The Right Kind of Drunk

On the state we reach for in a glass

This is one of the fifty states of consciousness explored in the All 50 States program. Explore the full map.

My spiritual tradition has a day on which it is not just permitted but encouraged to get drunk.

The day is Purim, and the drunkenness it calls for is a strange one. Not the “I love you, man” kind. Not the kind where people laugh uncontrollably and parade around with lampshades on their heads. The drunkenness Purim asks for is at once deeply joyful and deadly serious — a loosening aimed, of all things, at God.

Judaism is hardly alone in this. The Greeks had their Dionysian rites; Christianity places wine at the center of its holiest sacrament; the Sufi poets wrote endlessly of a divine intoxication that made the literal kind look tame. Across history, culture after culture has carved out a sanctioned place for altered consciousness — and reached, through it, for something sacred.

It’s a hard state to achieve, and when I was younger I would spend the day trailing the people who did it well. Once, one of them gave me a kind of status check. My teacher began to dance with me — face to face, holding my eyes. He was already there: uplifted, thankful, expansive, entirely present. After a few moments he told me, “You didn’t have enough.” And he was right. My primary companions that day were still the weight of the world, my responsibilities, and a dozen other concerns I couldn’t put down.

There is, obviously, a delicate line here. The same reaching that can open onto communion can just as easily end at the porcelain god. But when the needle is threaded just right — and threading it is a skill — something real happens. The difference between drunkenness as oblivion and drunkenness as prayer turns out to have almost nothing to do with the alcohol, and almost everything to do with what surrounds it.

Like many harnessable — and dangerous — substances, alcohol carries potential energy. Activated, it is enormously powerful, and what it does depends entirely on the container it finds itself in. It's not unlike nuclear power, which can level a city or light one for generations. The reactor has a containment building — a thick shell of reinforced concrete and steel, built to hold the danger in when something goes wrong. Purim, too, had its containment: the ritual, the intention, the teachers, the day set apart, the whole structure aimed at pointing the energy somewhere.

Take away that structure and the fuel remains, but nothing holds it. With no containment, what becomes of the energy in six beers and a bad week — or half a bottle of scotch and a failing marriage?

Somewhere beneath the occluding sheath of your inhibitions is your true self. In daily life those inhibitions serve a purpose — they keep the peace, they hold things in — but they also veil something. Beneath them is a simpler, purer entity: one that could express what it actually feels, share itself without calculation, and roll more easily with life’s slings and arrows. Some people call this aspect the soul. And the soul, freed for a moment, is not only at ease with others but fearless, and strangely energetic.

That energy is the danger and the gift both. When the inhibitions drop but you aren’t prepared for the surge — no intention, no container — it spills out as aggression or foolishness. But held rightly, aimed rightly, the same loosening reveals the best of what’s in you: the truest part. If you’ve been there, you know. There’s a warm, deep aura to it — the feeling of being, briefly, exactly who you are.

Here's the thing. If the feeling I'm describing really is the true you, then it isn't a rare summit to be scaled — it's your own nature, and it should be possible to live there far more than we do. We may never take up permanent residence; even the people I followed on Purim weren't "there" every day. But that only means alcohol isn't necessary to reach it. The drink is just a clumsy trigger we reach for when we haven't learned the other ways in.

There are many gates to this foundational state: deep prayer, ecstatic song and dance, fasting, meditation, the collapse of self in awe, the abandon of real laughter, even the loosening that comes from grief or exhaustion or love. Each dissolves the same occluding sheath — quiets the self-monitoring, drops the guard — and lets the soul come forward. Alcohol is one key to a room with many entrances, and by far the one that costs the most on the way out. It’s not popular because it’s the best way in, but because it’s the easiest: no teacher, no discipline. Just you and a bottle.

And here’s the good news: there’s nothing wrong with a glass of wine to unwind, or cocktails at a party. The loosening can be lovely. But the better news is that the state the alcohol reaches for is already in you — it’s yours by right, waiting behind the sheath whether or not you ever pour a drink. What if the thing you reach for a drink to feel could be reached, more fully, without one?

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If this is the sort of thing you like thinking about, compassion is one of fifty states of consciousness I mapped in All 50 States: A Passport to Your Mind — a guided journey through the full terrain of the inner life, from ordinary waking awareness to grief, flow, awe, mystical union, and the harder territories most of us visit without a map. Each state comes with its own orientation, its own wisdom from across the traditions, and its own practice. All fifty lessons are available as a single download.

Explore All 50 States

Coming this fall: I’ll be leading a small founding cohort through the first segment of the map — five weekly lessons and a live session together, beginning Sunday, Oct 18.