The Intoxication of Divine Love
Narada describes the highest devotion as a kind of divine madness, in which the lover, drunk on love, forgets the world.
Attaining that love, the devotee becomes as if intoxicated, stupefied, and absorbed, delighting only in the Self (Narada Bhakti Sutra 6). Narada uses the language of intoxication deliberately: para bhakti is not a calm sentiment but an overwhelming rapture that dissolves ordinary self-consciousness. The God-intoxicated saints — Chaitanya dancing in ecstasy, Mirabai singing through her tears, the Sufi mystics whirling — exemplify this divine madness that looks like folly to the worldly but is the height of wisdom. This state cannot be manufactured; it is given by grace and recognized by its fruits of overflowing joy and indifference to worldly concern. The glory of devotion is that it can lift a human being into bliss beyond anything the senses can offer. Such intoxication is the soul's homecoming to its source of joy.
Attaining it, one becomes intoxicated, transfixed, and rejoices in the Self alone.
The motif of holy intoxication unites the bhakti saints with the Sufi poets like Rumi and Hafiz, for whom wine is the standard metaphor for the soul's rapturous absorption in the Divine.
Narada Bhakti Sutras