Adam Blatner
Words and Images from the Mind of Adam Blatner
Table of Contents:
Foolin Around
“BbbbL…”
This is the sound of a spluttered Bl… a “raspberry” as a term for the sound made of slightly sticking out your tongue and making an impudent noise. Bbbbl is a sound followed by a sort of soft or silent L. If you think about it, BbbbL is one phoneme. It often is a sound […]
“Focusing Agents”
The following is only a mytho-poetic exercise: So imagine the living cosmos requires at some point in its evolution the development of a layer of advancing consciousness that can become reflective, can recognize itself as conscious, and from that, move into recognizing the world and the universe as emerging into consciousness. (That’s me! and maybe […]
“Glory Be” Is God
I speculate philosophically and theologically with certain friends, so when my pal Anthony Skrovan asked at lunch, “So what do you think was going on before the Big Bang?”, it was fun to dare to imagine an answer. Before I share it with you, though, a disclaimer: Of course I don’t know to the tenth […]
"Other than That, He’s Perfectly Normal”
This line from a skit in the mid-1970s done by the British comedy troupe, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which was on public television at the time. The line would address the fallacy of normality —there are so many variables that no one could ever be “normal” —but rather everyone copes with the institutional requirements, and […]
(‘S)elves
Little known (because I just made it up) are the auxiliary selves, the adjunctive resonant energy forces that support the major unfolding of the psyche. These, too, are part of the experience of the “self,” though never acknowledged, unconscious, because, like invisible germs, they are hardly perceptible to the ordinary senses. One must cultivate not […]
A Central Texas “Dragon”
In this Chinese Year of the Dragon, my wife noticed that our region of the Texas Hill Country features a living (?) river dragon of considerable size, also known as “Lake Travis.” But look! So I looked and sure enough. Well, I just had to tell you! With a little more rain it’ll get fleshier. […]
A Component “Next Step”
What is illustrated below is Task 4b: This shows how multi-contextual paradigms are affected by shifting aesthetic criteria. It was not really possible to reveal this task to any member of humanity until now, as the species as a whole was rather immature, and many of the concepts thus named in this task were really […]
A Cosmic Compass
For those of you who lose your way, perhaps this may help. It is a cosmic compass. Actually, it may not help much, because “direction” is such as 3-dimensional… well, dimension? Realm? (But the true cosmos, you know, is very multi-dimensional and includes, for example, dreams.) But the point in the symbolism below is really, […]
A Hundred Loose Screws
I have a panel in front of me, figuratively speaking, a panel with a hundred more-or-less tightened screws, although 34% have been loosened 1/8 to ½. I am loosening them a little at a time. It’s not that I have a screw loose, which implies that there is one screw holding my mind in place, […]
A Little “Tottery”
To tell you the truth, I’m growing older, approaching 80, a tiny bit more tottery. I still dance, but for fast folk dances it takes a little more time to get the messages through my nerves down to the feet. Still ballroom dance. There seems to be a balance between exercising to one’s capacity and […]
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 […]
Add “Surplus Reality”
I found a book by Rosilyn Wilder, a teacher of creative drama, titled "A Space Where Anything Can Happen" (New Plays Books, 1977). Yes, it fits with my hope to expand consciousness so that people—not just young people, but old people, too, like my age group!—can make up stuff. In a world (and school system) […]
Adding Photos to Blog
My son David is helping me learn how to add photos to my blog. The learning continues. Here is a picture of the area around Beijing, China, where, in preparation for the 2008 Olympics, they did amazing gardens and topiary. For example: Okay, viewed it. Now will add another picture: Very fast photography of a […]
Afterlife Letter from Freud to Jung
The following is a fantasized letter from Sigmund Freud to Carl Jung about the nature of a more holistic psychology: Dear Carl, Now that I’m dead to the living, I’ve discovered that as part of my purgatory, my purification process, on this post-death plane I’m encouraged to do a life review. I have come […]
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 Over the Internet
What does it mean that my friend Russell Williams in Southern California has been writing about me and inviting me to write about my ideas? I’m present at more than one place on the internet! Wow! http://passkeys.org/author/russell-williams/page/6/ http://blogs.ocmetro.com/1979-adam-blatner/ http://blogs.ocmetro.com/a-lively-curiosity/ Perhaps you too will find yourself thus publicized as time goes on. Perhaps it is not […]
Art-Speak from Other Worlds
Sometimes what we want to say cannot be expressed in the linear alphabetic word-language of your species. In music, this is why polyphonic music and then orchestras were employed: to suggest rich textures of experience-meaning. Since we’re using a print/visual medium to communicate to your people […]
Awesome! No Problem!
The desk clerk was a young man who responded to matter-of-fact arrangements being made at a hotel with such phrases, instead of saying “okay,” “good,” or “yes, Ma’am.” It’s strange when young people say “awesome” to describe fortunate but really rather mundane events. Or when something has evidently been a big problem, but they work […]
Back, Dragon!
When I was young I was very taken by the struggle of the boy in the poem, Jabberwocky, in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass. My pretend dragon—let’s call him Poof, because in some ways he came back in the 60s as Puff the Magic Dragon, and I would engage in cartoon-fantasy struggles. […]
Bean uh Splainer
I’m uh splainer. I splain things. You got a thing? I’ll splain it. No problem. I don’t claim to splain it right, according to you or some other standard. I don’t even claim that my splanation will work good. It’s just a splanation. Like a myth. Or a construct, a story, a figment of imagination. […]
Becoming More Spontaneous
One of a number of chosen missions in life is to help people re-own their own natural potential for spontaneity and their capacity for exploratory playfulness. As Allee and I write in The Art of Play (which we’re presently re-writing), spontaneity and playfulness not in itself childish. Although its roots begin in early childhood, and […]
Bibliophilia
I am a bibliophiliac, a mild addict, not so much in the sense of seeking collections per se, but really interested in what the books say in certain fields. This New Yorker cover describes my living room, not to speak of several other rooms with many bookcases. I realized that not many people have this […]
Biochemistry Enlivened
I’m sorry to have to use the trope of “little men,” elves and fairies that look like little people, but that’s where humanity is. It’s hard to realize that at the micro-level, subtle astral forces facilitate events as much as the fairies help flowers to blossom or birds to find their mates. (Oh, yeah, just […]
Blahg For the Great-Grandchildren
Your Grandpa, my son, reminded me that I’m writing this for you! My true identity as AB is not Adam Blatner—that’s just my “Earth” name. Really its “Amazing Brains!” Adam is just my cover, just this guy. Part of the time in the role of Adam do dishes, enjoy my kids and grandkids, be a […]