There is nothing like love

There is nothing like love

April 2013

By Abhishek Thakore

There is no spiritual practice as enlightening as a love relationship, chuckles Abhishek Thakore

I went around the world looking for my guru – but I could not find my G-spot (guru-spot). The gurus were either busy churning out their ‘bestsellers,’ or hiding the fact that they borrowed from their own gurus, to become great. Others were dead or too confusing or both. That was over a decade ago.

Today, I must coyly admit, that I am enlightened. It is hard to hide it. My eyes, my face, and my general aura give it away. It happened only because I discovered my true guru, my spouse – my significant other. The rest of my life after that point was like the visit to a dentist – extremely annoying, strangely painful, and of course, enlightening.

Think about it – everything you need for personal growth and ‘New Age,’ exists in a relationship – particularly when it goes bad. The early dating days were good – the principles of ‘don’t sweat the small stuff,’ were in action, as was laughter therapy. There was yoga in the bedroom, and a lot of bodywork. Life seemed beautiful. However, that short-lived phase was like the introductory evening of the Blandmark forum. It made life look way more beautiful, than it really was going to be. Like thousands of gullible young men, I enrolled, and was married.

Today, life is zen-like. There is no more Krishnamurti on my bookshelves – everything she says sounds like JK anyway, “If you do not do the dishes, your internal cleansing will be hampered.” I often wonder – is it any measure of success to get the love of a profoundly dictatorial woman? Indeed, marriage is a pathless land. No one has a clue how he or she got into it.

Past-life regression sessions take place almost daily – I am taken back to different parts of my life, with emphasis on mistakes of different magnitudes that I made. Emotions of guilt and embarrassment are triggered, and then I am left alone to work with them. Clearly, Vipassana and T-groups do not come anywhere close.

I surely must give her credit for the times when she sounds like a chest-thumping New Age motivational ‘peak performance’ speaker – when she wants to go out shopping. Abundance mentality, the law of giving, and all my passive income strategies are practiced here, mostly unsuccessfully.

I also suspect that I have been subjected to hypnotherapy and subliminal language. Listen to this: ‘Are you sure you want to see the match with your friends and not meet Mummy?’ That combination of looks and tones leaves me with no choice. I have to meet the mother of all my troubles.

I am totally convinced that man’s search for meaning is nothing but a metaphor for Victor Frankl’s survival of his wife’s tortures. So is Life of Pi – Richard Parker is actually Richa-the Partner (obvious reference to the author’s wife, Richa). Living with your wife is hardly different from living with a tiger on a boat in the middle of nowhere.

Of course, it is all a spiritual experience. At the end of it, I have reached enlightenment, or indifference, if you call it that. My existential realization is that it is all meaningless – and she is my Master.