BENEFITING FROM INTERDEPENDENCE

So often, that it’s difficult to understand how it could be, we hear about groups and individuals within them who care nothing about anything but themselves. Their egos have virtually taken them over. The day-to-day life around them is dominated by how can they get others to buy their product(s), use their service(s), and how they can get something out of every situation. The obvious end result being they have little regard for whether or not people want or need those items. Their will to receive (their ego) is so great that their entire existence literally revolves around those egoistic desires.

What can we do to shift this trend? With our lives being so irreversibly interdependent and interconnected. It is very easy to look at the current events of any given area of the world and see how the events happening there influence events of our own or other locations. Our day-to-day existence depends on how we interact.

I’m sure you’ve heard of ‘Six Degrees of Separation’ it was first postulated publicly in the 1950s and later a movie and a play by the same name were made ‘Six Degrees of Separation’. Basically, everyone is six or fewer steps away, via introduction, from any other person in the world. We can create a chain of friend-of-a-friend statements that can be used to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps.

I myself find this easy to believe, if you use or are a fan of many of the social networks available on the Internet as I do, I’m sure you will find the same. One of those networks has me connected directly to 136 people and their first, second, and third-level connections give me access to in excess of 6.7 million others.

Our technological advances especially within the areas of communications and travel allow us to be larger than ourselves, we span greater distances faster and more than at any time in the past. Our modern world is virtually shrinking each day due to our ever-increasing connectedness. Despite the sometimes-great physical distances.

Mathematician Manfred Kochen extrapolated the empirical results in a manuscript entitled ‘Contacts and Influences’ in 1973 concluding at that time it was practically certain that in a U.S.A. sized population base and structure “any two individuals can contact one another by using at most two intermediaries”.

If we are to actually make this a world that we can all live together, our day-to-day lives need to be making a similar movement towards a similar goal. We can accomplish this greater connectedness through bestowal. Helping someone or something when the help is needed with no thought of compensation or return.

Each time we receive a chance to relate with or to others with greater concern for them than for ourselves we are bestowing ourselves to them. A connection is made between souls. The ending result of bestowal is reception. We receive a feeling of belonging, although it is a fleeting feeling and does not last long. we can get it back as often as we like by creating bestowal again.

As we move towards this life of bestowal and reception we begin to move internally and externally closer to those we bestow upon. This then moves us toward the reality of our existence that we are in fact the highest level of life on this planet, and we do not need to take anything for by bestowing we receive everything.

Humanity has little experience operating this way. We are used to defining ourselves as individuals or members of factions of society, from family to nation-state, the current situations around the world necessitate that we expand our view. We must become aware of the truth of our interconnectedness if we are to survive and flourish.

Dave SW