Adam Blatner
Words and Images from the Mind of Adam Blatner
Table of Contents:
Autobiographical
Contemplating Compassion
This morning I awoke with a couple of dream fragments that felt significant enough to get me to reflect on them. 1. I had to go uptown a mile or so and somehow annoyed my wife so that she was cross with me. I couldn’t figure out what I had done wrong. 2. […]
Contemplating This Blog
As a contemplateur, an invented and affected name for one who enjoys thinking about stuff, I like to write on my blog, and entertain the vague fantasy that someone in the great somewhere will find these jottings amusing and perhaps a little thought-provoking. (Someone in the Great Somewhere is a phrase taken from the 1953 […]
Context-Dependent Knowledge
A pickpocket at a convention of saints would only see their pockets. This morning I heard that the World Series Baseball game that I saw part of on television was considered one of the greatest games in the history of baseball. Who knew? The only thing that impressed me was how many spits the various […]
Counting Mistakes
There are parts of life where mistakes really do count, they make a difference. Part of this then involve a ready willingness to get quick feedback about what the mistake was and be willing to correct it. For many people this is undercut by tests in which you only learn (much later) your score, implying […]
Creative Musings
I cultivate a mild state of dissociation and surrender to my primary process, my free-floating imaginativeness, my pre-un-conscious mind. I willingly entertain confabulation, trusting (at least for a while) the sort of stuff my subconscious mind just makes up. This part of our mind is far more clever than even bright people’s minds! It comes […]
Creativity Enhancement
As I grow older, I’m interested in applying new age ideas, singing songs, psychodramatic methods (but only with people with fairly good ego strength). I’m rather finished with psychiatry, trying to help most people—I estimate a least 50%—who don’t want psychotherapy or any kind of mind expansion. I address rather those who are open […]
Creativity Enhancement
What a great goal for the folks I want to hang out with in the future. I’m dropping out of the psychiatry profession. I’m more interested in stimulating those who sort of want to be stimulated. A modest goal, but someone’s got to do it.
De-Cluttering
I confess today in front of all you readers, with great humility, I am a clutter-bug, and I hope to go into self-imposed rehab. I have way too much stuff. Accepting my biblio-holism is just part of it. I’ve touched bottom. I’ve (maybe) seen the light. I’m divesting, G help me. I’m mailing stuff out. […]
Denouement
The denouement is that part of a play where the loose threads are tied together. I’m winding up my many-faceted life, and need some time to do this, because so many “roles” are as yet unfinished. But again, many roles are indeed finished, or almost so—although I reserve the right to “re-open that file.” Pretty […]
Denouement 2
(Look it up for the meaning!). A French term used in drama to refer to the final scene. As Frank Sinatra sang, in his signature song, My Way, “And now, the end is near, and so I face the final curtain.” So I’m entering that phase, the denouement of my life: Tying up loose ends. […]
Density of Eventfulness
The angels have been conspiring to remind lil’ ol’ me that life is shorter than I thought, and I realized that others also are prioritizing—or needing to. There’s a density of eventfulness. There have been changes in how much I feel this way or that, so that such and such seems important! I’ve noticed that […]
Differences in Strengths and Weaknesses
Intellectual strengths and weaknesses may overlap with temperamental ones. I have a mild case of Asperger’s Disorder which, I think, operates on a spectrum. Severe is autism. Mild is Asperger’s. But the spectrum goes on: Social Learning Disability, average, and socially talented—“the hostess with the mostest” as they said of Pearl Mesta in the 1950s. […]
Dimensional Metaphysics
I thought of calling it a theology, but immediately that became radically absurd. I’m aware that each person’s transcendent experience is, so to speak, a many-lifetime journey, and differs from anyone else. Metaphysics may be descriptive, but it doesn’t presume to state how it really is. We are but tiny human-brains—that’s how the angels love […]
Dimensional Philosophy
I use the metaphor of “dimension,” drawn from geometry. From the internet: “A dimension is a measurable extent of some kind, such as length, breadth, depth, or height, as, for example, "the final dimensions of the pond were 14 ft. x 8 ft." Synonyms might be size, measurement, proportions, extent, volume, capacity, area, breadth, width, […]
Dimensional Theology
I have a friend, a rabbi, who has chosen to work within the Holy Scriptures, and to "milk" them. He writes sermons about them and/or teachings of others about them. Of course he reads into these writings his own interpretations, scholarly confabulations, seeing in them what sincerely seems to be there. He says, “As you […]
Disruptive Technologies—Photographs?
My son David told me about "disruptive technologies”—automobiles disrupt horseback or horse-drawn travel; telegraphy disrupted handwritten letters somewhat, and in turn this was disrupted in turn by telephones, emails, cell phones. In the past knights wearing armor disrupted attacks by archers: The armor deflected arrows—at least crossbow arrows. Cannons disrupted walls, and armor. As we […]
Distractions
It’s amusing and annoying to realize that multi-tasking is what so many of us do—not with minor things like talking on the cell-phone when driving, but as part of our life-script. I’m thinking of someone who writes and also is a wife and mother. She wants to do all three, and sometimes one role drains […]
Divesting
What a word: I need to begin to divest myself of too much stuff. (My book collections are strong examples of too much stuff.) George Carlin, the late comedian, has a wonderful bit he does about “stuff.” I’m beginning to look at all my books that way—not much, but it’s a beginning. So did I […]
Divesting
I”m getting older and beginning to divest myself of tons of accumulated treasures. Crap. I don’t know: One man’s garbage is another man’s treasure. Actually, this stuff is just a bit more treasure than crap but it’s a process. I hear an inner voice: “Because I want it, I want to have it! It’s mine, […]
Divesting More
I have tons (literally) of books, and am an admitted bibliophile—but I’m app-roaching treating my desire as a mild addiction, sometimes called “biblioholism,” and undertaking a program of divesting. It’s difficult, and full of discoveries. I have attachments to categories of topics that I am coming to recognize that I shall not revisit. There are […]
Divesting Stuff
My wife and I are confessing to the world that we are mild addicts: She doesn’t want to let go of stuff that we may never be able to afford to buy afresh. She was poor as a child and has a residual that way. For me it’s stuff that’s “interesting”— that’s my key. But […]
Divestitating
I know, I extended the word divesting so that it’s bigger and that there’s no such word. I am fooling around and probably will until I die, maybe even after. The fooling around role, that part of me, speaks for the clown archetype which has been lively in my personality since childhood. I loved comedians […]
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 […]
Doin’ Its Own Thing
Everything is doin’ its own thing, follows what the ancient South Asian Indian scriptures call its “dharma.” But the thing that everything is doing is vastly inter-dimensional, connected to many, many other things doin’ their own thing. Gravity, aesthetics, patterns, symbiotic connections, underlying similarities, the list goes on. Some things are more rapidly eventful than […]
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 […]