This mind of present-moment awareness stands outside the preprogrammed physiological determinants and is alive to the present. “The other mind entity is what we call the impartial observer. Many of us look back puzzled on some emotional explosion and ask ourselves, “What the heck was that about?” It was about implicit memory we just didn’t realize it at the time.” The reaction is not to the irritant in the present but to some buried hurt in the past. The subtle, virtually undetectable nature of implicit memory is one reason it can have powerful effects on our mental lives.”12 Whenever a person “overreacts”-that is, reacts in a way that seems inappropriately exaggerated to the situation at hand-we can be sure that implicit memory is at work. According to the psychologist and memory researcher Daniel Schacter, implicit memory is active “when people are influenced by past experience without any awareness that they are remembering.… If we are unaware that something is influencing our behavior, there is little we can do to understand or counteract it.

This subtle but pervasive process in the body, brain, and nervous system has been called implicit memory, as compared to the explicit memory apparatus that recalls events, facts, and circumstances. “What seems like a reaction to some present circumstance is, in fact, a reliving of past emotional experience. In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction Even our 24/7 self-exposure to noise, e-mails, cell phones, TV, Internet chats, media outlets, music downloads, videogames, and nonstop internal and external chatter cannot succeed in drowning out the fearful voices within.” In fact, the harder the mind struggles to get rid of the pain, the greater the pain.”14 So writes Eckhart Tolle. “One of the main tasks of the mind is to fight or remove the emotional pain, which is one of the reasons for its incessant activity, but all it can ever achieve is to cover it up temporarily. The constant, intrusive, and meaningless mind-whirl that characterizes the way so many of us experience our silent moments is, itself, a form of addiction-and it serves the same purpose. Our consumerist, acquisition-, action-, and image-mad culture only serves to deepen the hole, leaving us emptier than before. Many of us resemble the drug addict in our ineffectual efforts to fill in the spiritual black hole, the void at the center, where we have lost touch with our souls, our spirit-with those sources of meaning and value that are not contingent or fleeting. The addict dreads and abhors the present moment she bends feverishly only toward the next time, the moment when her brain, infused with her drug of choice, will briefly experience itself as liberated from the burden of the past and the fear of the future-the two elements that make the present intolerable.

“At the core of every addiction is an emptiness based in abject fear.

Gabor mate in the realm