Tag: wisdom

Posted in Life & Happiness

Simple Pleasures

Posted on by Jinavie

Consider this theory. People feel happy when they experience an upturn in life. A hungry person is happy when he receives food, a poor person is happy when she earns money, and a person seeking love is happy when they find love. But as people are highly adaptable creatures, they become used to such upturns very quickly. Even the happiness brought on by great food and luxurious lifestyles tend to fade over time, and the love between a couple who act like they cannot live without each other will eventually die away. To remedy this, people always seek excitement that will create an upturn in life, giving them happiness. This causes them to adventure, seek new experiences and sometimes make dangerous, risky decisions.

Everyone has a point in their lives that could be called the “peak”. But no matter how tall the peak is, as people will adapt to it soon, the height itself does not matter. What matters is the path to the peak. For example, if someone experiences their peak in life too early, every moment from then on will seem worse than the past. The person will continuously face disappointment and reminiscence the good times. The reason being, no upturn can beat the peak that they experienced, meaning they cannot feel the happiness of an upturn in life. According to this theory, the key to a happy life is delaying this peak as much as possible. When life is starting to get boring and dull, add just a little sprinkle of greatness in your life to continuously infuse it with happiness.

However, life is not as predictable and controllable as we want it to be, making this theory highly implausible. But the theory is not completely wrong. Although it is near impossible to artificially add little upturns throughout life, it is extremely easy to “feel” an upturn. All you need to do is change your perspective. The difference between a happy person and a miserable person is that the former finds joy in the smallest things. A miserable person will feel bored unless something exciting is happening, but a happy person leads what appears to be a boring life while enjoying every minute of it. Enjoying a warm cup of coffee on a rainy day, being astounded by the beautiful sky, smelling the roses on the path, singing and dancing when no one is looking… Finding and enjoying the simple pleasures of life is the most important skill one can have in life.

Who would you rather be: a miserable person who always seeks excitement and thrills or a happy person who enjoys a “boring” life?

Posted in Psychology & Medicine

Berry Aneurysm

Posted on by Jinavie

Stroke is a disease often associated with the elderly, but this is not necessarily true. As much as 5% of the population carry a ticking time bomb in their brain, known as a berry aneurysm. An aneurysm is a weakening of the arterial wall, causing a localised ballooning of the vessel. A berry aneurysm is a common type of aneurysm where the ballooning resembles a berry. What is most troubling is that a large proportion of these aneurysms can present very early (usually congenital, meaning you are born with it), with one research suggesting that 1.3% of the population in the age group of 20 to 39 has a berry aneurysm. If this berry aneurysm was to burst, no matter how young and fit you are, you will bleed into the area around your brain (subarachnoid haemorrhage), suddenly develop a severe, crippling headache (“thunderclap headache”), become confused, show signs of stroke such as speech or movement problems, or simply drop dead.

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Fortunately, only 10% of people carrying a berry aneurysm suffer a ruptured aneurysm and subsequent brain bleed. The other 90% will carry on living their lives, without ever knowing that they had a time bomb in their brain.

Certain factors make the risk of the aneurysm bursting go up, such as high blood pressure, which can be caused by a stressful lifestyle or smoking. But in some cases, as explained above, even a healthy teenager could suddenly drop to the ground with a massive brain haemorrhage.

Berry aneurysms are only one of many ways death could strike unnoticed, no matter how young you may be. You could live a long and healthy life and die peacefully in your sleep when you are 90 years old, or you may have a stroke and drop dead in a few minutes’ time. For all you know, a bus might run you over tomorrow, with no warning whatsoever. Ergo, youth is not an excuse to waste the day you are given. You do not have to achieve something great, or be productive, but at least spend your day knowing that you are doing everything in your power to make yourself happy, without harming your health, your future or other people.

Carpe diem. Seize the day.

