Adam Blatner
Words and Images from the Mind of Adam Blatner
Applied Drama: An Open Letter
There is a new field emerging that might best be called “Applied Drama” or “Applied Theatre,” but it doesn’t really know it yet. It’s a term for a wide variety of endeavors that use drama to promote personal and group consciousness. There are a few academic departments that use terms like these, but it still […]
Posted in Current Events, Psychodrama | No Comments
Embryo-as-God Metaphor
Mythmaking tends to draw on ancient metaphors—stories of super-heroes and god-kings, the imagination of millennia past, etc. But what if we created myths that drew on the findings of science in the last century or so? In this case, consider the emerging sub-field of biology called embryology. Two hundred years ago we didn’t know about […]
Posted in Essays and Papers, Spirituality and Philosophy | No Comments
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 […]
Posted in Follies, Psychological Literacy, Wisdom-ing | No Comments
God Realization (??)
We all get our god-realization in different ways. For me as I fell asleep on the edge of the Autumnal Equinox or thereabouts, 9/21/11, something like a minor god-realization happened through a gentle extension of a slight talent I have—i.e., when at the edge of sleep I begin to remember thousands of dream images as […]
Posted in Autobiographical, Spirituality and Philosophy, Wisdom-ing | No Comments
Simple Heart-Songs
Simple Heart-Songs Singing simple song, brief, with words, can be another type of spiritual practice. The ones below I picked up from the late David Zeller and, in the early 1980s, from Elizabeth Crisler. Many of these are also included in a book titled Circle of Song: Songs, chants and dances for ritual and celebration, […]
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Singing for the Fun of It
Sing! Sing a song. Make it simple, to last your whole life long. Don’t matter if it’s not good enough for anyone else to hear! Just sing! Sing a song! This song, by Joe Raposo, from the Sesame Street children’s television program in the late 1960s, has a powerful message! Sing out! Singing can be so […]
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Common Sense
(I confess that what follows is perhaps more of my commentary than a good book review, but still I want to acknowledge Common Sense: A Political History, by Sophia Rosenfeld (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), is an excellent, scholarly review of the notion, especially as it has evolved in the last few hundred years. […]
Posted in Book Reviews, Essays and Papers | No Comments
Asymptotic Limits
This is the property of infinitely approaching a limit while being mathematically barred from achieving it. It’s a useful concept not only when studying hyperbolas back in high school algebra, but also insofar as it applies to our tendencies to speak of ideals as attainable. Although there is an element of just liking fancy words—I […]
Posted in Follies, Psychological Literacy, Wisdom-ing | 1 Comment
Creating Celebrations
Did you know you could create your own rituals, ceremonies, celebrations? I’ve written about this in a paper on my website, a chapter in my anthology, Interactive & Improvisational Drama, and also posted a supplement on my website for that book. They’ve got a national organization for training people who can serve as consultants for […]
Posted in My Favorite Things, Play and Spontaneity, Spirituality and Philosophy | No Comments
Can Evolution Explain Human Nature?
There’s a website that presents thoughtful people commenting on important questions. I attend a small discussion group that explores such themes, and they selected for our consideration the title question. In addition to the really quite sensitive ideas of the people mentioned, here are some of my thoughts, too: The idea that anything can be […]
Posted in Spirituality and Philosophy, Wisdom-ing | No Comments