Entrainment

Physicists call synchronized oscillation, or vibration, between objects mutual phase locking, or entrainment. Ursula K. Le Guin points out in her essay “Telling is Listening” that all living beings are oscillators. “Being in sync--internally and with your environment--makes life easy. Getting out of sync is always uncomfortable or disastrous.”

We humans have created a plethora of deliberately synchronized actions--singing, chanting, drumming, marching, playing music, dancing. We want to be in sync.

It turns out that we entrain when having a conversation. William Condon filmed people in conversation. He saw that “when we talk our whole body is involved in many tiny movements, establishing a master rhythm that coordinates our body movements with the speech rhythms. ...listeners [make] almost the same micromovements of lips and face as the speaker is making, almost simultaneously--a fiftieth of a second behind.”

Speech is incomprehensible if we don’t get the beat. We all have the experience of not being able to track a conversation, even in our first language. We’re out of sync. “Listening is not a reaction, it is a connection,” Le Guin writes. “Listening to a conversation or a story, we don’t so much respond as join in--become part of the action.”

This morning, as I muse on this, I think of the effect prayer has been shown to have for people who are ill, whether they “believe” or not, whether they are aware or not they are being prayed for. Healing of any sort seems to me to be about getting the rhythm. Healing may bring vibrant bodily health or it may bring peace and acceptance of the situation. Whatever the result, it makes life easy.

I wonder, too, if the cats and I join together more consciously to “pray” for the neighborhood what effect we might have on bringing about greater entrainment. This is, I think, what Pamela means when she suggests giving satsang to apparent resistance we detect in others. Resistance to the beauty of cats, for example. Fear and loathing comes up. Welcoming, inquiring sincerely into what is wanted, inviting them to be seen in their true nature.

Isaac said, “Don’t pray FOR peace, but pray peace.” Something here wants to be prayed. Maybe it is to “pray the neighborhood” rather than “for the neighborhood.” Maybe it is to pray the intimate connection of all life.