Posted in Philosophy

Carpe Diem

Posted on by Jinavie

Countless teenagers claim that “you only live once” and use that as an excuse to live a reckless, risky life. Although most adults have the sense to recognise how idiotic and juvenile that sounds, it seems that they live their life as if there is only one chance as well. Too many people give up everything after a big failure messes up their lives, thinking that their life is “over”. For example, if a person has trained to become a mechanical engineer and one day has an accident that prevents them from ever working as an engineer again, the most common response is to fall into a pit of despair. They believe that they are only trained to do the one thing, and not doing it contradicts their life entirely. They are afraid that their life is over – that they are “dead”.

According to a certain statistic, we are capable of learning and mastering something new in 7 years. This means that between the ages of 11 and 88, you have no less than 11 opportunities to be great at something. Ergo, even if one “life” is over, you still have 10 opportunities to start a new life. Some people are too afraid to let one of their lives die and cling to the past, never moving forward to live on. But you have many lives. You do not live once.

Spend a life writing poems, spend a life building things. Spend a life looking for facts, spend a life looking for truth. Be a doctor, a musician, a detective, a chef, a businessman or a wanderer. No life is wasted as long as you are doing what you truly want, while not hurting yourself or others. Never forget that you have numerous lifetimes that are waiting to be seized by you. There will be times in life when you are hit with misfortune, when your life seems to crumbling around you. But that is just life. Realise that you still have the chance to start anew. And in the meantime, enjoy the lifetime you are living. Seize the day, and all the other lifetimes that are lying ahead of you.

Carpe diem.

(Idea and image from: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2722#comic)

Posted in Psychology & Medicine

Flow

Posted on by Jinavie

Have you ever had a moment of pure passion, where you are so immersed in what you are doing that everything around you does not matter and you are in a state of total bliss? In that moment, you feel fully alive, present and completely engaged with what you are doing. When the happiness and creativity expert Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi was studying how painters work, he noticed an odd thing. When their painting was going well, they did not care about getting tired, hungry or uncomfortable. They just carried on. But when the painting was finished, they rapidly lost interest in it.

Csíkszentmihályi described this state of mind as a flow state: the experience of being fully engaged with what you are currently doing. When in a flow state, an hour can pass in the blink of an eye, action and awareness merges and the experience is intrinsically rewarding. You feel that what you are doing is important, in full control and not self-conscious. Flow state does not just involve ultimate concentration. It is a complex state of mind where you are solely driven by focused motivation, operating at your peak level of mental and emotional engagement. Essentially, your mind uses 100% of its capacity for the task at hand, rather than wondering what is for dinner or peeking at the beautiful girl across the road. Because of this, a person in flow state not only works with great efficiency and creativity, but they also feel positive, energised and happy. In fact, the intense spontaneous joy brought on by flow state can almost be considered the mental equivalent of an orgasm.

So how can you achieve flow state? Flow state is not something that one chooses to go into. It is only attained when certain criteria are met.

  • Flow state can happen with any activity, but it is more likely to occur if you are internally motivated (i.e. you are doing the activity mainly for its own sake).
  • You should have clear short-term goals for what you are trying to achieve. This adds direction and structure to the task.
  • An important aspect of flow is that the activity must be challenging enough to stretch your skills almost to the limits, but not more. If it is not challenging enough, you will get bored. If it demands more skill than what you are capable of, you will become anxious. That being said, the balance only has to be between “perceived” challenge and skill. In other words, all you need is confidence that you can take on the challenge.
  • The activity should provide immediate feedback on how you are doing (e.g. seeing how a painting is turning out, hearing yourself sing). This allows you to adjust your performance in order to maintain flow state.

Flow is an incredibly useful thing. Through flow, you can forget about your worries and your strife, reach a state of pure happiness and inner peace and produce something truly great. The key to happiness is knowing what allows you to reach flow state and routinely entering flow state. For example, I know that the three things that give me flow are: music, humour and obsessions. Ergo, I play my guitar and sing, watch television shows that make me laugh and write an entry for the Encyclopaedia of Absolute and Relative Knowledge every day. All of these activities allow me to be truly happy, no matter what the situation may be.

