Adam Blatner

Words and Images from the Mind of Adam Blatner

July, 2015

I Can “Fabulate”

There’s a word, “confabulation,” that refers to the way some people’s minds rather  obviously make up a reality, memories, consistent thinking, that jibes with a slight suggestion. It’s more obvious in some patients than others. I daresay that in subtle ways it’s ubiquitous! We do this far more naturally in dreams. Then when we wake […]

Posted in Follies, Foolin Around, Psychology, World of Almost-Real | No Comments »

Finding God’s Purpose

A friend used this term, “God’s Purpose,” and it got me to wondering: Well, one interpretation is to just do what we can to make everything nice, the greatest good for the greatest numbers, as Jeremy Bentham suggested? (Or was it Frances Hutchinson? You go to Wikipedia and find that clichés are more than what […]

Posted in Foolin Around, Spirituality and Philosophy, Wisdom-ing | No Comments »

“The Good Ol’ Days”

I have an acquaintance with an obviously conservative political inclination: She wrote: “It seems that no one wants responsibility anymore. I remember my proud, independent mother whose greatest fear was that some governmental institution might try to step in and interfere with the raising of her four girls.” Then she wrote, “We should all rise […]

Posted in Current Events, Essays and Papers, Follies | No Comments »

New-Fangled Cars Today!

My son got a new car with a lot of “bells and whistles,” new gadgets. He writes: “Alas, it lacks the latest Telepathic Soul-Connection (TSC) technology. So it’s not so great.  It doesn’t do the driving for you.” But he says he is relatively sure we will be able to buy self-driving cars within 10-15 […]

Posted in Current Events, History, Whassup? | No Comments »

Freedom to Create

You may enjoy more or less foolin’ around, creativity, making-stuff-up, as you grow older. The important thing is that you feel free to do so, that you are not inhibited by phony residuals. Tradition says that all the great stuff is made up by great men. Rarely women. Myths, beliefs, laws, stuff like that. It […]

Posted in Follies, Play and Spontaneity, Spirituality and Philosophy | No Comments »

Permutations

This mandala suggests that external appearances are structured by archetypes, which are in turn structured by meta-archetypes, etc. As categories overlap in dream worlds and at the Platonic levels, one meaning can never suffice. There is of course the geometric meanings, and how one line or part of line in one triangle becomes another line […]

Posted in Art (Mandalas, Doodles, Scripts), Spirituality and Philosophy, Wisdom-ing | No Comments »

Sensitive Perception

What if some people are more sensitive than others, and pick up more stuff? We know about tetrachromats, a small minority of people who are sensitive to not three basic colors (like most people) but rather four (tetre) colors! This sensitivity allows for a richer perceptual field, more permutations than most people. What if this […]

Posted in Mind-Spectrums, Psychology, Psychotherapy and Psychiatry | No Comments »

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 […]

Posted in Autobiographical, Whassup?, World of Almost-Real | No Comments »

Krazy Kat Redux

This summer Patrick McDonnell’s comic strip did a take-off on George Herriman’s comic strip, Krazy Kat, for those who might not have gotten the classical allusion. There are so many of these. I pride myself on recognizing many that may have been relevant to the educated class in my era, but then I realize that […]

Posted in Autobiographical, Foolin Around, Whassup? | No Comments »

Power of Words

I’m going to a conference titled “The Power of Words,” in Kansas in mid-September. I’ll be presenting on Role Theory as a User Friendly Language in Life. Words mean different things to different people Speaking of semantics, a friend sent me this by Simone Weil, page 271 from her Simone Weil Reader, titled, “Power of […]

Posted in Essays and Papers, Psychological Literacy, Spirituality and Philosophy | No Comments »

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