In this lecture, Michael McCord opens by polling the audience for a Zen topic and chooses one that surfaces from the room: hungry ghosts. Drawing on the Buddhist image of beings condemned to an endless, unquenchable hunger, Michael presents hungry ghosts as a metaphor for a part of the human psyche that perpetually thirsts for the satisfaction of its desires yet is never satisfied. This thirst, he explains, is rooted in delusion and is itself a major cause of suffering. The hungry ghost thus serves as a mirror for our own craving, revealing how the pursuit of satiation, when driven by illusion, only deepens the hunger it seeks to resolve.