Adam Blatner
Words and Images from the Mind of Adam Blatner
Psychological-Mindedness Confronts Simplicity
People have a deep sense of entitlement to being able to perceive and think about the world in simple terms. It’s easier to imagine that there is either sin or virtue, and we still have a subtle backwash from the belief in higher and lower classes. People feel entitled to scold: “Don’t muddy up the […]
Posted in Essays and Papers, Psychological Literacy, Spirituality and Philosophy | No Comments
Folk Dance Sprites
Life as we know it is infused with vital energies from the cosmic ground of being, and humans tend to anthropomorphize, to personify, to imagine these as gods and angels, faeries and sprites. Of late (the last 300 years) we have moved towards de-animating life, making it more a machine, blind forces that have no […]
Posted in Autobiographical, Foolin Around, Play and Spontaneity | No Comments
A Cosmic Compass
For those of you who lose your way, perhaps this may help. It is a cosmic compass. Actually, it may not help much, because “direction” is such as 3-dimensional… well, dimension? Realm? (But the true cosmos, you know, is very multi-dimensional and includes, for example, dreams.) But the point in the symbolism below is really, […]
Posted in Foolin Around, Spirituality and Philosophy | No Comments
I Changed My Name!
Yes! And if you don’t like your name, maybe you can change your name, too! Why not? Re-invent yourself. Before that my given name was Howard, which was—how shall I say it—an okay name for the 1920s and ‘30s, but kinda dorky. Howard-the-Coward. Yuk. But I had become involved in learning more about psychodrama, and […]
Posted in Autobiographical, Current Events | No Comments
My Angels!
Dear angels, helping me to be. There’s a platoon of them, some 25 – 35, I guess, though I don’t know. More than 15 for sure, less than 70, but they do have access to liaison angels, consulting angels from another sphere, and so forth. The great God-of-Everything-Becoming is way too busy being a billion […]
Posted in Autobiographical, Foolin Around, Spirituality and Philosophy | No Comments
The Whizzard of Ahs
This is a bit of an autobiographical contemplation: Perhaps I too am a bit like the Wizard of Oz, not a great wizard, but really a good man. Maybe my name in another story would be “The Wise Art of Ah’s” or the “Whizzerd.” Anyway, the point of this post is: Who is to say. […]
Posted in Autobiographical, Current Events, History | No Comments
Becoming More Spontaneous
One of a number of chosen missions in life is to help people re-own their own natural potential for spontaneity and their capacity for exploratory playfulness. As Allee and I write in The Art of Play (which we’re presently re-writing), spontaneity and playfulness not in itself childish. Although its roots begin in early childhood, and […]
Posted in Foolin Around, Play and Spontaneity, Psychological Literacy, Wisdom-ing | No Comments
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 […]
Posted in Current Events, Psychology, Psychotherapy and Psychiatry | No Comments
Shree Yantra Meditation 1212
This basic diagram is quite meaningful for me and I’ve written about it on my website. A good symbol is evocative—it evokes new associations, creative meditations. For me, my mandalas are two-dimensional visual expressions of the creative process. This variation of the shree yantra partakes of both the aesthetics of geometry and the spontaneity-elaborative process […]
Posted in Autobiographical, Spirituality and Philosophy | No Comments
Broad “Roots” in the Present
One type of root system for people feeling that they really belong in the world is through genetics—who your biological ancestors and relatives are. Genealogy is a “thing” in my community and age group, assisted by computer technology, more people are probing their family roots many generations back. Alas for me, I don’t have much […]
Posted in Autobiographical, History, Wisdom-ing | No Comments