Adam Blatner
Words and Images from the Mind of Adam Blatner
Table of Contents:
Essays and Papers
The “Cultural Conserve”
That was the name of the category of whatever has been conserved, even for a time. It may be for a day, for a month; it may involve sports or war news. It man celebrate or virtually moan. I realize that I have been one of the guardians of the cultural conserve in the fields […]
The Adventure of Dialogue
There’s a quality of dialogue that, when refined, illustrates an interesting dynamic: The superstars of Jesus’ childhood were the wise elders of that culture, the scholars who debated the deeper meanings of the Holy Scriptures. Two were outstanding: Rabbi Shammai and Rabbi Hillel, the former being somewhat conservative, the latter somewhat liberal, but both were […]
The Amplifying Unconscious (Part 1)
In this series of essays on my blog I am proposing the existence of not one but two types of unconscious functions: The first involves the more familiar complexes of disowned childish motivations and their associated reconciling mental maneuvers—what most psychotherapists learn about and treat. The second type of unconscious function amplifies, intensifies, and operates […]
The Art of Blogging
So perhaps we consider blogging as an art form, as valid as sculpture or dance. How much attention should I put into it? Should every piece be rehearsed, re-worked, evaluated in terms of a variety of criteria? Is it elegant, well-written, understandable, persuasive, innovative? It is the extension of easy self-publishing, that’s all. Open to […]
The Beach, the Waves…
A friend sent this, and it was poetic enough that I asked her permission to post it, and she said yes: “In my life, I am standing in the ocean and facing the beach. I love the beach; the rhythmicity of the waves relaxes me. I love the warmth of the sun, the smell […]
The Curves of Becoming
The cosmos operates in magic curves that are based on the phi ratio found throughout nature. This is the basis for the “Golden Triangle” pictured at right, a major element in sacred geometry. Sometimes things move along seemingly slowly at one level, while at a deeper level things are germinating, resting, gathering strength, reorganizing and […]
The Fragility of Memory
Evidence continues to accumulate regarding the fragility of memory. Beyond the scandal of the “recovered memory syndrome” around 1992 and other ways that distortions of memory have been used (or probably mis-used) in many kinds of legal proceedings, attention to this problem is an important corrective in our tendencies to give more authority to certain […]
The Hell with Hell
It really is time to discard completely the notion of hell. Such notions abound in many religions that believe that there really is a metaphysical reality to everlasting punishment; that that punishment involves everlasting torture (and if you think about it for a moment—even just a moment—torture is designed to be the ultimate punishment beyond […]
The Impossible Dream
I was singing this song to myself, from the Broadway play of the 1960s, Man of La Mancha—, revealing my private dreams of grandiosity. These betray the mind’s capacity to think in terms of superlatives. Each is paradoxical, a way of dramatizing ambition, such as dreaming an impossible dream or fighting an unbeatable foe. They […]
The Individuality of Spirituality
This essay builds on the other essay published today, “Objective Reality,” and also points to personal expectations that go “Beyond Psychotherapy.” First, note that many of the procedures that constitute “psychotherapy” as a corrective for problematic thinking have applications beyond the medical model! They may be used for personal development, which in turn includes many […]
The Lowdown on “Flying Saucers”
My imaginative soul invites me to share with you the foollowing (sic. Which means: I meant to spell it that way) “truth” (note the quotation marks) as a form of tall tale: Of course flying saucers are real, or almost-real, or seem to be real, or definitely appear in people’s minds. That’s mainly how […]
The Meaning Instinct
I suggest that humans have an intrinsic need to construct meaning—something that orients them to the chaotic phenomena of the world. We pass along meanings as stories, myths; we organize religious-cultural systems based on these stories. It is universal. (When people become sufficiently disoriented through delerium (due to fever, some plants or medicines, some illnesses, […]
The Myth of Efficiency, Burn-out, and Role Overload
A common source of burn-out and/or employee stress in modern organizations is what I call the myth of efficiency. It assumes that there is a degree of inefficiency in work, and one of the tasks of the efficient professional or competent worker is to figure out how to “cut the fat” and detect those inefficiencies, […]
The New Sensitivity
Evolution requires periodic shifts in what we are sensitive to and what we need to learn to ignore. In the past, we had to ignore a variety of physical discomforts or psychological traumas because we simply didn’t know yet how to avoid them! Now that we do have many more ways of ensuring basic safety, […]
The Origin of Seasons
For thousands of years the Earth slept, hardly being aware that it spun about its axis every about 24 hours. But about 88, 301 years ago, a primitive lady said, about the sun, “Hey, that there evening was there yesterday, too.” Not that anyone believed her. But later that year, they conceded that she was […]
The Problem of Authority in Religion
Newsweek, February 14, 2011 , page 48, involves an article that’s sort of a book review of two recently released books that invite a re-evaluation of the common understandings of sexual mores as presented in the Bible—mainly in the Old Testament. What interested me was a statement near the end of the article. Albert Mohler, […]
The Psychology of Spirituality: Some Notes
Of course this is a vast field, but here are some observations. I was chatting with a friend who’s in the mental health field and he noted his difficulty with religion; but at the same time, seemed to be a little interested in spirituality. He mentioned John Bowlby, a psychoanalyst interested in the dynamics of […]
The Resonance of the “Wow!”
The title of this post is a bit of paradoxical apophatic musing. Apophatic refers to the stance that we—human consciousness—cannot begin to begin to know Divine essence. A degree of surrender is needed. Yet we can in our foolish innocence speculate. So also a three-year-old can talk about “my mommy” and know deeply that of […]
The Spectrum of Rational Coordination
The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) stated (as one of my favorite quotes) near the end of his book, Modes of Thought: “…The purpose of philosophy is to rationalize mysticism, not by explaining it away, but by the introduction of novel verbal characterizations, rationally coordinated.” This brief passage has impressed me mightily. (Many of Whitehead’s […]
The Truth About the Truth
We are misled by arithmetic, where, according to the rules there is one and only one “right” answer. We absorb this as ultimately true. Things we come to believe cannot have multiple explanations—there can only be one true answer. But consider that there may be multiple valid answers; there may be more than one “truth.” […]
Thickening Philosophy with Psychology
Increasingly philosophy is coming round to appreciating the inevitability of distortions due to depth psychology. Carlin Romano’s book, America, the Philosphical (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), offers a nice review that brought me up to date about some figures about whom I had been sadly ignorant, such as Richard Rorty. Apparently a number of […]
Thinking About…
I discern several levels of consciousness: 1. Thinking, 2, thinking about thinking, 3,thinking about those processes, and 4. meditating on those levels. The first is straight thinking, calculating. Example: "He’s heading off that way, so I’ll cut him off." Leopards do this. The second level is more human: Thinking about thinking. Because of their developed […]
This Moment in Time
There’s a song with that title and first line. I’ve been a fan of Jewish humor, especially in the mid-20th Century. I picked up “The Myron Cohen Joke Book” (New York: Gramercy Press) and have been leafing through it. It reminded me that I’ve enjoyed humor and cartoons, joke books of various types, all my […]
Thoughts on Creativity
Creativity is an emerging dynamic about which we continue to learn new facets and depths. It’s not as if we fully understand creativity. It’s more like electricity, a phenomenon about which we continue to discover new features even after a couple hundred years. Creativity may be reformulated in many ways. One element that may be […]
To Blog or Not to Blog
To paraphrase Hamlet’s soliloquy, in the play by Shakespeare, but things are different today: I have become more aware of “blogging,” which is another way of publishing my random thoughts or writing. What ego! What conceit! to think that anyone out there would care in the least about “random thoughts,” no matter how well-put. To […]