How God Can Be Cognized/Mikhail Nikolenko

Mikhail Nikolenko

Childhood and Youth

My memories of my childhood in this lifetime begin from the age of about three years. I remember that I very seriously and clearly perceived the world around me — not less clear than it is now. It was a process of accumulating experience, familiarity with the material world, in which I was to live. And what seems to be for an adult small and ordinary, can fully capture, draw the attention of a child — because he or she is faced with this for the first time during the life in these bodies.

I also remember the care and affection of my mother, her hands full of love.

Another person who embraced, enveloped me with her love was my grandmother. She was a selfless woman who lived only for the sake of others. I never saw in her emotions of irritation, hatred towards anyone. She also never defended her own interests.

My father, too, was a wonderful man. Before I was born, he worked in a design bureau of a plant, which produced TVs. It was an interesting job, and he was a promising professional. The parents were a young couple, and they still did not have their own apartment. When my father found out that he would have a child, he decided to leave his work and future careers — and move to another city, where his wife’s parents lived and where there were optimal conditions for the growth of the newborn.

It is thanks to his parents and grandmother, I knew — since childhood — love, affection, and was able to grow with the feeling that I feel good in this world. They gave me a wonderful childhood!

I remember our walks on skis in the winter forest among the stately snow-covered firs. In sunny weather, the forest was particularly impressive by its extraordinary, fairy-tale beauty. The whole body seemed to be imbued with a healthy freshness and purity of frosty air.

In summer, during the school years, I was always expecting a vacation in the village with my other grandmother, where I could swim in the river, sunbathe.

We also went as a family on trips with overnight camping on the riverbank. There, we were often faced with forest beings, in particular, with snakes, hedgehogs. We caught some of them for a better look and even took hedgehogs to our home for a short time: I and my sister really liked to see such a small mammal living in our apartment. Now I recall about this with regret, because we did not take into consideration the right of these creatures to run their lives, and we troubled them only for our own fun.

The desire and inner need to be respectful to the residents of the forest and not to disturb them unnecessarily — came to me years later.

... God clearly built my childhood in accordance with His Plan. For this, He gave me to cognize not only the warmth of human love, but also the difficulties that there are in life.

One of them was the disease, because of which I was admitted to the hospital for two years. For a child of preschool age, it was a terrible shock: to be cut off from family and accept the fact that now I will live in totally alien, unfamiliar conditions. But, in terms of future growth, it was good, because it gave me useful experience.

... I also clearly see now, how for me — in this incarnation — was predestined a path of development in the scientific environment.

One of my grandmothers was a school teacher. She taught me to read and write even at preschool age. And in the hospital, I was pleased, avidly “devoured” books. Because of this I even had received from other children the nickname “Professor”.

Most of all, I was fascinated by the book that told about the structure of space and the solar system. I “accidentally” bumped onto it in a box with the hospital rubbish, where it miraculously appeared. This book first aroused my interest in the scientific knowledge of the world.

The school, where I had to study, turned out to be great: the teachers of mathematics and physics were in love with their job. Largely thanks to them, I began to love these disciplines and studied them with pleasure.

And when, after graduation, I entered the Physics-Technical Institute, where there was a very big competition, there was another “accidental” coincidence. At the verbal examination on physics, the tasks posed to me by the examiner, were of those that I have just analyzed the eve with the textbook. As a result, I passed the competition and was accepted to study at the institute.

Later, more than once, I was convinced from my own experience that, when a person takes actions that are consistent with God’s Plan, this person moves as if on rails: all events are perfectly lined up one behind the other, the circumstances are favorable, the right people are met. It is like a trip by railway, where the arrivals and departures of trains are coordinated with each other, and the traveler moves smoothly from one segment of the way to another.

Such “successful transplants” occurred in my early life and later: while studying at the university I was invited to an internship at the Institute of Nuclear Research. There I found a job at the end of study.

Soon I received an invitation to participate in an international experiment at the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva. Work in an international scientific team has given me a very valuable experience.

So I reached that, which I dreamed in school years: graduated from one of the most prestigious universities of the country, became a member of the famous center of science, participated in a major international experiment, carried out at the very forefront of modern elementary particle physics. And I even received, as a result, the Ph.D. degree in physics and mathematics.

But all this, however, did not limit my desires. By that time, I opened a much larger perspective, which, when I was a child, I could not even imagine.