Adam Blatner
Words and Images from the Mind of Adam Blatner
Table of Contents:
Wisdom-ing
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: […]
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
Action Explorations are really just using psychodramatic methods and related approaches as tools for enhancing creativity, in business, community-building, education, even developing spirituality. Applied beyond the context of psychotherapy, though, I prefer using the term “action explorations.” In other fields, creativity itself is being recognized as a valuable dynamic in producing ever more useful innovations. […]
Creativity Promotion
Can we promote creativity itself? Maybe that’s like creating electricity without having devices to run. I suspect this is a theme to explore and develop. Really, what it involves is playing with stuff, people, the world, your mind, attitudes, whatever. “Can you just do that?” Sure, why not. I’ve become impressed with a dismal reality: […]
Critical Thinking Needed!
We are given so very many ways to think and so many things to think about. (I’ve chosen to not think about an ever-increasing variety of things that I used to feel obliged to think about, but now I’m focusing a bit.) We’ve also begun to be given more ways to think about the ways […]
Cut Me Some Slack: Forgiveness or Excuse?
My dear wife Allee is one of the most meticulous and intelligent people I know, and recently she was bemoaning her own lack of clarity: She had composed an email to a friend and on receiving a response that had obviously misinterpreted her message, realized that what she had sent was understandably confusing. I was […]
Cybernetic Communications
Folks used to think that communications were simple. I say X you understand X. Then we realized that to communicate well, the sender must be clear—from whence came editors, spell-check, revisions, etc. And the receiver should be educated. And/or the sender must calibrate vocabulary etc. to the level of the receiver if the goal is […]
Dear “Kids” (To mid-life adults!)
What a funny phrase, “kids.” On one hand, you’re “our” kids, and on the other hand you’ve moved through young-adulthood, career development, parenting, and are now middle aged! You have kids! But what else should we call you?! I still hear the verse from the song, “Sunrise, Sunset” from the 1960s hit Broadway Musical, Fiddler […]
Deffils (Imps of the Mind)
I think that one of the most useful things we can do is to confront the little niggling voices in our minds that drag us into lower consciousness. There are many kinds of foolishness, and some of it feeds on ignorance, mainly. What I call “deffils” (rather than devils) are little complexes that are often […]
Deffils (Part 1)
This word, “deffil,” describes a complex in the psyche that seems innocent and blame-free, at one level; at another level, this same complex may be recognized as foolish and naive; and at a third level, deffils in the long run have a thousand times more aggregate power to generate evil than clever, wicked, sociopathic, scheming, […]
Deffils (Part 2)
As I said in the last blog entry (yesterday), deffils are the personification of the tendency to buy into simplistic beliefs. Another form this takes is to identify with the role of innocent victim, projecting one’s selfishness on the blameworthy “other.” This justifies defensive aggression: Get them before they get you, undermine your culture. Again, […]
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. […]
Depth Psychology Education
Psychology has been around for over a century, and it’s time we spread the word. Much of it has been mystified, but it shouldn’t be. A moment’s reflection—well, more than a moment for many of us–will reveal that we in our know-how-ing selves don’t even know what we do when we pee! I mean, there […]
Diddely-Squat Chicken-Shit
What I don’t know! Boy, do I need to surrender. There’s a real type of effort in psychically “letting go,” though. It’s only vaguely an act of will, or maybe non-will. But it’s not the same as “trying,” much less “trying harder.” It’s 99% beyond me, that I realize, the 1% being that I know […]
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. […]
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,” […]
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 […]
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 […]
Dimensional Thinking
There is a hidden assumption that everything can be presented in terms known to all. This is as fallacious as saying that all higher mathematics can be symbolized by simple arithmetic and no other symbols are needed. It’s a matter of trying not to be all “stuck up”—we learned to try to not be this […]
Dimensionality
I’ve worked out my own theology: The cosmos is structured somewhat like the triangular designs of the Sri Yantra, in expanding patterns of downward facing triangles met by upward facing ones. In the middle is God, sort-of, a point. The next level out is the recognition that what we call the highest is multidimensional. In […]
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 […]
Dimensionality as New Perception
It has occured to me that “Dimensionality,” might be thought of as a new angle on metaphysics, or what people used to call “religion,” though of course I seek no converts. It notes that just as the third dimension adds dimensionality to the second dimension, and the fourth—time— adds dimensions of duration to space, so […]
Dimensions of Mind
One dimension is a line, two dimensions is a plane, and our world is experienced in three dimensions, length, breadth, height. But in truth, we experience it in what Einstein called a fourth dimension of time, and our experiencing it might well be viewed as from a fifth dimension: Mind. Let’s then reflect how existence […]
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 […]