Music in relatioships October 24, 2013

image by axinia

The seer, the deep thinker, the knower of human nature, acts also as a musician by finding in people’s actions their tone and rhythm.

He notices in an untimely action, caused by ignorance or impatience, the irregularity of the rhythm; and in a word or action that has a harder or softer effect than it should have he sees the false tone, the false note. He also feels consonant or dissonant chords.

When two people meet the dissonant chord of their evolution keeps them distant from one another in thought, although they may be sitting near together; and often a third person comes who either harmonizes the dissonant chord or produces disharmony in the consonant chord.

The Sufi Message of Hazrat Inayat Khan

How to outsource your personal growth February 25, 2013

What a nonsense, you may say. How a personal growth can be outsourced? This is something highly personal which entirely depends on our own efforts and learning abilities. And yet I would claim it can be outsourced, let me tell you why and how.

The basic driving force in the human evolution has always been learning from experiences. Either exploring environment or building up their living comforts, people has been learning by doing. Some experiences became a success, but many more have been mistakes. Especially as far as psychological issues are concerned, talking of experiences people mostly mean pain.

I guess each of us can confess that learning from a painful lesson is a long-term thing, often it takes  not one or two, but many similar cases in order to realize the mistake and change the behavior. Learning from pain is painful and this is the way we have been learning since ages.

Is there any other chance to grow? Can this long, boring and painful way be outsourced? Can we develop ourselves through any outside help and – this would be the best – effortlessly?

YES, WE CAN!

The cool thing is that each and everyone of us has “something” inside our being which is not our being itself,  but a kind of an external part which is ready and happy to take over and do the personal/spiritual growth job for free! This part is tremendously powerful and intelligent, and it knows exactly how to help us out, even in our daily matters.

The sages and enlightened seekers of the past all knew about it and described their experience with this power in various cultures and religions, all in the same way. In the Indian tradition in Sanskrit language it is called KUNDALINI (here you can find an excellent description of this fantastic power).

Now how does it work?

1.You get your Kundalini awakened (here – how exactly, easy and fast)

2.You let her (this is a female energy) do the job: rising upwards your spinal chord Kundalini clears out your energy centers/chakras and removes your problems. The best thing is you can almost always precept it physically!

So basically you sit down in a nice meditation for some 10-15 min mornings and evenings and while this your Kundalini works. The perfect outsource, isn’t it? You do nothing, she does it all. You get up fully refreshed, happy, fully of energy and bliss! And by practicing this for some time you will find out that not only your old problems vanish, but an actual personal growth takes place – slowly but steadily. Even within a year or two a person can change dramatically to the best! And that -again – without any painful experiences.

This is my observation done for over 17 years since my Kundalini has been awakened. Within this time I had a couple of painful experiences but as far as I can judge, I did not learn that much out of them. I learned much more from Kundalini itself – the power which she carries is truth, auspiciousness, holiness, chastity, self-respect, detachment, oneness, enlightened attention, compassion, pure love and joy. This is all what I was lucky not only to experience through the Kundalini work but gradually to imbibe and manifest in my personal growth. This would not be possible for me by a mere human “learning by doing”, at least not in one life time.

LOVE
axinia

Sufism on educating an Infant April 29, 2011

A highly insightful and interesting not only for parents read from Hazrat Inayat Khan.

It is never too soon in the life of a child for it to receive education. The soul of an infant is like a photographic plate which has never been exposed before, and whatever impression falls on that photographic plate covers it; no other impressions which come afterwards have the same effect. Therefore when the parents or guardians lose the opportunity of impressing an infant in its early childhood they lose the greatest opportunity.
In educating the child the first rule that must be remembered is that one person must educate it, not everybody in the family. It is a great mistake when everyone in the family tries to train the infant or to take care of it, because that keeps an infant from forming a character. Each one has his own influence and each influence is different from the other. But most often what happens is that the parents never think of education at all in infancy. They think that is the age when the child is a doll, a toy; that everyone can handle it and play with it. They do not think that it is the most important moment in the soul’s life; that never again will that opportunity come for a soul to develop.

Should the father or the mother educate the child? A man’s life demands all his attention in his work; the mother is born with the sense of duty towards her child, and therefore the mother has the first right to educate it. The mother can also quiet the child in the first days of its life, because the child is a part of the mother, and therefore the rhythm of the mother’s spirit is akin to the rhythm of the child’s spirit. The soul that has come from above is received and is reared and taken care of by the mother; and therefore the mother is its best friend. If there is anything that the father can do, it is to help the mother or the guardian to educate the child. If the child in its infancy were given entirely into the hand of the father, there would be little hope that it would come out right; because a man is a child all his life, and the help that is needed in the life of an infant is that of the mother. Nevertheless, later in the life of a child there comes a time when the father’s influence is equally needed; but that time is not in infancy. As the Brahmin says, the first Guru is the mother, the second Guru is the father, and the third Guru is the teacher.

There are five different subjects in which an infant must be trained in the first year: discipline, balance, concentration, ethics, and relaxation.

Changing Education Paradigms – another brilliant insight on education! January 6, 2011

The video in my previous post was showing severe problems the global society is facing,  and here comes  one of the solutions. I found this animation very well presented and highly insightful.

Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we’re educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence.

