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  1. Swami Shailendra Saraswati
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    2020-11-03T10:13:09+05:30
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    When we commune with the Word or Naam, we feel an exhilarating or intoxicating effect. This exhilarating aspect of Naam has been called by Indian sages as Hari Ras, Ram Ras, Amrit Ras, Maha Ras or Som Ras and the intoxicating effect of Naam or Word is known as Divine Ecstasy.

    Many spiritual traditions including Zen and Sufism talk about wine. It is not ordinary wine. It is the wine that comes through the silent, meditative ecstasy of our being. Whenever we reach to the point of our innermost being where everything is silent, where we cannot even say we are, where only pure is ness remains, a tremendous drunkenness arises. This is Divine Ecstasy.

    Only fortunate ones become thirsty for the Divine wine. Those who are drunk with ordinary wine, they cannot be thirsty for the divine wine. When a man is not drunk with this world, a thirst arises. And that thirst cannot be fulfilled by anything that belongs to this world. Only the unknown can fulfill it, only the invisible can fulfill it. That unknown wine is Naam or Word.

    God is a drunkenness of a different type. Kabir has said: “Aisi tari lagi – I have fallen into such   an ecstasy that nothing now can disturb it, it is eternal.” Omar Khayyam talks about the wine of the other world. Fitzgerald totally misunderstood him, because he is not talking of the wine that we can get here; he is talking of the divine wine, which is the Sufi symbol for God. Once we are drunk with God, then there will be no thirst at all.

    This world and its wine can give us only temporary relief. It can give us only temporary gaps of forgetfulness. When somebody is drunk with this world and its wines he is hypnotized, asleep, moves in a slumber, he lives in a sleep — his whole life is a long dream. But when someone is drunk with God’s wine he is totally alert, aware, and fully conscious. As this God’s wine comes from the Master or Murshid, he is often described in poetical language as “Saqi” or the Divine Cup-bearer.

    Once we start getting drunk with divine, it is unending. Once we have tasted it, it is not going to fade away. It will overwhelm our whole life. Our whole life will become a festival of lights, a ceremony of laughter, of dance, a song, and music.

    In Lay Yoga, the path of dissolving, no awareness is needed. We are needed to be drunk, completely drunk with God. We need to become a drunkard.

    If wine can do so much, we cannot conceive of what the divine wine can do. Once we taste it, the ego is gone forever. Nobody ever comes back from that drunkenness.

    Zen Masters have painted ten pictures of seekers, searching his bull symbolic of life energy, finally he finds it.

    The tenth picture shows that the man is so happy… he takes a bottle of wine and rushes towards the marketplace, perhaps towards the pub, to enjoy with his friends. He has found his ox; now this is a celebration.

    Wine is only a symbol of being drunk with the divine. Wine is only a symbol of being utterly at ease with existence; relaxed, in tune, in harmony, in accord. And his rushing towards the pub is also symbolic. It is rushing towards our own juices of life, to the very center of our being, where we will get drunk.

    Unless we are drunk with divine, something remains unfulfilled. To be drunk in divine is the only way to find oneself. And God is the greatest intoxicant there is. Once we are drunk with divine, we never come down; we move from high to high. Contrary to the ordinary wine divine wine does not leave any hangover. God is pure high; it knows no lows.

    God is the ultimate intoxicant, but it has a very paradoxical quality. It makes us drunk, but keeps us aware too. The more we are drunk, the more aware we become. When we are utterly drunk, we are utterly aware. We are not there but awareness is there. Then awareness exists without a center. It is just pure universal consciousness.

    One has to be drunk with divine; less than that is never effective. That is the only thing worth learning — how to become a divine drunkard, how to live so intensely and so passionately that each moment is transformed into eternity.

    — Swami Shailendra Saraswati

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