Adam Blatner
Words and Images from the Mind of Adam Blatner
Table of Contents:
Psychology
The Un-Acknowledged
I am reminded that for much of the world, what is history for us goes unspoken! Indeed, there are peoples who live with massive repression! Let’s not talk about that! Let’s not even THINK about that! Indeed, that is a way of life for perhaps most of the people in the world! I’m fortunate indeed […]
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 […]
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 […]
Two-Thirds Human!
Yes, imagine that I am indeed 2/3 human! More, I’ve established credentials, so that makes me okay. All this is to compensate for the part that most folks don’t understand: I’m 1/3 elf. Now let’s just say that I have imagined myself in this fictional but meaningful story. I would daresay that whatever we imagine […]
Types of Knowledge
There is a spectrum here. There’s stuff I know pretty much with certainty and then stuff I pretty well know but I could tolerate being corrected. Then there’s stuff I sort of know and I can go back and retrieve other memories and shore this up. Sort of “yes, that was when… and the book […]
Unconscious Depths
I was reminded of the depth of subtle programming in a gentle and amusing way, by realizing that the persistence of songs in my mind—I think they’re called “earworms”—in the week following my participation as one of over a hundred people in our Sun City Chorus singing our Christmas Concert. The songs carry on, after […]
Understanding Understanding
Reading in the March 2014 Smithsonian an article about Carl Sagan, on p.71, he says, “I think I’m able to explain things because understanding wasn’t entirely easy for me. Some things the most brilliant students were able to see instantly I had to work to understand. I can remember what I had to do to […]
Upon Reflection
I’ve done a lot, learned a lot, loved and been loved a lot. I like the words of the song, “My Way,” which was Frank Sinatra’s theme song, though for me I have to confess that it should often have been called “Thy Way.” I was forced to do some things I didn’t really want […]
Vitality Enhancement
Aha! So that’s what I’m really about! I must confess, though, that this term is just a fancy way of saying “having fun.” Maybe in some circumstances we need to pretend to be a bit snooty to appease the demand for functionality, for higher purpose. But really, we don’t need an excuse. If you think […]
Wacko
Wacko (i.e., without a h) is useful. Whacko seems to imply violence, while wacko is charmingly fey. Anyway, seeing myths everywhere? Indeed, there are some new books about the God myth. I believe in a God of mystics, but it is quite undefinable. After all, myth is only a word, an abstraction, a story. "There" […]
What’s It All About
It’s gloriously complex, to begin with. Each person has an incredible complex of challenges: – to heal the various hurts arising from areas of particular weakness, general weakness, lack of talent, physical disability (even slight), body form, too much this, not enough that, so many things to feel ashamed of. Then there’s the subtle […]
Why Don’t They Lock Up the Nuts?
I as talking with an acquaintance who was dismayed and a bit angry at the murders by nuts around the country. “Why don’t they lock ‘em up?” It turned out that she really believed that psychiatrists were able to tell with some degree of accuracy who was really dangerous and who wasn’t. She was a […]