Adam Blatner
Words and Images from the Mind of Adam Blatner
Table of Contents:
Essays and Papers
But It Seems So Compellingly Real
This takes off from previous blog posts. It combines dimensional perspectives and numinour verisimilitude. These may be thought of as deriving their compelling-ness because mind operates on many levels simultaneously: – It can experience things as more or less, as if on a spectrum: One Dimension. – It can experience pattern, color, map, writing, all […]
Changing Eras
Allee & I read in bed: One flosses, the other reads. Right now it’s Bobos in Paradise, Bobos being Bohemian Bourgeosie. It speaks to the sociological shifts of the late 1950s through the early 1970s. We only vaguely knew this was going on. The American culture was shifting from subtle aristocracy to meritocracy. More Jews […]
Cheap Diplomas!(?) Shop and Compare!
I’m dismayed at the sheer volume of spam email about “genuine” diplomas for sale—cheap! On one hand, I playfully want to join the bandwagon: I’m allied with The Wizard of Oz who created a Diploma for the Scarecrow because of his “cleverness” in rescuing Dorothy. Hey, why not? I can make up one for you […]
Circuses Without Animals
Reading the July/August 2017 Smithsonian, it has an article about changes in circuses: A century or so ago, through to when I was a lad in the 1940s, circuses exploited captured animals—bareback riders, lion- and tiger-tamers, tricks with elephants , but in the early 21st Century acts that featured animals were phased out. Acts that […]
Commandments & Guidelines
The following cartoon has interesting wording: This is a deep misunderstanding of the nature of law. For the word “government” substitute “necessary,” because it is childish to think that the ten commandments are not ambiguous. For “guidelines” substitute the word “interpretations.” Think of what the Talmud was about, and modern-day Bible classes in many mainstream […]
Common Sense
(I confess that what follows is perhaps more of my commentary than a good book review, but still I want to acknowledge Common Sense: A Political History, by Sophia Rosenfeld (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), is an excellent, scholarly review of the notion, especially as it has evolved in the last few hundred years. […]
Compelling Distractions: Another “Service” of the Amplifying Unconscious
In a recent series of blogs I laid out my provisional theory of the amplifying unconscious, a way of speaking about psychic energy that notes its capacity to intensify our intentions, whether they be for good, evil, or what most folks do, which is to pursue childish illusions. To that list I would add a […]
Complexity and Change
Not only is the world changing at an accelerating rate, but many things are becoming far more complex than they used to be—not only because our tools are more refined and we keep discovering levels of complexity not known previously (as in microscopy or astronomy), but also as we contemplate consciousness the number of variables […]
Consider the Universe
Consider that the universe—which includes every thought as well as everything— is expanding, as is God, and we get to be a tiny part of it. Do not think that you’re praising God by presuming S/He’s all finished. Consider—open to the idea—that an unfinished, open-ended creative process is quite a bit more glorious than a […]
Considering Cultural Trends I
Reading Jeremy Rifkin’s excellent and recommended recently published book, The Empathic Civilization, makes an erudite and extensive case for the emergence of a more complex type of consciousness. Recommended! But what occurred to me is that not only is he right, but that also history has been moving towards the emergence of other cultural and […]
Considering the “Imaginosphere”
I use this term to name the category not of ordinary thought, problem-solving, or linear communication, but rather of those types of thinking, intuition, imagination (including aspects of music and other senses) that transcend the kind of thinking that is required for most mundane tasks. This realm is far vaster, including myths, stories, poetry, nonsense, […]
Constructing a Philosophy of Life
There’s an instinct in the deep psyche to lead the mind towards a sense of meaning. In this sense, almost everyone has a philosophy of life, insofar as they assemble a satisfactory collage of platitudes, social norms, widely-accepted beliefs, and so forth that in their aggregate offer the illusion of coherence and significance. More most […]
Contemplating Folly
One of the problems with consciousness in our own era is that knowledge is expanding much faster than any even small collective can keep up with. Curiosity, the awareness that there is so much more to know, is not keeping up with our rapidly expanding horizons. There is a natural inclination towards inertia, which means […]
Controversies
On a website, https://shar.es/16hs8Q , the writer of a blog criticizes a New York Times essay by Barbara Ehrenreich, a best selling author. The essay criticizes the “selfish side” of thankful-ness. The criticism suggests that she may have misread the research? My response is that this is a meaty topic for sociodrama. Of course all […]
Creativity Carries On
I have of late encountered a series of experiences that have delivered a reassuring and startling message: There are many who carry on the work of creativity, and many who are doing so in ways that are more refined, more radical, more elaborate, more whatever than me! A small and not-to-be-honored egocentric part begrudges them: […]
Deconstructing Multi-Perspectival-ness
(…or is it multi-perspectival-osity? I mean, can you just make up words like that?) The scene opens at an unnamed university, not in a secret bunker under a mountain, but right out in the open looking like a normal college campus. Zoom in on one nice-looking building, into a window in which a nice looking […]
Differentiation in Your Career Plans
A certain percentage of medical students can take enough time off their most demanding studies to indulge in realms of activity beyond their profession’s requirements. Some play sports, some date, some have a family, and some dabble in the arts. I’m intrigued with the concept of how physicians are studying for the purpose of “healing,” […]
Dimension-ality
I am rather sure that there are dimensions beyond what most folks can perceive, contemplate, travel in or beyond. My “magnum opus” is an illustrated philosophical contemplation of the many facets of existence, most of which few people imagine much less contemplate. There’s one dimension, which means more or less of anything. More brightness or […]
Dimensional Metaphysics
This is a short essay on the plausibility of considering mind to be a dimension, a category of actuality that interpenetrates with all the other dimensions of time, space, matter and energy. In the last two centuries we have discovered the existence of realms of existence that we hadn’t known about before, that are not […]
Dimensionality
There was a time not so long ago that perhaps most people did not know about there being other lands, other races, other ways of speaking or writing. So too we human beings live in a world that may know nothing of other realms. For example, we live in a three-dimensional world, and we presume […]
Dimensions Beyond
One of the other ways the cosmos works is that it evolves. This includes the emergence of consciousness as a product of complexified mind, and the emergence of qualities associated with the capacities to be amazed, astonished, awed, reverent, reflective, thoughtful, inspired to theorize about, desiring to share, question, doubt, and in other ways bring […]
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), […]
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 […]
Dream Dynamics
For a few minutes between deep and eventful dreaming and full awaken-ness, I discovered myriads of fragments of old dreams, vivid but partial scenes! They were extracts from dreams over scores of years! Reflecting on these, I had several insights: (1) Mind permeates multiple realities, and ordinary consciousness just skims the surface; (2) we live […]
Dream!
Dare to dream new dreams! This is not in the sense of the night-dreams that come to you, but rather in the sense of daring to envision possibilities for your life, even if only fantasy. At the end of the Muppet Movie around 1979, Kermit sings, “Life’s like a movie, write your own ending! […]