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Posted in Life & Happiness

Communication

Posted on by Jinavie

What I am thinking,

What I want to say,

What I think I am saying,

What I say,

What you want to hear,

What you think you are hearing,

What you hear,

What you want to understand,

What you think you understand,

What you understand,

Because there are ten possibilities between what I think and what you understand, there is great difficulty in our communication.

But even so, we must try.

Posted in Life & Happiness

Yellow Ball

Posted on by Jinavie

If I was to put a yellow ball in front of you and ask what colour the ball is, you would confidently say “yellow”. As you say, the ball appears yellow, but the answer is technically wrong. Strictly speaking, the ball itself is not yellow – it is merely reflecting the colour yellow. The ball only appears yellow because we see the yellow part of the natural light spectrum bouncing off the ball. We cannot say that the essence of the ball is “yellow”. For example, if you were to look at the ball through a red lens, the yellow light would be filtered and you would see a black ball. A person with a certain kind of colour blindness would say the ball has a bluish hue. A butterfly, which sees the ultraviolet spectrum as well, would see a colour we cannot even name.

Human beings judge objects using the vision. We describe an object as we see it and store that information in our brain to define the object. For this purpose, the fact that a colour blind person or a butterfly sees the ball a different colour is irrelevant to us. All we need to know is that object appears yellow to us. But this is only the case for objects. Let us imagine the ball is a person. If everyone in the world sees you as a yellow ball, would that make you a yellow ball? Of course not. However, people worry too much about how others see them. Although other people’s perception does not change our true nature in the slightest, we even go as far as erasing or abandoning our nature to look good in front of another person. Thus, whether our essence is white, black, red, blue or technicolour, when others see us as yellow, we have a tendency to try desperately to become yellow. 

If the world says you are a yellow ball, act crazy and be a red ball. There is not a single reason you should have to hide your true nature. Have confidence in your essence. There is nothing wrong with that.

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Posted in Life & Happiness

Success

Posted on by Jinavie

If you ask a hundred children what their dream is, not a single one would say “I want to be successful”. But as children grow up and enter society, society advises them that dreams do not feed them. And so, children slowly lose their innocence and dreams and choose to chase success instead. Why? Because success will feed them and give them a secure future. It is uncommon to find a middle-aged person who has achieved their childhood dreams. The majority judge their dreams as unrealistic, put them away in a corner of their mind and sacrifice happiness to earn more money to feed the family. The child who wanted to become a painter who put the world on a canvas follows her parents’ advice and becomes a lawyer. The child who wanted to become an astronaut is working into the night at a bank so that he will be promoted. They devote themselves to work and strive to succeed. But when they are at their deathbed, the only thing they are left with is regrets.

In life, there is no success or failure. The only moment you will know whether you led a successful or failed life is when you are at your deathbed. No one else can judge whether you were a success or a failure. Whether you were rich, poor, famous, average, lived long or died prematurely, you were a success if you can end your life with this thought: “Yeah, I lived a happy life without regrets”.

Live without regrets.

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Posted in Life & Happiness

The Donkey And The Well

Posted on by Jinavie

One day, a donkey fell in to a well. It cried piteously for hours while the farmer tried to figure out what to do. Ultimately, the farmer decided that the donkey was old and was nor worth saving. He planned to fill the well, as he had no need for it either. He invited his neighbours to come over and help him. Everyone grabbed a spade and shovelled dirt into the well.

The donkey was terrified; sooner or later he would literally be buried alive, with no food, water or air. It cried even more and begged the farmer to show mercy. The people ignored the animal’s neighing and screeching. The donkey was about to give up. There was no hope of getting out the well and soon it would die a slow, suffocating death. But then, it came up with a cunning plan. As the dirt slowly filled the well, the donkey stepped up on the mound of earth. Eventually, the mound grew high enough for it to jump out of the well. The donkey then kicked the farmer and galloped off into the sunset.

Life is bound to throw all kinds of dirt at you. But just because bad things happen, it does not mean you have to live a miserable life. When life throws a spadeful of dirt at you, brush it off and step over it instead of letting it weigh you down. With a positive mindset and determination to become happy, you can escape even when you fall into the darkest, deepest well of despair.

