Relative Something

When a message comes at you from three different sources in a short span of time it tends to get noticed. When this happens to me, I find myself assigning an increased level of significance to the subject and become attuned to anything that relates, but I often struggle to identify myself as the target audience. It usually goes something like this in my mind: “Oh, this subject matter is exactly what so-and-so needs to hear based on what they were just telling me the other day…” However, it usually turns out that one of the three sources I have credited with bringing the message to my attention, is the same individual I am now interpreting as the one more likely to benefit from hearing the lesson it holds.

I can’t count the number of times the ultimate lesson turned out to be one that I benefited from. So it is on my mind to unravel a current lesson that feels like one with which I already have a good grasp.

We have a little flip book in a bathroom at home with, I think, a year’s worth of pithy little Zukav (as in author, Gary) messages that I notice on a regular basis; especially when it turns out that no one is bothering to advance the page for days on end.

From page 32:

“Every action, thought, and feeling is motivated by an intention, and that intention is a cause that exists as one with an effect. If we participate in the cause, it is not possible for us not to participate in the effect. In this most profound way, we are held responsible for our every action, thought and feeling, which is to say, for our every intention.” Zukav,Gary. Thoughts from the Seat of the Soul. Meditations for Souls in Process. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989.

So I come home after having a discussion where this very thought was triggered in my mind and I suddenly find the tidbit from Seat of the Soul waiting for me as reinforcement.  Maybe it had more impact because that same message was waiting for me for days in a row. But that’s not the point. Later, I log in to catch up on my online community conversations and see they are making reference to a “Thomas Theorem” (W. I. Thomas, 1863–1947): The classic aphorism, stated by Thomas, is, ‘When people define situations as real, they become real in their consequences’.

Accurate or not, we interpret the world around us and the situations we find ourselves in, and then we react accordingly and ultimately experience the consequences. There is always opportunity for correction along the way, but ideally, the correction would happen all the way back at the front end of the chain of events. Since we establish how things are going to develop, and they develop whether we were accurate in our initial interpretation or not, it is in our own best interest to become aware of how we are perceiving situations and choose to frame them in the healthiest way.

I thought I was already cognizant of all this, but for some reason, the message is continuing to arrive for me. The consequences are real in self-fulfilling prophecies. If I want different outcomes, I can choose to see things differently at the outset. It is taking the idea from mountain biking, of watching  the trail and not the rocks I’m trying to avoid, and expanding it. It is another version of smiling to become happy, or imagining, visualizing, and expecting the best outcomes for myself to achieve consequences of my choosing.

I’ll be paying attention to this in my life with a little more intent in the near future as a way of heeding a message that has returned three-fold in the last few days.