General Description

This is a forum venue for all who join the SanibLakas (Synergism) Foundation in the Philippines in gathering and sharing all around our various rays and shafts of light to help us view the profound realities beyond illusory perceptions. We welcome shared insights from personal experiences, inspirational anecdotes (preferably non-fiction and based on direct experiences), and even nuggets of Wisdom from the Academe. Let us seek, share, synergize the bits and pieces of the Great Truth that we each discover, rediscover, possess and apply to guide our personal lives, and the Truth shall set us free from all blinders and separation. (From the general description carried in the home page of LightShare@yahoogroups.com.)

Additional/Specific Descriptions

‘Sanib-Sinag’: Towards A New Culture for Human Conversations

(This is an article writtten in October 1999 about the live, face-to-face version of Sanib-Sinag)

“Smile for earnest conversations, the synergy of information, views and feelings that are shared with honest humility and are heeded with genuine respect.” –a line from the poem “Smile for Synergy” by D. Reyes, May-June 1999

SOMETHING NEW is going on at Geo-Café. Actually, a lot of things are going on here, but there’s something going on very quietly and slowly every Saturday afternoon, usually at the long table nearest the panoramic window. And it is the birthing of a new habit, quite possibly of a whole new culture, of earnest and fulfilling conversations among friends and strangers, each humbly offering one’s own personal views without claiming these to be the obvious or universal truth, and each listening intently to others talk, according each speaker genuine respect not only for the right to speak but the right to be actually listened to.

This is Sanib-Sinag, the weekly informal sharing of personal thoughts and feelings within such themes as synergism, lifepath-setting, sense of fulfillment, self-esteem, separative ego, family relations, friendship and romance, death, destiny and free will, maturity and spiritual growth.

In these conversations, attended by people numbering from five to twelve at any one time, lectures are discouraged. There are enough lecture sessions going on all around us where we converge to listen to authoritative discourse. In Sanib-Sinag, everyone is a lecturer and gets to choose the topic she or he would like to bring out. When one begins to sound like a lecturer speaking from the authority of books or professors, the facilitator asks why the speaker personally decided to agree with that authoritative theory or passage, what personal experiences led to such decision to agree. And the lecture turns back to personal sharing.

Debates are definitely a no-no in these sessions. But, of course, we can understand that some people have the unconscious tendency to sound as if debating due to over-enthusiasm for their own points. Somehow reminders are made that differing views need not be resolved because no collective decisions are being made in these sessions, anyway. We get enriched by simply knowing of another point of view and understanding it fully. Sharing is the word. And in real sharing, competition has no place at all.

Sanib-Sinag is a project of SanibLakas ng Taongbayan Foundation, a three-year-old organization dedicated to the promotion and conscious application of the principle of synergism to all possible facets of life and reality. The principle is nothing new, and it operates from the level of the atom, molecule and the living cell to the level of basketball teams, neighborhood associations, cooperatives and the biosphere, all the way to star systems and galaxies, as shown in the poem “Smile for Synergy” written by its founder.

“What we are trying to do is have a more conscious application and therefore fuller utilization of this principle for our empowerment and upliftment,” Saniblakas founding chair Ed Aurelio Reyes would explain to answer questions on the subject. “We already had a much older word for this, bayanihan, and from it came our nearest equivalent word for heroes and heroines. But somehow the meaning of bayanihan got eroded and lost as centuries passed, and we would now tend to limit its image to the carrying of houses, or, worse, identify the word only with a folk dancing group.”

That was the reason a new word, “saniblakas,” has been proposed to capture the sense of synergism, and the prefix “sanib-” has come to be identified with many applications. "Sanib" here stands for an intransitive verb that pertains to a mutual act of combining; the transitive verb “sinasaniban,” with a doer and a direct object, has a sense quite from our use of this word.

One application of this prefix is “sanib-galing,” which some working teams have come to use to happily describe their collective capabilities. Another is “sanib-recall” where two or three people who were in a past situation together would succeed to recall much more of that situation if they teamed up for the effort. Still another is “Sanib-Kulay,” the name adopted by a new visual arts group organized by a painter who has frequently been attending the Sanib-Sinag sessions since recently.

And that brings us right back to Sanib-Sinag itself, the build-up of mind and spirit synergies. “Each of us carries a mirror that reflects the Great Light of Truth in its special, unique way,” a Saniblakas handout for the project opens. “But we can appreciate even with exhilaration the breathtaking beauty and richness in diversity in Creation itself, as presented in many kaleidoscopic panoramas and microcosms all around us, with each leaf, each flower, each tree trunk, each rock reflecting the glorious rays of the sun in its own unique way. Sanib-Sinag is a way of sharing the rays of the Great Light of Truth and Beauty as reflected in the little mirrors of our respective unique personal experiences, so we can all enjoy our commonalities, respect and transcend our differences and be enriched by by them, and be a collective beacon for bigger and more powerful synergy of light for Truth and Beauty.”

Sanib-Sinag is basically unstructured, save, perhaps for its regular schedule (Saturdays, within the 1-5 p.m. range) and venue (Geo-Café at Earthlite) and, more importantly, for its aversion to authoritative lectures and energy-sapping debates. There are no memberships to apply for, no fees to pay, no fixed agenda prepared beforehand.

But even the schedule and venue may not be limited to its present arrangement much longer. Someone who was planning to come to the session one Saturday thought to invite his three kabarkadas, and explained Sanib-Sinag to them when they asked what it was all about. His friends resonated on the felt need to talk occasionally of profound themes in conversations of the Sanib-Sinag type, and they half-consciously started such a session right then and there where they were. It may become something like a habit spread by some who have enjoyed coming to join in these conversations. Who knows what that might do to dinner table situations in some very quiet homes?

Sanib-Sinag has been going on at Geo-Café since May 8, 1999. This is not exactly very new anymore. Although the number of people attending at any one time has not really grown much, new faces have come to smile with strangers everytime. And even if these people do not usually come back the following Saturday, or the next, the important thing is that they’ve had the experience of enjoying this kind of conversation, this kind of informal but profound sharing. And as soon as they feel any serious need for such conversations again, they can start them right where they are. Or they may decide to come to the next regular session with enough confidence that Sanib-Sinag will be there as usual, in that long glass table by the window at Geo-Café.

There is a quiet and very gradual process centered at Geo-Café but growing even well beyond the "urban paradise" that is Earthlite. This is the emerging Sanib-Sinag habit in a growing number of people, the emerging Sanib-Sinag culture that would serve us well in the coming millennium. This is what is new. And it is dawning from the synergy between the SanibLakas Foundation and Geo-Café and the bigger Earthlite community.

(This article was written by volunteer editor Ding Reyes for the early October 1999 issue of Sparks and Reflections the now-defunct fortnightly newsletter of Earthlite at C.O.D. in Cubao, Quezon City. Sanib-Sinag (Live) was then being done every Saturday afternoon, specifically at the Geo-Cafe organic foods restaurant. Weekly sharing sessions continue to be held at Earthlite on Saturday afternoons led by Sammy del Rosario.)

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