Happy birthday, Vova! June 29, 2010

Today one of the most amazing people ever living  has his birthday!

And I tought of a small virtual present, a blogpost. I tought of a tribute listing some of the qualities that design his personality to the brilliant person he is.

• he has the most incredible intellect I ever met: his point of view is always so unique, that even highly intelligent people never come to the (obvious!) conclusions he comes to.
• he knows all the answeres. no kidding! He has this magic ability to give the right answer to any question, even if he does not know the subject. There is a story behind it, that he was meditating upon getting this quality and he’s got it! I must admit such a thing just thrills me since I am so keen on intellectual stuff 🙂
• he can do everything with his hands: repare, invent, find a unique engeneering solution for any construction problem
• he loves children and knows how to bring them properly up
• he writes poems and songs, and sings them with guitar
• he is incredibly romantic and carrying: he remembers every my little wish and is looking for possibilities to fulfill it. Even if I have already forgotten it myself, he would still remember what I wanted!
• his Russian language is very pure and beautiful, he expresses himself very well
• he is balanced and feels very meditative.
• he has a great sense of humour and loves telling jokes (Russian “anekdotes” ), estimated 10 per day 
• he keeps the perfect order in everything and no one can beat him in packing: sometimes I think he can pack an elephant into a suitcase 🙂
• he is a true genetelmen
• he is a person of high ideals, a global-thinker
• he is humble and never shows off
• he loves the way people seldom love nowadays…

 Well what else shall I say?

Why do we love summer time? June 27, 2010

The sun is what most people are missing the colder parts of the world. We long for summer because it is warm and nice, the nature is splendid and generous. The question “why do we love summer?” may appear silly. Why?!? Sommer time is obviously so great:

However I have a feeling that the main reason for love of summer is… the lack of happiness. Just think of this stunning quote by Anton Chekhov:

People don’t notice whether it’s winter or summer when they’re happy.

Have you also noticed that?

LOVE; axinia

Highly insightful: why it’s so hard to become happy, what is dramatically wrong in our child-care and how to overcome it June 23, 2010

There are very few books that can deliver some truly fresh, insightful information. Most of the things have been repeated for ages. One of this rare, uniquely insightful books is “The Continuum Concept: In Search of Happiness Lost” by Jean Liedloff. (1975)

 

Jean Liedloff, an American writer, spent two and a half years in the South American jungle living with Stone Age Indians. The experience demolished her Western preconceptions of how we should live and led her to a radically different view of what human nature really is.

And that is:

• the aggressiveness is NOT in a human nature, and even children may never fight! “Not only did they not fight, they never even argued. This is not at all what we have been taught human nature is — boys will be boys. So I thought well maybe, boys won’t be boys.”
• every human being is born as a happy, confident, stable personality. “Society is unpleasant, dangerous, unhappy, alienated, and unstable because in childhood our nature — being confident, joyous and loving — has been undermined and we simply live the way we are expected to. What we believe is what we make our experience into. And what we believe is what we have been taught to believe by our parents and our experiences.”

Jean Liedloff claims that it all our problems can be traced back to the general misconduct of child-care and upbringing. We’ve got disconnected to the natural/true method ages ago, no wonder the evolution has taken a somewhat weong track…

She discovers that the basic difference in what the indigenous people do and we don’t – is the so called “in-arms period”: from the birth till the baby starts crawling, a mother carries it 24 hours a day on her body (including sleeping in one bed). A child gets an enormous dose of security and happiness, since there is nothing more important and beautiful for it than the mother.

 

 Let’s have a look at the common practice in the modern Western childbirth and child-care. A baby experiences:

In one word, what is your life purpose? June 21, 2010

I welcome all my dearest readers to answer this simple question. The answer may even surprise you.

Well, what’s your life purpose?

PLEASE ANSWER IN ONE WORD ONLY! – I know it’s not easy, but it’s  helpful for one’s own sake.

Thank you 🙂 axinia

The silliness of gym-philosophy or why quit physical work? June 17, 2010

 

My attitude to sports of any kind has been always very suspicious. Any kind of mass obsession caused by a brainwash “it’s useful and healthy'”  causes some natural resistance  in me. Recently I found out what the reason for my sceptical attitude towards any kind of fitness and sports: why doing it while we can do something more useful with the same results?

Modern people in the “civilized societies”  have created an enormous level of physical comphort. They have learned to avoid any physical work and enjoy their laziness.  At the same time they realise that “the body needs to be shaken.” And that – regular! So, the clever modern mind has invented the need of fitness and sports.

