Once it happened that Mulla Nasruddin was walking along with his wife, absolutely drunk. She had found him lying in the street and was bringing him home. Of course, as usual, she was arguing, and winning all the arguments, because she was alone. Mulla Nasrud-din was not there; he was simply coming along with her.
Then suddenly she saw a mad bull approaching. There was no time to warn Nasruddin, so she jumped into a bush. The bull came up and spun Nasruddin almost fifty feet in the air. He fell into a ditch, and as he crawled out of it he looked at his wife and said, "If you do this to me again, I shall really lose my temper. This is too much!"
Ordinary wine gives so much power when one is drunk, what about Tao, what about the absolute drunkenness?
What about Krishna or Buddha, the greatest drunkards -- so drunk with the divine that not even a trace of the ego is left? You cannot hurt them because they are not there, you cannot insult them because there is no one who will resist the insult and create a wound. Your insult will pass through them, as if passing through an empty house. Their boats are empty. A breeze comes in and passes with no barrier. When the breeze has gone the house is not even aware that the breeze has been there.
The appeal of wine is really because you are so egoistic. You are too burdened by it and sometimes you want to forget all chaos created in the world. So the world will have to follow alcohol or Tao -- these are the alternatives. Only a religious man (one who believes in a Super-Power), can be beyond alcohol, marijuana, LSD -- any type of drug.
Otherwise how can you be beyond them? The worldly burden is too much, it is constantly on your head. You have to forget yourselves.
But if wine can do so much, you cannot conceive of what the divine wine can do.
What is the wine doing? For certain moments, through chemical changes in the brain, in the body, you forget yourself.
But this is momentary.
Deep down you are there, and after a few hours the chemical effect disappears, your body has thrown the wine out and the ego asserts itself again.
But there is a wine which gives permanent intoxication, I tell you --
LOVE is that wine.
Once you taste it, the ego is gone forever. Nobody ever comes back from that drunkenness.
That is why Sufis always talk of wine, Sufis always talk of women. Their woman is not the woman you know -- God is the woman. And their wine is not the wine that you know -- God is the wine. Omar Khayyam has been misunderstood, tremendously misunderstood; because of Fitzgerald he has been misunderstood all over the world. Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat appears to be written in praise of wine and women, but it is not at all. Omar Khayyam is a Sufi, a mystic. He talks of the wine which comes through Tao; he talks of the wine in which you are lost forever and forever. This intoxicant, this divine intoxicant, is not temporary, it is non-temporal, not momentary -- it is eternal (Undying).
A person intoxicated with LOVE is a thousand times more drunk than a person intoxicated with alcohol.
And Sufis tak of God as the woman. That embrace is eternal, it is ultimate; then there is no separation. If you can understand this then you are intelligent, but not through your strategies, cunningness, arithmetic, your logic.If you can, look deep into existence. From where have you come? Where are you going? With whom are you fighting, and why? These same moments that you lose in fighting can become ecstatic.
- Copied from Divine Drunks
