Adam Blatner

This is ambiguous: perhaps a put-down, perhaps an expression of guarded admiration and wonder. A friend, a poet, said that she was told by a friend that she was “out in left field.” I responded: “Well, maybe left field is a good place to live. It’s a “place” or state of mind in which one is  receptive to the inflow of inspiration.

This reminded me that one of my many goals is to encourage others to be a bit more expressive: Many folks have a crack into the creative subconscious realm, and one way to think about history is that for thousands of years we’ve been gradually expanding that crack, just a bit more every decade, expanding the inspirational process, so that people may be empowered to witness to forms that may not have been handed down for centuries.

This is a spiritual liberation. I’m giving a post-Passover talk on this next month. It speaks to the ways subtle or not-so-subtle oppression generates self-oppression, self-dis-empowerment, slavishness. Often people exchange one master for another who is thought to be more benign or less oppressive or appropriate because it defers to the category that is “greater.” But, alas, the theme that one must have a master is too often not questioned. Or, stating it differently, too many people think,  “Somebody has to make the rules.”  I offered a riff on this in a recent blog post of the dialogue of Moses and God on Mt. Sinai.

They idea that we make the rules, and we change the rules when we need to? Too vulnerable, chaotic. It’s modern ideal democracy, sure, but it flies in the face of the slavish mentality from childhood, a mentality that suggests that we can’t make our own rules; we’re too clueless and disorganized. Let mommy or daddy make rules, or whoever makes rules for them, or whoever makes rules for those folks.

In other words, the flip side of oppression is often enslavement and the psychology of acceptance that goes along with it, and the opposite of that state is taking responsibility. And, ways of taking responsibility— methods, frames of reference, etc., all are goals of much of what I discuss in this blog and my books.