This is apparently a band, a movie, an Army Fort, and who knows what else.
It is also a name I like for the unconcious/subconscious realm of our selves, obviously referencing the Alpha brainwave state. To my mind the “unconscious” is best understood as a sort of drama containing many characters, all of them the residue of imprints of various sorts. Our consciousness listens to all these characters, and chooses which ones to listen to. Perhaps what a principle does is create a perfect character–instead of the many imperfect ones who constituted our family and friends and strangers and enemies. You create a voice for yourself that is unchanging and unsusceptible to moods.
I’m thinking out loud here.
At times, when I meditate (and I have found, by the way, that some of my most useful reveries are sitting still in the darkness drinking whiskey, and simply watching my emotions flow by like a stream; I do not think I am rationalizing when I say this has been enormously therapeutic), I feel the presence of this universe, where things really don’t change. It is not perhaps an altered state of consciousness, but a focused one, where I have removed all need for problem solving, all need for purposive action, and most external stimuli.
Talking about feelings is not therapeutic, but feeling them flowing is. Things that flow tend to move, and blocks can disappear that way. First, you have to see the blocks, which is to say to feel them.
Returning to the stage metaphor, it is perhaps like you–I, as should be obvious, but this is hopefully tranlatable to the experience of any readers I may have–have been hearing a cacophony of conflicting voices from a dark playhouse, where you can’t see the stage, and now you are putting a spotlight on each character and asking them what role they play, and giving them the room and time to speak in their own voice.
Most all people have multiple “frequencies”. This was perhaps the only useful insight I retained from my study of Neuro-Linguistic Programming years ago. This is another way of saying that everyone has multiple “personalities”, multiple selves, some of which contradict one another, but which can be speaking at the same time.
One simple example is someone saying “I love you” when they don’t mean it. There is what Freud called the ego–and what I might call the “presenting self”–saying rationally comprehensible words that are understood by the listener.
Yet, these words have referents. We all have some idea what love is supposed to feel like, and if that feeling is not there, then the stage is set for cognitive dissonance. It is my feeling that we all have profoundly accurate intuitive understandings as latent capacities, but that many people–men, particularly–tend not to express them, consciously.
So we get a mixed message. Which one do we listen to? Actions speak louder than words, but one can always rationalize the actions of others, so there is always a choice.
This is the behavioral equivalent to those quizzes many will have seen, where you have to choose the color of a word quickly, but in which is typed a different word. For example, the word “red”, but typed in the color blue.
Persistent incongruities of this sort amount in my view to a sort of qualitative assault, in that you are demanding of people to choose between what is said and what is done.
To the point here, the only part that enters “Alphaville” is the reality, and to the extent we are not able to consciously separate the reality from the facade, then confusion enters the picture.
A good example of this would be beating children and claiming it was for their own good, when in reality it was an outlet for the anger of the parent. That child will internalize that anger, and not know why it is there.
We see a lot of anger in our culture today. There are no doubt many reasons for that, but among them are, I think, a heightened sense of entitlement/expectation, and the de facto qualitative assaults of the modern, retrogressive American family.
First, if you expect more, if you think “life” owes you something, if you think you ought to be able to live an exciting, fulfilled life of the sort shown in commercials and peddled by Hollywood, then most people are going to experience a gap between fantasy and reality. This breeds self pity, and self pity breeds anger and resentment.
Second, though: what about the parent who abandons you to the media, who instead of creating a living culture of interaction with their children, lets them sit in front of the TV? Kids find TV (and, to be clear, video games, iPods, computers, cell phones and everything else) fascinating, but it cannot replace constant living human reinforcements. There is a frustration that builds for many, I think, that arises from a LACK that they can’t identify. They are “communicating” with others via Twitter perhaps dozens of times an hour, but they are still lonely and afraid of being alone.
I wonder how many kids today could stand sitting alone in a quiet room for an hour? I think five minutes would be pushing it for most of them.
They have been abandoned, without knowing it. Their parents have disappeared, and turned into automatons, incapable of nurturing. Everyone has their own TV, and their own channel. Time is scarce, and everyone wants more, more, more.
The kitchen table, of course, is the solution.
These are a few scattered thoughts. I have had a lot of ideas since I last had time to focus, so I’m going to move on.