‘This is how we are with wine and beautiful food,” says the poet Rumi. “We want and we get drunk with wanting.” The longing to get high has never seemed so strong to me, but we’ve become literalist about it.
Rumi’s lines about wine are a source of disappointment to those who don’t realise that it’s not the alcohol he seeks, but spiritual intoxication. His words are sometimes a shock to the religious who have forgotten that religion is not about rules but about liberation and spiritual ecstasy.
In particular, we see the wilful blindness by religious extremists who divert the quest for our souls to soar, away from the spiritual and deviate it into the darkness of hating others, or insist it can be achieved by following black and white rules, from which emotion, love and humanity has been stripped. But the high we seek can never be fulfilled this way.
People initially look at you strangely when you suggest that the search for a “high” is part of the human condition, and that it’s no surprise that we seek it in myriad stopgap ways, whether in drugs that wreak horrendous harm, or shopping, which we deem a good way to fill our aching void.
I experience the misdirection of the quest; we all do. I remember when I thought that getting married would fill the void; then there were the little bursts of romantic love giving me the high I was seeking. No wonder the beginnings of relationships are so popular, with their red-hearted highs and the romantic bubble that floats us to that higher place we seek. But the bubble bursts and unless we’re getting our high somewhere else, we’re back in our gloomy holes with a thud.
With Christmas coming, alcohol consumption in the UK is up as people seek to escape from the end of year fatigue. It’s recently been found that middle-class women – ostensibly with everything material they require at their disposable – are quietly becoming alcoholics, drinking more every evening as a “treat” or “escape”.
Tensions about how to deal with ISIL and what to do in Syria are rising, and huge decisions with high stakes are being made about how to engage in a war. But it’s hard not to notice the testosterone high in the rhetoric that politicians use. This is not about whether military action is or isn’t required but rather the idea of a crushing fight seems to be giving people a real rush.
A study in the US about religiosity among millennials noted that they are moving away from religion, and the fulfilment once found in religious spaces is now most probably delivered by social media. Witness, though, the recent admissions about ever-more-extreme activities people will engage in to achieve the high of being liked.
Our spiritual intoxication levels can often be high, but it’s elusive. Sometimes it evaporates and we must once again identify the yearning and then set off on the quest to fill it again. But it is made harder by the fact that expressing our sense of feeling lost is interpreted as weakness or being a hippie. This also precludes us from sensibly discussing how as a society we contextualise challenges like alcoholism, gambling and even religious extremism.
There’s nothing wrong with a high: denying this is in fact the obstacle we’ve set ourselves. We can go back to Rumi for advice: “Any wine will get you high. Judge like a king, and choose the purest.”
Shelina Zahra Janmohamed is the author of Love in a Headscarf and blogs at www. spirit21.co.uk