If I were to use the word “intoxication,” what would spring to your mind? For most, it conjures up the image of someone who is under the influence of alcohol.
I want to suggest that alcoholic impairment and the befuddlement that accompanies it have little to do with what intoxication really implies. Such impairment is a pseudo form of intoxication.
I just rewatched the original Arthur movie starring Dudley Moore and Liza Minnelli. Moore portrays a drunken New York City multimillionaire, descendant of a powerhouse of business tycoons. He’s known to New York’s in-crowd as a perpetual drunk. However, it’s only when he falls in love with a common working-class girl from Queens that he realizes his drunken life isn’t in the least truly “intoxicating.”
For about 20 years I lived in New Orleans, which meant I participated in a great many seasons of Mardi Gras. This the city just celebrated a very different New Orleans Mardi Gras. The many thousands who normally flock to the city at this time of year stayed home because of Covid.
The dictionary points out, “Intoxicants and drugs are used by some to escape physical or psychological pain.” Rather than being intoxicated with life, Mardi Gras’ drunken hordes join Arthur in imbibing alcohol as a means of avoiding truly what intoxication is really about.
Let’s think for a moment about what it means to be intoxicated. Did you realize that it is connect to our thirst to experience what it means to be truly spiritual?
Psychologist Carl Jung once said, “Alcohol in Latin is ‘spiritus,’ and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison.”
Jung also explained in a letter to Alcoholics Anonymous cofounder Bill Wilson, “Craving for alcohol is the equivalent on a low level of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God.”
In other words, to be thoroughly intoxicated with life is what it means to live a life in which spirituality and true enjoyment of our physical existence are brought together in a seamless whole.
From time immemorial, the enjoyment of our physical life has been denigrated by many forms of “spirituality.” On the one hand we have religions that teach us to despise if not deny much of our physical existence, while on the other to be debauched is hailed as “intoxication.” In both cases, we see not intoxicated individuals, but those who will do anything to avoid ever becoming truly intoxicated. They are in flight from a truly intoxicated life.
Intoxication implies living an existence in which the whole of life is woven into a seamless garment, so that we are fully immersed in whatever we are doing. Excessive alcohol is just one example of how many avoid ever becoming profoundly involved in embracing what it means to be fully present in each and every aspect of their lives.
Medical doctors Christina and Stanislav Grof lament, “Some even describe the first drink or drug as their first spiritual experience, a state in which individual boundaries are melted and everyday pain disappears, taking them into a state of pseudo-unity.” That’s why it’s easier for us to cross sexual boundaries or to say things we wouldn’t otherwise say when we drink much.
When we fail to be intoxicated by each and every moment, sex—which ought to be a celebration of who we are—is transformed into a need and a duty. Consequently, all across the planet bodies are entwining, but there is precious little real connection taking place.
Unlike what happens when we drink too much, which blots so much of reality out, experiencing our own spirit enlivens us. It does this by heightening our awareness. Our attention becomes razor sharp, with the whole of who we are—body, soul, mind, and spirit—attuned to the reality of this moment.
A century ago William James concluded in his classic study The Varieties of Religious Experience, “The sway of alcohol over humankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes.”
When we immerse ourselves in the pseudo experience of connection that either alcohol, drugs, or sex offer, what we are looking for is connection with our own spiritual center. This essence of who we are happens to be the heart of the cosmos itself, and thus the means of connecting to everyone and everything in a heartfelt way. We want to feel connected to ourselves, and through this connection with ourselves to experience being a part of everything.
Being in touch with the spiritual dimension opens us, broadens us, expands us, so that our sense of separateness and isolation melts.
To awaken to our spirit floods us with a powerful sense of personhood. We begin to believe in ourselves to the point that we become absorbed in life, intoxicated with who we are and with everything we are engaged in.
There’s a clue to how we can accomplish this in the Beatles’ song when they sing, “I wanna hold your hand.” Holding hands is a symbol. It pictures our need for closeness to one another—not in a grasping or controlling way, but in a way that celebrates and enhances who each of us is as a unique individual.
What if we were to take every aspect of our lives, uniting them as if the whole of life is where the spiritual dimension is playing out in a revelatory manner, so that our material existence becomes the unfolding of what life is all about?
Nicole Daedone shares how we can become whole individuals through enshrining our physical existence with spiritual purpose. She advocates, “You draw down inspiration, and you draw up creative power. You begin to see the whole of life with a vision of how it all appears in its transmuted form. The more you live this prayer, the more you yourself are transmuted in the process.”
The divine isn’t separate from our physical experience. It’s the real driver of life’s beauty. Daedone adds, “In a world where many feel their lives are meaningless specks of dust, irrelevant, discarded, unseen in their splendor, to see the potential beauty in all things confirms what the bones remember. It is all the sacred ‘It.’”
As states that as a result of viewing life this way, “Both within and without, you live in ever-increasing states of jeweled beauty, with scarcely a notion of where the boundary lies between the two. The stuck, the stagnant draws this psychedelic energy that resides in the grey ‘dead’ energy back into life.”
Poet Charles-Pierre Baudelaire, who apparently couldn’t live the insights he shared, had a sense of what intoxication really means. He once wrote concerning life as it ought to be lived,“You must always be intoxicated. In order not to feel the horrible burden of Time which breaks your back and bends you down to earth, you must be unremittingly intoxicated. But on what? Wine? Poetry? Virtue? As you please. But never be sober. And if it should chance that sometimes, on the steps of a palace, on the green grass of a ditch, in the bleak solitude of your room, you wake up and your intoxication has already diminished or disappeared, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, ask everything that flees, everything that groans, everything that rolls, everything that sings, everything that speaks, ask them what time it is, and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, will reply: It’s time to be intoxicated! If you do not wish to be one of the tortured slaves of Time, never be sober; never be sober! Use wine, poetry, or virtue as you please.”
So I ask again, are you living an “intoxicated” life? Do the wind, the waves, the stars, the birds, the clock—everything that is part of the unfoldment of spirituality in our everyday lives—transform your experience into one that is no longer torturous, to be merely endured in an alcoholic daze, but one that is in every sense rapturous?