Look at this amusing description:

“A man who spends his necessary, unenjoyed working life among papers and ideas will recreate his innate expectation of physical work through something like golf. Unmindful that its main virtue is uselessness, the golfer trudges about in the sun carrying a heavy load of clubs and every so often brings his attention to a sharp focus on the problem of persuading a ball to fall into a hole in the ground; this is done, very inefficiently, with the end of one of those clubs, not by carrying the ball and dropping it in. If he were made to do all this by force, he would feel sorely put upon, but as it is called recreation and is guaranteed to serve no purpose beyond exercising him, he is free to enjoy it. But there are now many golfers who have allowed the labour-saving impulse to spoil some of this pleasure as well, since it has been suggested by the relevant sector of the culture that carrying the clubs is not pleasant and, more recently, that the trudging between strokes ought also to be moved into the work category and little automotive carts are used instead. To re-create themselves after playing golf, they may soon have to resort to tennis.” (by Jean Liedloff)

Isn’t it hilarious?

How much all religions have in common? June 13, 2010

It was always clear to me that all religions and spiritual practices are of the same nature, origin and logic.

Speaking to representatives of any of them it was almost impossible to explain what I mean, this was such a subtle logic… But now I know!

I suddenly realised that all of them talk the same thing:

1.there are microcosm and macrocosm

2.there are an individual should and the collective(world) soul

3.and these two shall become one.

Isn’t it that obvious?… The form and the way of expression can be different, be the essence is just the same…Then why people fight?

LOVE, axinia

Why men love blue and women pink colour? June 8, 2010

Traditionally in most (all?) cultures men prefer blue and women red shades. Interesting enough,  these preferences are not taught, but built in (various studies prove that).

I just thought of a simple explanation why.

In the ancient knowledge of Yoga, the right energy channel of a human body  is said to be yellow(can get red). It contains heat and generally stands for the Sun and masculine principle.

The left energy channel is of a blue colour and stands for the Moon and the female principle. By the way, the same works for Yin and Yan in the Chinese philosophy.

Thus, men prefer blue because it balances their yellow/red energy, and women prefer red(pink, orange, etc.) because it balances their blue!

 As simple as that 🙂

Any other observations on your side?

LOVE; axinia

(images of me and my husband, taken mutually)

How to easily solve conflicts June 5, 2010

This is an old good tick in case you may need one day to make peace between two fighting parts.

The trick is of a purely psychological nature, and thus can be widely applied (there are some other non-psychological  more efficient tricks but they can be only applied by a person who can work with vibrations).

It is an old wisdom but it comes up very fresh even in modern times…

So basically if you have two people hating each other… just start telling each of them separately that the other one was just praising him/her for something (what can be realistic in that case). It is amusing to see the happy and astonished face of the person who hears that… 🙂 It is important to start the procedure simultaneously, so that the both rivals can change their emotions at he same time.

When angels sing… June 4, 2010

Happy to present you another beautiful piece of singing by my beloved sisiter Tatiana:

Isn’t she an agel?…

LOVE; axinia

Children stop being communists at the age of 11, study says June 1, 2010

Many people from different countries and background told me that when they were children it was difficult for them to understand the idea of money and goods distribution. I always thought it is a good proof for my idea that capitalism as  such is a very unnatural institution.

The new study from Norway shows some interesting evidence in support of my supposition. As children progress to adolescence, their sense of fairness changes from pure equality to proportionality based on merit, study says.

The study was conducted at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration (NHH) by the research team consisting of Associate Professor Ingvild Almås, Professor Alexander W. Cappelen, Associate Professor Erik Ø. Sørensen, and Professor Bertil Tungodden.

One of the most fundamental questions in the social sciences is how morality and fairness considerations affect human behavior. Previous research has shown that adults differ greatly both in the extent to which they care about fairness considerations and in what they perceive as fair.

“This is, however, the first economic study to show how some of these differences are shaped in adolescence. In doing so, the study also sheds light on how our perceptions of fairness are affected both by the social environment and biological factors,” explains Professor Bertil Tungodden from NHH in Norway.

What is a fair inequality?
Most adults find some inequalities fair. Hence, in contrast, to young children, they do not always think of strict equality as the fair solution to a distributive problem. What explains this and how does this acceptance of inequality develop? These were motivating questions for the present study of the distributive behavior of 500 Norwegian school children 11-19 years old.

“By comparing the behavior for different age groups, we were able to established clear developmental patterns. In particular, the study shows that as children grow older, they increasingly find inequalities reflecting differences in individual achievements fair,” continues Professor Tungodden.

Just luck?
In the experiment, the children worked on a task for 45 minutes. At the end of the work session, some were lucky and received a high price on their production; others were unlucky and received a low price. Thus, there were inequalities in earnings that reflected differences in both individual production and luck.

Each participant then had to decide how to distribute the total earnings between themselves and one other participant. Hence, they had to decide which inequalities they found fair.
“Here we observed a very interesting pattern,” adds Professor Tungodden.

“While almost none of the younger children made a distinction between luck and individual production, a substantial share of the older children did so. They accepted inequalities reflecting differences in individual production, but not inequalities reflecting just luck.”