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The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

George Bernard Shaw

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The above succinct quotation is a lot more apt than many are willing to acknowledge. It is widely applicable. It takes a lot of effort, willingness and practice to enhance communication so that one can be “en rapport” with another. One has to be on similar wavelengths and not too divergent in intellect. There must be some shared commonality of allegory and metaphor, usually some overlap of life experiences. There needs to be some kind of tie, perhaps emotional or deeper. The sharing of space and time with another helps, sharing trauma or profound experience can enhance a shared experiential which enables communication. One can communicate well with someone who one “hates” because that intensity adds focus to communication. This intensity can aid or degrade communication. There are a lot of assumptions and biases present in most attempts to communicate.

Above all one needs to listen attentively and try to communicate, to convey. My experience suggests that many are unskilled in listening. To tune in to another requires one to be passive like a radio receiver. One needs to find the wavelength of transmission on the dial.

If there is poor rapport using conventional methods such as talking it is not surprising that unconventional methods such as telepathy are not well experimentally proven. I like the analogy of an electronic instrument. If the noise in the instrument is high its ability to detect true signal is reduced. The “minds” of most are a cacophony of internal dialogue unable to pick up signal. If the mind is distracted and unfocussed the spoken word fails to register with any longevity in the consciousness. {Oh look a butterfly, my ‘phone has just pinged with a text, what is for tea?}

I’ll speculate that profound inter-human rapport is on the wane.

In the media when a psychic is consulted to solve a complicated murder case, perhaps find a body, they are given a piece of clothing, a photograph. This enables the psychic-seer to tune into to the missing person or object. Logically the rapport gained from a scarf or a photograph cannot be as strong as that gained from a genuine relationship with that individual. Perhaps by taking time to immerse into the life, the bedroom, the friends of the missing person a non-proximal rapport can be gained. But it would not be the same as if they worked together for a decade and shared life’s highs and lows. There may be some more predisposed to such a skill. We have the notion of empath on one hand and trained skilled psychological profiler on the other hand. One uses a subjective rapport and the other builds from a quasi-objective evidence base.

The notion of rapport is of course subjective and perhaps elusive. Rapport must vary in a temporal sense. For example I am markedly different in outlook now than I was two decades ago. Any rapport people had with me from back then has probably passed its expiry date. I can still put on my Worzel-Gummidge science head if needed. It is at the back of the barn behind the haystack.

Because we may lack a genuine rapport we can easily assume that we understand people and their motivation much better than we actually do…

Rapport has cultural elements too. This has been clear here in France. I have had conversations where I know we are not on the same page, in the same book or even the same library. I have noted the case. The other person has not. There is no way that you can convince the adamant that they have gotten the wrong end of the stick, even when you know they have.

Communication is way trickier that we imagine.

In Buddhism the notion of mind to mind transfer is active in the hagiography and key in the Zen lineages. Things are passed on non-verbally. This strays into the parapsychological notion of telepathy. In such instances the follower and teacher have shared considerable time, they have had grumbling bellies when the alms bowls were sparsely filled. They have meditated together. Their way of life has been shared, their philosophies have converged, their wavelengths have become similar and synchronised. Under such circumstances the likelihood of mind-to-mind transfer must be enhanced. They did not go home to their wives nor watch Strictly of a Saturday night. They are not worried about losing their jobs nor distracted by the next vagaries issuing out of Trump’s jumbled mind.

Rapport then is an unquantifiable but when shared is a common subjective experience. Communication is less difficult and mutual understanding more easily reached.  A convergence of being enables rapport.

I liken this mental rapport to the phenomenon of quantum entanglement. Two photons created as an entangled photon pair have their wavefunctions coupled, they are en rapport with each other. When one photon is “asked” about its state of polarisation and answers. The other photon telepathically knows what its state is too, despite any geometric distance between them.

Rapport can be thought of as a form of entanglement, a loss of harsh individuality, where a shared outlook is held, however briefly. During full rapport communication is “instantaneous”. The separate I, me, is melded into an us. In full rapport we might think as one.

The wavefunction contains everything we might want to know about a photon {or pair}. The mind contains everything we might want to know about the non-biological part of a being. Two minds fully en rapport share. Of course mental rapport is unlikely to be total though it could be significantly partial. A shared mental rapport might enable a telepathic transfer, being to being. Physical plane distance need not hinder.

If one studies an individual for an extended period one might get to know them and have a measure of predictivity concerning their thoughts and behaviour. This could be an ersatz rapport when you think you know but don’t really. The grey area between advised intuition and genuine telepathic rapport is probably experimentally inseparable. A stalker thinks they know the victim, a spook understands the target. To generate an accurate rapport with someone personally unfamiliar is not facile. We may imagine we know. We may be overly optimistic as to extent.

What we wish for and what is actual, can differ.

Hmnn…