How I Came To See What I Was Looking Right At

By Irv Thomas

Wow, this consciousness-change stuff is so subtle that you'll likely not even see it, at first, when you are looking right at it!

On a Monday early in December -- a bitingly cold day in Seattle, though it was clear and beautiful -- I went out for a few mid-afternoon errands, fooled by the sunlight as to how heavily I should have dressed for it. And living by Metro bus schedules, as I do, one doesn't readily respond to second thoughts about such things. I braced myself and went on into it.

But at the tag end of my errand run, I was one minute late for the bus that would have gotten me easily home -- it had left the terminus already. That meant a half hour's useless and frigid wait. Unless . . . I could catch a cross-street bus soon due, and intersect the departed one at a transfer point less than ten minutes away. I went for it, gambler that I am . . . only to barely miss the intended connection. So the half-hour wait was still my fate, in the increasing cold of the now sunless day.

Faced with what seemed terminal futility, along with frigidity, I tried something that only such desperation could prompt: I put out my thumb for the passing traffic. In the city, in these times of homeless panhandlers, people are not so responsive to such expressions of need, but I hoped my advanced age might make a difference . . . to no apparent avail, however.

I stood at the curb like that for perhaps five minutes and then spotted, far down the hill's slope, what looked for all the world like the outline of an approaching Metro bus. It was totally unlikely, for there was no other line running that route except the one I knew I had missed.

It drew nearer as I remained there with my thumb out, until I could finally make out the "Not In Service" sign on its destination marquee. But as I innocently stood there, it pulled over, and its door swung open . . . apparently for me!

"No charge," said the driver, "but I can only take you as far as the freeway" -- which quite adequately fulfilled my immediate need. I live merely a block off that course he was driving.

Hitch-hiking 'rescues', as most who know me are aware, are a reasonably familiar part of my experience, and I tend to chalk them up to Providence and 'the nature of the game' -- this occasion, to be sure, a little more remarkable than most. But late that evening when I finally got around to opening the early Monday morning email from Rev. Angela Peregoff of Virginia Beach, who regularly cues my week with her spiritual take on things, her week's counsel opened up a perspective on my experience that had never before struck me.

Let me quote a portion of it for you:

"The cosmic divine plan for 2010 is opening a platform that allows us to move back and forth across the non-physical/physical boundaries of creating reality...

"This also means your physical reality is going to become an even more malleable substance in the near future and the above mentioned gifts will assist you in mastering your personal realities. If you are a student of Science of Mind you already know that reality has always been something that you have control over, but for those who are not familiar with the idea -- get ready. You may want to start exploring the idea of being a co-creator because those who can project intentions and solutions into the Law of Mind will be more at peace."

With that in mind, I'd like you to consider the following...

For everything that happens in your world -- whether it happens to you or is something you witness, or read or hear about -- you are applying an interpretation to it, based on prior conceptions and awareness. Depending on how you handle this, you are continually laying (and/or extending) the groundwork of your ongoing evolvement. If you choose to see it in 'the same old way' it will merely continue 'that way' for you. But every time you open yourself to a new element, or suddenly see things a little more deeply than you did before, you've made a progression along a path of evolvement.

Literally, you see, the course of your reality has been your own determination. I've been a hitch-hiker, on and off, for 66 years, now. At first, it was simply a way to get around. But in getting an automobile for myself at age 24, I put hitch-hiking aside -- it was of no further use for me. Then, twenty years later, when I saw the economic wisdom (in a newly directed life) of picking up that old activity again, I got back into it -- simply, however, as a form of transport.

Up to that moment, my reality of hitch-hiking had a rather static configuration. But radical change was underway at that time in my entire overall reality: 'the times', and a younger generation afoot (and a-hitch, as it were) were providing me with all sorts of new-reality fodder, and it was only natural that I'd begin seeing things about hitch-hiking that I'd never seen before. It doesn't mean that anything other than my perception of it had changed . . . but that meant my reality had changed! It's as simple (and as profound) as that.

From then on, I saw increasingly more magic in my hitch-hiking -- as though some new ingredient had been infused, but the pure fact of it was that I was seeing it differently. Perhaps that did tend to 'sharpen' and refine the actual occurrence, I don't know -- I can't swear otherwise. But it makes little difference: the important thing, for practical purposes, is that hitch-hiking became, for me, a superb and continually instructive vehicle for my evolving consciousness.

This most recent further step in that direction -- the sudden insight that, all along, I had been engaged in a discovery project through hitch-hiking: the demonstrable fact (as now realized) of my active participation in the creation of my own reality.  Finally seeing it, as such, is just frosting on the cake of my lifelong experience.

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