Why don’t we get the best out of people? Sir Ken Robinson argues that it’s because we’ve been educated to become good workers, rather than creative thinkers. Students with restless minds and bodies — far from being cultivated for their energy and curiosity — are ignored or even stigmatized, with terrible consequences. “We are educating people out of their creativity,” Robinson says. It’s a message with deep resonance. Robinson’s TEDTalk has been distributed widely around the Web since its release in June 2006.

The most popular words framing blog posts on his talk? “Everyone should watch this.”

A visionary cultural leader, Sir Ken led the British government’s 1998 advisory committee on creative and cultural education, a massive inquiry into the significance of creativity in the educational system and the economy, and was knighted in 2003 for his achievements. His latest book, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, a deep look at human creativity and education, was published in January 2009.

LOVE, axinia

A new approach in self-teaching – the future of schools? December 16, 2010

Some of you may know that pedagogics is one of my favorite spheres of interest, although I don’t blog about it much. I have a dream of opening a private school that would be based on the principles, more relevant to the evolutionary level of the upcoming generations than whatever we have now.

Today I would like to share with you an interesting TED video about a new experimental approach in teaching – helping school children in self-teaching.

I find it very insightful, especially the point of collective learning – something which is missing quite a lot in the modern concepts of education.



LOVE; axinia

A Mathematician’s Lament – or why I hated math at school May 10, 2010

Mathimatics has been always a horrow subject to me. My brain blocks when I only see numbers and formulas… It’s a wonder how I could have survived so far with such an attitute towards maths!

Renecetly I came across an amazing article on mathematics, which literary has blown my mind. A Mathematician’s Lament, is written by Paul Lockhart in 2002. Paul is a mathematics teacher at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn, New York. His article has been circulating through parts of the mathematics and math ed communities ever since. His point is that much mathematics education is hijacked by people who know nothing about it.

Here are some quotes:
“The first thing to understand is that mathematics is an art.  The difference between math and
the other arts, such as music and painting, is that our culture does not recognize it as such. 
Everyone understands that poets, painters, and musicians create works of art, and are expressing themselves in word, image, and sound. 

In fact, our society is rather generous when it comes to  creative expression; architects, chefs, and even television directors are considered to be working artists.  So why not mathematicians?
 
Part of the problem is that nobody has the faintest idea what it is that mathematicians do. 
The common perception seems to be that mathematicians are somehow connected with
science– perhaps they help the scientists with their formulas, or feed big numbers into
computers for some reason or other.  There is no question that if the world had to be divided into the “poetic dreamers” and the “rational thinkers” most people would place mathematicians in the latter category.
  
Nevertheless, the fact is that there is nothing as dreamy and poetic, nothing as radical,
subversive, and psychedelic, as mathematics.  It is every bit as mind blowing as cosmology or
physics (mathematicians conceived of black holes long before astronomers actually found any), and allows more freedom of expression than poetry, art, or music (which depend heavily on properties of the physical universe).  Mathematics is the purest of the arts, as well as the most misunderstood.
 
So let me try to explain what mathematics is, and what mathematicians do.  I can hardly do
better than to begin with G.H. Hardy’s excellent description: 

A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker
of patterns.  If his patterns are more permanent than
theirs, it is because they are made with ideas. 

So mathematicians sit around making patterns of ideas.  What sort of patterns?  What sort of
ideas?  Ideas about the rhinoceros?  No, those we leave to the biologists.  Ideas about language and culture?  No, not usually. 

Freudian theory and its crime against motherhood September 30, 2008

“The idea gains ground that the doctrine and theory of psychoanalysis has been the greatest intellectual confidence trick of the 20th century”– P.B.Medawar, Nobel Prize in medicine.

Everyone agrees that Sigmund Freud has had a profound impact on Western society and intellectual life. However people are mostly unaware of his theory and, moreover, of the true dimetion of this impact. In fact, the Freudian theory has takend the role of a modern religion in the 20th century.

Interestingly, a century after its invention, psychoanalysis is being challenged on scientific grounds, and criticised with regard to its clinical efficacy. All scientific research conducted with any degree of rigour has shown Freudian theory to be fraudulent. Freud was opposed to the statistical comparison of groups pf patients which is basic to credibility in modern medicine.

What is Freudian theory about?

According to Freud, children begin to enjoy sexual pleasures in early ages. The first stage of childhood sexuality is oral,  during which pleasures come from the mouth. Nursing at the mother`s breast is said to intruduce sexual pleasure. The fatuity of such statements is breathtaking!

After the oral stage, the child is described as passing through  the anal stage and, at the age of 4 years, reaching the Oesipal phase. The young boy allegedly “falls in love” with his mother, and wants to sleep with her. Her therefore views his father as a rival and an enemy who would like to castrate him.

Freud constantly denigrated the role of the mother. As the height of absurdity, he believed that a woman`s desire to have a child was a way to compensating for her lack of a penis! This claim was developed and amplified by many adherents of Freud`s theory.

The impact of the theory on the Western Society

Watson in the USA went so far as to write, in 1928, that maternal love was most dangerous, and could have irreversible consequences on children. His book Psychological Care of Infant and Child enjoyed great success, with sales of over 100.000 and greatly influenced generations on American mothers.