The Pursuit and Practice of Synergicity
By Richard Eyre

Editor's note: Today's column continues a series on the Third Alternative of "Synergicity." Over the next few weeks, this column will continue to outline and explain the third alternative of "SYNERGICITY," and how the concept can replace the loneliness and isolation of "Independence."

A Declaration of Interdependence and Dependence (and the Amazing Power of "Nothingness")

Over the past few weeks, we have defined our third alternative of Synergicity, and outlined why it is such a superior attitude and paradigm to Independence. (Click the Alternatives archive to the right if you need a little review of the last couple of columns.)  Now we turn to the question of how to get more of it into our lives!

For starters, make a personal declaration of interdependence with other people and a declaration of divine dependence on God.  Just acknowledging your own lack of independence is a good first step.  It brings a type of peaceful humility wherein there is much less stress.  It allows us to start turning things over to the Lord, and it increases our faith and our hope. It allows us to follow the Savior's admonition to "Cast our burdens on Him." 

Sometimes just understanding one’s own nothingness is the beginning of a glorious humility and something that liberates us from all kinds of things like pride, selfishness, and loneliness.  "Nothingness," as it turns out, is not a negative thing, in fact, it is a powerful thing that opens to us great worlds of promise.

And the promises are very literal, and very specific.  Read with me from King Benjamin's great address:

How is that for a list of promises?  What would you give to have those six things come true in your life?  Well, the admonition — the challenge — which Benjamin gives that leads to those promises is to remember and retain in our rememberance "The greatness of God and our own nothingness."

If you think about it, you can see how an attitude of humility and nothingness leads to each promise.  Humility gives us gratitude and causes us to rejoice.  Realizing how great God is and how dependent we are on Him fills us with love for Him.  Feeling our nothingness makes us repentant and thus retains the remission of sins. 

The perspective of His "everythingness" and our "nothingness" allows us to know Him and grow in knowledge of Him.  And nothingness brings peace and the example that leads our children to love each other and choose God's path.

And nothingness is the trigger of Synergicity!  When we are in this state of mind, we look for God's timing and notice His hand and feel His nudges.  And we reach out to work synergistically with others and to look for win-win solutions and to find the Lord's way rather than insisting on our way.

I still remember one of the boldest prayers I have ever heard.  Elder LeGrande Richards, then too old to speak in General Conference, was giving one of the prayers.  As I recall, he said something like "And please bless all of us General Authorities with a realization of our own nothingness."

Synergicity as an Accurate Lens on Mortality

Synergicity is a lens through which we try to view the world a little like God sees it — with everything interconnected, everything benefiting from everything else, and in one way or another depending on everything else. (Symbiotic is another nice S word, by the way, meaning "any interdependent or mutually beneficial relationship between two persons, groups, etc." It could also have been a candidate for the Alternative, though it only has nine letters)

Synergicity then, the third of the Three Alternatives, really is a combination of the words synergy, synchronicity, and symbiotic, and it can be defined as a paradigm in which we acknowledge divine dependence, mutual interdependence, and respect the interconnectedness of all things, times, and occurrences within the framework of God's plan.

On a more personal level, we learn that, as D&C 90:24 teaches, all things will work together for our good, if we walk uprightly, remember our covenants, search diligently, be believing, and pray always.

Implementation

The key to implementing an attitude of Synergicity is to understand that, while our perspective and grasp of reality is narrow and limited by our mortality and by the veil, we have three incredible tools at our disposal, each of which can open things up to us and give us a much broader view of reality and of God's will. (And, in doing so, can show us the connections, opportunities, and insights that will allow us to learn the lessons, do the work, and find the joy that God has put us here for.) The tools can open up to us enormous resources and capacities beyond what we have independently and consciously.

The tools that we have, that our spirits can use, are:

1. Our own brains. We use less than 10% of the capacity of our marvelous minds. The power of our subconscious is largely untapped. We can "program" our brains to show us connections, to notice subtle things, to put the right words into our mouths, or give the compliment that someone else needs. We can literally tell our minds to be more aware, to prompt us to call someone when they are available, or to remember things from past experience that are relevant to what we are doing at the moment.
2. Other people's consciousness. When we ask other people how they feel, how they see things, what their take is, it's like getting a whole new picture with a whole new camera angle. When we develop our sense of empathy, we can sometimes get these perspectives without even asking. The point is that there is so much awareness and perspective around us, in the form of other people with their own sets of experiences and viewpoints, and the more we tap into that, the more our own awareness and perspective expands.
3. The Holy Ghost. The third member of the Godhead has the complete grasp of all reality, and we have the right to His companionship and benefit from His vast and beautiful comprehension. This connection is a gift, but only we can open it.

Think of these three resources in a technology metaphor. Our brains are our laptop computers (let's call them our head-top computers). They have far more capacity and memory and connections than we normally use.

Other people's experience, insights, and perspectives are like a computer network or even the internet. By plugging in and tapping in, we dramatically expand our own computer's speed, memory, and capacity.

And the Holy Ghost is, of course, the mainframe computer, the unlimited database and endless capacity master computer to which we have access. And it never breaks down or goes off line and cannot supply any false or misleading information, only truth and light.

As we avail ourselves to these three sources of awareness and perspective, we will find our lives ever more influenced by the wonderful phenomenon of Synergicity!

Richard appreciates your comments, questions, and feedback at Richard@meridianmagazine.com