I am, or worse, expending a lot of energy trying to make it go away by any available means.”

If genetics ruled our fate, we would not need to blame ourselves or anyone else. Genetic explanations get us off the hook. The possibility does not occur to us that we can accept or assign responsibility without taking on the useless baggage of guilt or blame.”

“We human beings don’t like feeling responsible: as individuals for our own actions; as parents for our children’s hurts; or as a society for our many failings. Genetics—that neutral, impassive, impersonal handmaiden of Nature—would absolve us of responsibility and of its ominous shadow, guilt.