Was President Eyring's Talk about Synergicity?
By Richard Eyre

Editor's note: Today's column continues a series on the Third Alternative of "Synergicity." This column winds up the discussion of the third alternative, "SYNERGICITY," explaining how the concept can replace the loneliness and isolation of "Independence." Write to Richard@meridianmagazine.com. with comments.

I know I said at the end of last week's column that I had written about all I knew about Synergicity, but then along came a careful reading of President Eyring's conference talk, and I expanded my view. When he spoke of his attempts to notice and recognize God's hand in our everyday lives, I realized that the key to Synergicity is doing exactly that. Today's column will be brief, but carries, I think, the weight of the profound advice of the newest member of the First Presidency.

Let me remind you once again of our working definition of the third alternative:

Synergicity: A state of mind and spirit that acknowledges (indeed, celebrates) one's complete dependency on God and complete interdependency with others and develops synergy on all levels. An attitude and approach which gives all credit and gratitude to God, seeks His will and looks for His hand in all things, particularly in the timing and interconnectedness of events.

The ability to notice and recognize the hand (and guidance and inspiration and "nudges"....and even the intervention) of the Lord in our everyday lives is clearly what we are talking about here. It is that recognition that pulls us away from the short sighted and small thinking idea of "independence" and helps us to see how completely dependent we are on our Heavenly Father and how completely we are connected to our brothers and sisters and how interdependent we all are on each other.

I loved President Eyring's account of his resolution to make a journal entry every day of the times during that day that he had recognized God's hand. He made that kind of entry every day for "many years." Imagine how tuned-in he became to God's tender mercies, and to the large and small ways He inputs and intervenes in our lives, and to the fact that "God is in the details."

As I pondered President Eyring making his journal entry every day, this intellectual giant, blessed with an exceptionally keen mind and heavily involved at the time in the secular and academic world, I marveled that he could notice things, every day, that showed him the personal involvement of God in the daily events of his life. I wondered what the entries were like, what type of things he noticed. Were some of them broad and general as he observed the beauty of nature or the majesty of God's creation? Or were most of them personal, involving the thoughts that came to his mind or the "coincidences" that weren't really coincidences, or the people that entered his life, to help or to be helped.

Whatever the case, it is clear that looking for God's hand in our every day lives is a marvelous key to changing our paradigm to a more spiritual one, and to begin to see the world in "soulful" rather than worldly terms. I have always loved the saying "We are not mortal beings who sometimes have spiritual experiences, we are spiritual beings who are having mortal experiences."

It is hard in this very worldly world, bombarded 24/7 by messages of materialism, to have a spiritual paradigm. It is difficult, in a world where control, ownership and independence are worshiped, to shift our focus and seek instead spiritual serendipity, spiritual stewardship, and spiritual synergicity. It is hard, BUT IT CAN BE DONE! And President Eyring has given us one simple and elegant way to do it.

The task (and the goal) of the last few installments of this column will be to explore WAYS! We will look for all the ways we can find to make this shift, to turn our minds and hearts more and more to the things of the spirit, to the ultimate realities of eternity. We must try to do so in ways that fit in with mortality's purpose, and that do not remove us from mortal realities but help us to see those realities in a more spiritual context. I have always believed that the much-used phrase "Be in the world but not of the world" is best read as two separate admonitions. And the reason I like the concepts and the attitudes of spiritual serendipity, stewardship and synergicity is that they are approaches to life that can keep us firmly and constructively in the world, yet deep us from ever becoming of the world.

Thus we can experience all the learning and experiencing and expanding as well as all the giving and sharing and contributing that mortality makes possible without getting overcome and swallowed up by the petty materialism and false gods that reign in our current culture.

It's all about attitude, and its all about gratitude. And those are the directions we will be going in the next few columns.