Читать книгу Power Cues - Nick Morgan - Страница 4

Three things happened to me when I was seventeen that turned out to have a significant effect on my interest in communications and, specifically, nonverbal communications, later in life. First, I read a book about the Dalai Lama and made him one of my personal heroes.¹ Second, I learned my father was gay. And third, I died.

Let me take those in order. I read a book about the Dalai Lama’s escape into India from the Communists in 1959 and immediately cast him as one of my heroes in a pantheon that included Martin Luther King Jr., President John F. Kennedy, and the Beatles. I was excited, therefore, a half-dozen or so years later when I had the chance to hear the Dalai Lama speak at the University of Virginia, where I was a graduate student, and cheerfully queued up for a seat in the small auditorium.

The room was overflowing with devotees, local Buddhists, and the merely curious. There was an excited, impatient buzz—or at least as impatient as Buddhists get—and the Dalai Lama was late. He was an hour late when he finally took the stage, crossing to the middle of the space slowly, hunched over a little, dressed in his signature saffron robes, much smaller than I’d imagined.

I realized I was holding my breath as he crossed the stage. To my astonishment, when he finally reached the center of the space, he sat on the floor, bypassing the comfortable chair that had been provided. He arranged his robes. He looked at us.

Then he said … nothing. He just looked at us for one minute, saying nothing. Two minutes went by, and he was silent. Three minutes passed, and still His Holiness said nothing.

We were transfixed. Finally, he let out an unearthly laugh, high and spacey, like a child’s “hahahahahahaha.” He said, “I’d better say something really important, I’ve kept you waiting for so long.”

After that, his speech was an anticlimax. There was something about the way he looked at us in silence, each person in turn, for those three minutes, that made a much deeper impression on everyone in the room than anything he could have said about the science of happiness.

Comparing notes afterward with other attendees, I learned that we all shared the feeling that he had touched us in some profound way. I wanted to know: What was it that passed between us? What was it about the Dalai Lama’s silent gaze that was so profound?

More broadly, how did nonverbal communication work? How could one person transfix me with a look?