Adam Blatner
Words and Images from the Mind of Adam Blatner
Table of Contents:
Spirituality and Philosophy
A Passover Contemplation
What really happened on Mt Sinai (A myth): Moses: Okay Lord, gimme the rules. The Lord: No rules. We co-create this. General guidelines. Be nice. Stuff like that. M I gotta have rules. L: Yes, dear Moishe, you are dealing with slaves and the children of slaves, I understand. But I have a problem […]
A Passover Myth
In the spirit of creative mythmaking, I made up the following to illustrate the possibility of what true spiritual freedom means, which is not even subtle mental enslavement to what some authority figure dictates—forget about how terribly distorted those rules may become over the millennia—but rather taking on responsibility for the present moment and daring […]
A Psychodramatic Story
(This is actually my condensation of an old Hasidic Jewish story attributed to the great story-teller and mystic, Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav, who was active in the first third of the 19th Century in what is now Byelorus, but was then the "Pale of Permitted Jewish Settlement" west of Moscow. I used this as an […]
A Theological Confabulation
I am a contemplateur, an affected term I made up to make my lazy thinking about stuff sound fancy. It’s a way to play. So I’ve been thinking about the Big Whats-it-all-about, beyond space, time, matter, and energy. I view these categories as fabulous in their infinitude, but still I have a hunch that […]
A Well-Rounded Life
Here’s a myth I heard: We sing and dance for the gods. This is our task. They don’t have hands and feet, so we need to do it, and they enjoy through us. I think it was about Australian Aborigine nature religions, but I’m not sure. It’s a deep idea, though. Dancing and singing has […]
Accelerating Change
The spring became a trickle, then a stream, then a rivulet. That then became a creek, then a small non-navigable river; then a big ol’ river (navigable), and a bigger river. Then the water flowed into a delta and from thence to the sea. Then it rolled back to us as a tsunami (tidal wave)! […]
Accepting Limitations
Early this morning when I was dreaming, in the dream I was at a sort of class lecture, and my eyes kept closing and sort of being glued shut. I tried to keep my eyes open with my fingers as I wanted to hear what the speakers were saying. Upon awakening I did a bit […]
Age-ing (Growing Older)
I’m age 80 now. My wife and I are reading an intriguing book about ageing titled Aging: An Apprenticeship, edited by Nan Narboe. This book’s goal is to help us think about the finitude of our living and to prepares us for our dying, our mortality, our limitedness. The book got me thinking about my […]
Agnostic
For a while I was agnostic, which means that I affirm that I don’t know about God. This was around the ages of 13 – 22, and I was influenced in this by the writings of Robert Ingersoll in the 19th century and Thomas Paine in the late 18th. Not that I wasn’t interested in […]
All About Fun
A friend mentioned fun as a primary philosophical category and I agreed: I’ve talked to my guardian angel who translates for the committee of about 30 angels—I’m sure I don’t know for sure—who manage my life and on the side and serve as inspiration sources about fun—and they reported that, though some nuances may be […]
All Are Prophets
I was looking through one of Neal Donald Walsh’s Conversations With God series of books and other media, and this notion occurred to me: You and I can imagine vividly, too. It’s just that there has been a cultural taboo against speaking or writing one’s inspiration and then claiming as did the prophets of yore […]
Ambiguous Decisions
Sometimes I’m rather unsure as to which position to take. There are good arguments on both sides of so many things. (Indeed, on my webpage on ethics I list over 30 current policy issues that I haven’t come to any conclusion.) Someone suggested I join some of the social media, such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, […]
An Amateur Confabulator
I’m an amateur confabulator. Amateur means only that I don’t get paid for this. Or should I say, “You couldn’t pay me to do this!”? And to con-fabulate means to make stuff up. Originally this was a medical term referring to people who because of a mild dementia didn’t even know they were doing it. […]
An Ethical Will (Part 1)
I brought up the idea of the ethical will with my son and we were wondering together what kind of words, what heritage, did we wish to impart to his kids, my grandkids, others. (Whoa! as of today, over 100,000 hits!) The ethical will is an old Jewish tradition in which we write a letter […]
Analysis Interminable
So my wife and I are pretty mentally healthy, but we are introspective, so we notice traces of neurosis, such as introjection of dissatisfied early attachment figures—also known as “hungry ghosts”—those for whom who we were was never enough—and we joked about it. I strongly suspect that 30 years of psychoanalysis would not suffice. “Only […]
Another Way to Think About “Divination”
I mentioned my meeting with Rowena Kryder yesterday in another post (an astonishingly insightful holistic thinker), and another idea I got from her was a different way of thinking about divination. She said: “Divination is of course one of the oldest and profound methods of humans finding truth. “To divine” is to reach the eternal […]
Answers?
I’ve realized that in the 20th century a major subtle attitude emerged: that there were “answers.” It was okay to ask questions and the unspoken message was that someone somewhere did have an answer. What wasn’t said explicitly enough was that indeed, there were answers to some questions, but this accounted for perhaps only around […]
Argument versus Reconciliation
My dear wife Allee and I have some of our greatest enjoyment in talking deeply. Rather than arguing, we listen and then try to not only understand, but express in terms of what the other might be thinking and feeling. We explored two key archetypes last night: I realized I’m settled into a sense that […]
At the Bottom Edge of Higher Consciousness
Alas, my mind plays best at this interface. I even speculate on a half-level higher. Mind interpenetrates all these, from one to seven dimensions. Each dimensional advance partakes of all “lower” dimensions. I’ve speculated on this spectrum of dimensions in past blog posts. The one before that also. I’ll not say that everything is mind, […]
Back 2 the Blog! Yay!
For a few weeks I have been out of it computer-wise and somewhat sickly, physically, too. Finally, with a new computer and coaching from a wonderful mentor at our community Computer Club, I am restoring my internet integrity. Whew! So I have some accumulated web-log entries to catch up with, and also a restored sense […]
Being Apophatic
According to the online free dictionary, apophatic is defined as “of or relating to the belief that God can be known to humans only in terms of what He is not (such as `God is unknowable’). I take it as a confession that puny human brains can never know, and I hold to this. I […]
Beyond Reason in Philosophy
Most of true philosophy involves reason, but not all. I like this following quote from one of my favorite philosophers, Alfred North Whitehead (1869-1947), who wrote near the end of his book, Modes of Thought: “The use of philosophy is to maintain an active novelty of fundamental ideas illuminating the social system. It reverses the […]
Beyond Religions
Book Review: Beyond religions: ethics for a whole world. By the 14th Dalai Lama. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2011). Pleased to discover this book as it speaks to the beginning convergence of psychological literacy and what His Holiness calls “the education of the heart.” I think we need this and the book describes a […]
Beyond the Beyond
There’s a Tibetan Mantra that, when translated, begins, “Beyond, beyond, beyond the beyond…” Recent developments in science have intensified the magnitude of its frontiers, from the vast to the minuscule. We are invited to consider theoretical constructs posed to explain phenomena that we don’t yet understand: At the micro-level, “strings” of primordial energy millions of […]
Beyond-ness
There are realms beyond our own. This truth has been almost hammered into human minds over the last five hundred years: Micro-realms with the invention of the microscope, and macro-realms with the telescope. Current developments have extended these view many-fold. We have further learned that we perceive and can perceive only a limited range of […]