Adam Blatner
Words and Images from the Mind of Adam Blatner
Table of Contents:
Spirituality and Philosophy
Disney Getting Metaphysical?
The Walt Disney Corporation apparently has sponsored this song about the way we’re all in this together, a song, “One Everything.” (It is sung by the group, They Might be Giants.” The implications are significant: If it is indeed so that we are part of an “Everything” (and Spinoza equated this mind-boggling idea with God), […]
Divine Pollen
Here’s another mythic construct: I get to be a point of “focusing consciousness” in the cosmos. It’s sort of like a pollen grain. Staying with that metaphor, the cosmos has been spending billions of years in constructing: – a star not too hot or cold, and a planetary system with at least one planet capable […]
Does God “Exist”
Does “God” exist? It’s a hard question because so many people have different conscious and unconscious understandings of that word, “God.” We must remember that it’s only a word, and more, there are different words in different cultures to refer to sort of the same thing. But actually, the complex of associations called up in […]
Does the Universe Have a Purpose?
Stimulated by some friends alluding to the discussion posted at http://www.templeton.org/purpose/ , contemplating their responses, here’s mine: It’s a misleading question. It assumes that there’s a “there” there, that there is an objective reality apart from what we are co-creating. In that sense, it may be a mistaken assumption that anything can “have” a purpose […]
Dogma in the Postmodern World
As we’ve become increasingly aware of the nature of mind and its intrinsic complexity, I perceive a rationale for a postmodern perspective. The perception of a non-trivial truth must resonate through the wholeness of our being, and as we recognize several elements, the idea that two people can deeply experience (perception plus interpretation) in the […]
Dynamic Tree of Life
Things are dynamically changing. A couple of days ago I noted this about one cosmic diagram, the Shree Yantra. (A yantra is sort of a map of the cosmos, allowing for the understanding that no such map could ever be made no matter how many dimensions we could conceivably represent. But for meditation purposes, some […]
Eeksplanations (and other Confabulations)
Sometimes my spirit guide, one of a couple dozen or so, channels inspirational messages and pictures. If this seems too far out, ignore it, consider that I just made this stuff up. Or contemplate these words on their own merits. As a psychiatrist colleague who was a consultant to our program when I was in […]
Effective Love Requires More Consciousness
I recently read an email advocating the virtues of love of humanity and a quote from Albert Einstein about the ultimate unity of life. I agree, being a person of my time, subject to the idealistic paradigms of what civilization seemed to be reaching for. Yet it also stimulated in me a contemplation of why […]
Eggsistentialism
Recently I’ve been contemplating the internally-reinforcing logic of a strict materialist, a modern thinker, and how, from another perspective, how shallow it is. The Aristotelian may note in full the details that lead to details, how seemingly un-ending is the extrapolation of the sources of bacon, toast, or coffee, of its own birth in butter […]
Ego, Memory, and Forgetfulness
I have been contemplating the sheer vulnerability of my memories, and the innate elusiveness of so many of the experiences that part of me wants to cling to. I want to have these experiences whenever I want to access them, as if they were kept possessions, treasures. Well, that’s one of the things ego does. […]
Ego—a Term with Many Meanings
In a number of contexts—“new age,” psychology, consciousness studies, spirituality—the term “ego” has been used as if it’s a problem. There are several meanings of “ego” and it may be worthwhile considering these. First, the word is Latin for “I” and is attributed by the English translators of Freud’s writings to that part of the […]
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 – […]
Embryo-as-God Metaphor
Mythmaking tends to draw on ancient metaphors—stories of super-heroes and god-kings, the imagination of millennia past, etc. But what if we created myths that drew on the findings of science in the last century or so? In this case, consider the emerging sub-field of biology called embryology. Two hundred years ago we didn’t know about […]
End-of-Life Doula”! Brilliant Idea
I picked up a book at the public library titled A Graceful Goodbye: A New Outlook on Death, by Susan B. Mercer. She’s an end-of-life doula. The idea of “doula” as one who facilitates a major role transition like birth was familiar. Indeed, I was a doula for my daughter’s first child’s first few weeks. […]
Envisioning Cultural Trends
This is only the beginning of a century in which people will begin to expand and deepen their identities manifold. We have become aware of the vastness of the cosmos, the depth of time (not thousands, but billions of years!), the complexity of nature, the depth and complexity and frontiers of mind (and unconscious mental […]
Epistemological Mind-Stretchings
Everything nowadays is being revealed as being far more complex than we thought it was. This trend has involved all fields, including subtle differences in psychology. For example, there is the problem of how do we know what we know? This is a philosophical problem known as epistemology. For example, we start with what is […]
Epistemology and Depth Psychology
Epistemology is that branch of philosophy that inquires into the problem of how we know what we know. Can some of what we think we know be illusions or errors? How could that be? Can Truth be known? Reality? The first point here is that most people seem to buy into the idea that truth […]
Eventfulness
…muscles are contracting; the earth is rotating (duck!) ; neurons are depolarizing (firing) : stomach and intestinal contents gurgle (borborygmi) ; air is circulating ; fluids are flowing ; there is beauty being experienced ; …and pain ; chemicals are reacting ; hearts are beating ; chemicals are reacting ; mites are eating… and […]
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, […]
Explaining Zordak’s Existence
I have a friend here at Sun City named John who sometimes reads my blog. Not infrequently he challenges me in a friendly way to expand my philosophy. He tends to be more materialist and I think tends to give science more weight than I think it deserves, but I agree with his requirement for […]
Exploratory Drama for Life
It may be time to confirm some rapprochement among drama therapy (all varieties, and there are several!), psychodrama (several varieties), and other arts “therapies”—and more that their being considered together, and consider now how they do not have to be therapeutic. In the mid-1950s some people partook of psychoanalysis because it was fashion-able, not because […]
Exploring More Paradigm Shifts
Reading some Whitehead and other philosophies, I’m impressed again with how the paradigms are changing in some ways I didn’t talk about previously. We learn, but in contrast to the general tone or world-view in the past, we learn also that the learning is un-ending. There is almost nothing of significance that is learned definitively. […]
Extending the Parable of the Blind Men and Elephant
In a recent post I mentioned the recent probable confirmation of the Higgs boson, which is only a condensation (?) of the “Higgs field”—which is still very mysterious indeed. Indeed, there are many mysteries at the edge of what our most expensive and complex machines can access: Also there are the various models of subatomic […]
Facets of Meaning
I’ve been reading about Paul T. Wong’s Network for Personal Meaning. I’ve been to a few of their conferences and think what he’s doing is good. Of course, he’s right, it seems, but also meaning-making seems to me to be an intermediate step. For many, finding meaning, co-creating meaning, may serve as a fulcrum. I […]
Faeries: Resonant Energy Fields
Faeries are not real in an ordinary materialist sense, but then again, neither is love. They are expressions of mind, and mind transcends a mere materialism-based metaphysical philosophy. You are really reading this, though all bets are off as to how you interpret it. More importantly, that leads to the realization that if you think […]