Adam Blatner
Words and Images from the Mind of Adam Blatner
Table of Contents:
Mind-Spectrums
Don’t Break the Fourth Wall?
The “fourth wall” is a term in drama that recognizes that spectators watch an enactment by players who behave as if there is no one watching, as if the walls of the stage are not transparent—especially the imagined wall that is really the open space between the stage and the audience. That imagined wall is […]
Doubling: Helping to Express the Unspeakable
Sometimes poets and songwriters say well what one can hardly express. A successful poem or song can express more poignantly, or beautifully than people’s more mundane feelings and thoughts. I’m reminded of a verse by a song sung by Roberta Flack in the 1970s, “Killing Me Softly:” “I heard he sang a good song, I […]
Ellipses
I love ellipses, that punctuation symbol ( …) that leaves room for imagined and un-imagined words, and frankly inexpressible experiences. I wonder if ol’ Sigmund (Freud) had any sense of the ultimate in-express-ability of many feelings. There are a couple of books about words in other languages that express things for which there are no […]
Embarking Into Philosophy
I have a young friend who is interested and asked me about what to read. This challenged me to think of how to respond. Philosophy, after all, is a very broad game. I think the key is to be found in a phrase used by one of my favorite philosophers, Alfred North Whitehead (1865 – […]
Explaining “Dimensionality”
I call my theory of reality, my metaphysics, “dimensionality.” The word suggests that some things are better understood as operating at different dimensions. Thus, some truths are best understood as applying to certain dimensions, and there is “more-yet” that is so at a higher dimension. For example, consider solid geometry. In dealing with a sphere, […]
Good Gracious!
This blog has been inactive for a few months as we’ve been moving from Texas to California. We have reached an age where we need the help of our daughter’s family, and, indeed, more of us may well be able to achieve more of what we aim for. Meanwhile, our goals and aspirations have been […]
Higher Consciousness as ETs
Considering extra-terrestrials, E-Ts. What if they’re really nice? There have been many movies that represent sentient beings from other planets as hostile and powerful, from The War of the Worlds on. But what if in fact extra-terrestrials do exist, and they definitely do not want to conquer you or eat you? What if that notion […]
How It Works
I have been informed by those in the know—or say they’re in the know—that we live in a multi-dimensional cosmos. “Duh, we all knew that.” “No,” they say, “Most folks don’t.” “What? I replied, Haven’t they been reading my blog?” I guess not. Anyway, there are lots of interpenetrating dimensions. As for us, we’re at […]
How the Mind Works
The mind, or as they say in a children’s song, “Der Honky-Donky-Doodle,” works in mysterious ways. At last (or as I am wont to say, alas) neruo-imaging has met neuro-imagining and resulted in a picture of the nerve bundle that connects right and left brain, the “corpus callosum,” as it is technically called. Below is […]
Illusions
I’m preparing a series on illusion for a class I’ll be giving starting at the end of this month at the lifelong learning organization that I helped found about 19 years ago. Not optical illusions, or magician’s illusions—though those are undoubtedly interesting, but psychological illusions. These operate at all levels of social organization. I […]
Individuality
A recent correspondence: My friend Ed wrote about seeing the video of my son David’s presentation in Seattle about “Spectrums”—a book he had just published. He wrote, “You son David has inherited your exuberance and capacity for projection. I learned something .. of the existence of "tetrachromats": Amazing idea, that some people have sensory capacities […]
Life Enlargement
Indeed, I’ve changed my vocational direction to the title of this piece! Back when I was into psychiatry, Freudian—really, post-Freudian— psychoanalysis still was dominant, and though I differed with many of the ideas, some I agreed with. Last year I taught what has become more standard and evidence-based, and after thinking about it, though I […]
Life is Very Multi-Complex
There are so many things to do, so many roles to play: Going to the toilet has many sub-roles, depending on whether you’re a man or a woman, depending on whether you’re constipated or have diarrhea, on the quality of the plumbing and the warmth of the toilet, on whether the toilet is in the […]
Living Subjectively
Once again I have been reminded of the fact that we all live subjectively, and we select out and resonate to songs, nature, whatever in idiosyncratic ways. This is great fodder for the existentialists: No one can truly rise to absolutely complete empathy with another, even if we try. While we may become truly close, […]
Making Meaning
I’ve participated in the Network for Personal Meaning, and a recent email from Dr. Wong, who heads up that group reminded me of some thoughts I’ve had about this topic. Personal meaning emerges largely as a feeling, like feeling secure in one’s home. It can also be stifled by a childhood of great insecurity. But […]
Mild Social Learning Disability
f I’m so smart, why am I so dense? I have a little bit of social learning disability, a term I used for a borderline form of mild Asperger’s disorder. It’s enough so that I annoy people who think that I’m ignoring their feelings when really I mis-perceive or really fail to perceive those unspoken-about […]
Mind-Blowing In-Sight
We are all living in a time when the full logical impact of our present situation for humanity is that we now seem to be part of the culmination of four billion years of planetary evolution within a cosmos four and a half times older than that. I just realized this: It is truly mind-blowing […]
Mind-Spectrums Picture
The problem with mind-spectrums is that they involve different sorts of things, receptive sense organs, intuitive “organs,” temperamental sensitivities, interpretative biases (which follow worldviews), frames of reference, etc. There are tendencies to imagine as distinctly different things that which is the same thing (at least as resonating to one part of one kind of spectrum), […]
Multi-Dimensional Metaphysics
I’ve contemplated and considered the idea that our cosmos involves many dimensions. Mind itself operates at a 5th dimension, beyond time and space, mainly; to some degree it penetrates yet higher dimensions, but rarely can make out their meaning in any definite way. That is to say, the conscious aspect of human mind hardly penetrates […]
Multi-Dimensional Mind
At one dimension—a line—we notice more or less of something, a spectrum. There are innumerable spectrums on all sorts of criteria or parameters. (My son David wrote a book about Spectrums, but he only touched the most obvious physical parameters.) In two dimensions—on paper on a computer screen—all sorts of patterns can be noted, as […]
My Offspringing Kidlings
I was feeling apologetic about my inability to really get into kids, stimulated by a comparison with Allee (my wife) and my daughter, who are more people people. Allee said, Your writings are you “offspring-ings” and I later had the thought, “Verily, the are my “kid-lings.” (Well, I didn’t say verily, but you get the […]
Off The Deep End
I have indeed gone off the deep end. To someone in the shallow end, this is insanely nuts. To those who swim well, well, that’s where the swimming is best. One cannot readily say that “higher” consciousness is “better,” because in ignorance there is bliss. No, that’s somewhat elitist. Actually, certain advantages accrue to those […]
On Knowability
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that asks about how we know what we think we know. I would dig it a bit deeper and ask whether it might be that true knowledge of anything, full knowledge, is truly impossible in a world of cosmic dimensions. In other words, could it be that the notion […]