THE DANCE OF LIFE

(The Other Dimension of Time)

Edward T. Hall (1983)

Glossary:

Adumbration:

The term adumbration is borrowed from literature and means to foreshadow. Adumbrative processes are related to action chains, except that there is an escalation of intensity and specificity of the message as well as the fact that in an adumbrative situation the individual (or group) will stop the escalation process and select one of a number of action chains which are in the inventory of the culture. Diplomacy in its classical form is the science of reading adumbrative behavior. By the time the public is involved in the process the adumbrative paradigm has progressed a long way - sometimes as far as war. Successful adumbrative practitioners are skilful at getting their message across before "face" and ego become involved. Adumbrations begin at the very high context end of the scale and drop in context (become more explicit) with each step. Adumbrations, like action chains, are culture specific.

Context, High and Low:

High context or low context refers to the amount of information which is in a given communication as a function of the context in which it occurs. A highly contexted communication is one in which most of the meaning is in the context while very little is in the transmitted message. A low context communication is similar to interacting with a computer - if the information is not explicitly stated, and the program followed religiously, the meaning is distorted. In the Western world, the law is low context, in comparison with daily transactions of an informal nature. People who know each other over a long period of years will tend to use high context communication.

Entrainment:

Entrainment can be observed in the physical as well as the organic world. Fireflies have a tendency toward entrainment, which can be observed as they blink in unison. Electronic oscillators will, if their frequencies are close enough, entrain with the fastest frequency, while pendulum clocks running side by side will entrain if the pendula are the same length, Most people are familiar with the high school experiment in which two tuning forks of the same size will drive each other - that's entrainment. William Condon settled on this term to describe a process which makes ‘sync’ing possible, wherein one central nervous system drives another, or two central nervous systems drive each other.

Monochronic and Polychronic Time:

M-time and P-time designate two mutually exclusive kinds of time. M-time is one-thing-at-a-time, following a linear form so familiar in the West. P-time is polychronic, that is, many-things-at-a-time. Schedules are handled quite differently; in fact, there are times when it is difficult to determine whether a schedule exists or not. P-time is common in Mediterranean and Colonial - Iberian - Indian cultures. At the pre-conscious level, M-time is male time and P-time is female time, and the ramifications of this difference are considerable.

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REVIEW:

Through experimental observations and inferences, Hall reveals the ways in which individuals in a culture are tied together by individual threads of rhythm, yet isolated from each other by hidden walls of time. Time is an organizer of activities - a synthesizer and integrator, and a special language that reveals how we really feel about each other. Wm. Condon's work (using stop-frame analysis/EEG) relates to the delicate web of body rhythm (synchrony) that ties us together, and discordance or breakdown of the action chains associated with this web can have implications almost beyond belief.

For example:

· on the interpersonal level, when a mate becomes involved with another, there is a shift in his or her rhythm, as though the 3rd person was in the house (as, in a way, they are, because their rhythm is there).

· in athletics, where the rhythm has been perfected, relative velocity appears to slow down.

· in communication, a source of dysfunction is failure to match feedback rhythms with corrective action.

[The effect of ‘synchrony’ (moving together) is described in case studies of people communicating (1/64 stop-frame analysis & EEG sine wave comparisons), or working together with a background of shared, non-directive conversation, song or rhythm, or of groups of children interacting to an unconscious beat - in all cases the purpose of the common wave length or rhythm is to strengthen the group bond. The lack of such synchrony can index unconscious tension, when goals cannot be identified nor worked towards because the members are ‘out of sync’. The members of some cultures, by inducing better levels of synchrony, can experience life in a more integrated, holistic manner than we in the West, who tend to cut the flow of life up into chunks & thereby experience the world as being fragmented.]

Entrainment rhythm is so much a part of everyone's life that it occurs virtually without notice. Somewhere in the process of synchrony there is a link between the normal experience on the conscious level and the so-called metaphysical. Only a short step separates the rhythmic sea in which all people are entrained and the contemporary theories of pre-cognition. Music is a highly specialized releaser of such rhythms already in the individual (the beat is in the person rather than in the music). When people talk with each other, their central nervous systems lock into a single unified sequence (sine wave), like 2 gears in a transmission. (Perhaps some form of entrainment can occur at a distance). At the inter-cultural level, if 2 different systems are not calibrated and unless a deliberate and successful effort is made to bring them into place, the results can be disastrous. (See Glossary - Adumbration)

In some Amerind cultures, Carl Jung's concept of synchronicity, or "collective unconscious" is extended to the point that events are experienced simultaneously by different people in different places so that people separated by space have been known to experience identical sensations and emotions. Hall's own beliefs are that there is a form of synchrony at the unconscious level which transcends space and sometimes time; that as more is learned about the human rhythm spectrum and how our rhythms relate to the earth's energy fields, the explanation of phenomena will become clear; and that learning to be able to utilize syncing on this level will simply be a matter of tuning in on one's self as in the art of Zen.

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