Posted in Psychology & Medicine

Parent

Posted on by Jinavie

Parents only have one duty: to bring up their children with love. The problem is that so many parents do not know this fact, or have a twisted understanding of the concept of “love”. Some never even hug their child, some abandon their child for their own lives and some even abuse their child. However, that does not mean one should obsess with their child either. Always teaching the child that “they are the best” is not love. Also, trapping a child and preventing them from leaving you is obsession, not love. Some parents tell their children that studying will lead to a happy, successful future, and compare them to other children who get better grades. This is a crucial mistake, as the children will probably live out an unhappy life with a deep wound in their heart for the rest of their lives. This is because the parents’ role is not to secure a successful future and instructing them how to get there, but to allow the child to independently plan their future, taste failure and develop their own values and philosophy, only supporting them from the side. A parent is not a leader who leads a child along a predestined path of life, but an assistant who supports a child while they pave their own path of life and walk down it. To support and respect a child’s decisions, dreams, talents and potential; to teach the wisdom and skills the child will need to follow their dreams; that is true love.

Of course, that is not to say that one should neglect and leave a child without any interventions. If a child clearly makes an objective error or misbehaves, it is a parent’s role to correct it. This kind of home education is not interference like obsessing about the child’s studies, but supportive intervention that helps the child follow their dreams and not be lost on the way. Home education is a very important form of love that imbues a child with skills such as social skills, ethics, morality, philosophy and love that will allow them to lead a happy and wholesome life.

Why is parental love so important to a child? Childhood is a critical period when the child’s brain is rapidly developing and when the child begins to form his or her personality and view of the world. Almost every mental illness (especially personality disorders) can be traced back to a childhood trauma, or at least be affected by it. For example, a child whose parents did not care for them will grow up lacking love and attachment, leading to constantly seeking love and attention from others, which may develop into dependent personality disorder. If a child has to live up to the parents’ great expectations, they will not receive sympathy and fail to develop a self identity. To fill this void, the child will continuously float from one person to another to seek this sympathy. A child with obsessive parents being led to believe that they are the best could develop narcissistic personality disorder, who becomes violent and enraged when someone points out a mistake they made. As one can see, parental love is a crucial nutrient that fosters a healthy personality in a child, helping them become a wholesome, independent “person”.

No matter how poor the parents are, a child who was raised on love is able to construct a plentiful, happy life. Then, when the child becomes a parent, they will know how to raise their own children with love as well. The best parents are those who respect the child’s decisions and allow them to be free when they set out on their pursuit of happiness. All you need is love.

Posted in History & Literature

Zodiac: Sagittarius

Posted on by Jinavie

Sagittarius is the Zodiac sign for those born between November 22 and December 21. The symbol for Sagittarius is centaur (half-man, half-horse) with a bow and arrow.

The model for Sagittarius is the wisest and most intelligent centaur, Chiron. Although most centaurs are known to be aggressive beasts only interested in women and alcohol, Chiron was different in that he was culture and civilised. He was interested in gathering knowledge and learning philosophy, especially medical knowledge. Chiron is also famous for being the teacher and master of many famous heroes and gods. Among his students are: the god of medicine, Asclepius; the Trojan War hero, Achilles; leader of the Argonauts, Jason; and the famous hero, Hercules. One day, Hercules ended up in a fight with some centaurs, which resulted in a bloody battle. Hercules used arrows coated with the poison of the Hydra (which he obtained during his twelve labours), swiftly killing many centaurs. Chiron saw this battle and galloped there to try and stop everyone from hurting each other. But Hercules did not see his master and accidentally shot him with a poison arrow. Although Chiron was given the gift of immortality by the gods, the Hydra’s poison still caused excruciating pain. Even though he was one of the best medical professions of his time, he could not alleviate the pain and begged Zeus to put him out of his misery. Zeus accepted this and raised him into the heavens to become a constellation as a sign of respect.

(Part of the Zodiac series: https://jineralknowledge.com/tag/zodiacs/?order=asc)