Imagine a tribal who drinks a stinking toxic liquid, goes crazy, shouts insensibly, topples into dirt, falls unconscious, returns to consciousness after several hours with severe headache and stomach upset and vomits helplessly in agony.
“How horrible,” we will exclaim, “What kind of people do such things? Why?” But isn’t that what an extra-terrestrial being will exclaim on seeing one of the most common – and most perverse – pleasures that we moderns delight in? Yes, we are talking about drinking. If we just remove the ad glamour from it, intoxication is nothing but a modern ritual of self-torture. And its worse than the ritual described above – because drunkards squander enormous sums of money to put the poison into their own systems. And their suffering continues long after the ritual ends; they wreck their liver and ruin their health.
Joseph Goebbels, the German propaganda minister in Nazi Germany who persecuted the Jews, believed that if one repeats a lie long enough, loud enough and bold enough, everyone will end up believing it. Few things illustrate this truth the way the lie of the pleasure of intoxication does. Everyone knows they are hurting and killing themselves by drinking, yet they obstinately imagine that somehow they will be exceptions and will enjoy.
Many of us may have saved ourselves from the propaganda deluge about intoxication. Still we can all identify with the desire to be intoxicated into a higher state of existence and enjoyment that intoxication falsely promises to fulfill. That desire to be intoxicated with happiness stems from our spiritual essence. In our original pure existence in the spiritual world, we as souls are intoxicated with love for God and become oblivious to everything except our beloved Lord. We can all experience that spiritual intoxication of divine love here and now by chanting the names of God like the Hare Krishna mahamantra. Indeed the holy names can fill us with so much joy that even addicted drunkards can quickly get rid of their addictions. Indeed Prof Stillson Judah commented about Srila Prabhupada, the founder of ISKCON and the greatest exponent of chanting, “I am simply amazed by your ability to transform hippies into servants of God and humanity.” Wouldn’t the world be a much better place if more people were similarly transformed? Why not start the transformation with ourselves?
Hare Krishna.....
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