The heavy lorry drew up at the pedestrian crossing; a few people crossed the road. The lorry did not move. The driver, it seemed, was waiting for someone else to cross. It was a lady pushing an invalid chair in which sat a girl of about ten years of age. As they began to cross, the lorry driver leaned out of his cab and waved his hand towards the little girl. She had glanced listlessly at the great bulk of the lorry, and the man leaning out above her. Then she became aware of his greeting; her eyes widened with surprise and pleasure; her pale, peaked face broadened into a delighted smile. The driver, no less delighted at the success of his gesture, now leaned his body halfway out of the cab, waving his arm, his face aglow with benevolence.
Thus, for the space of a few seconds, these two were at one. The little girl, rescued for the moment from her little pit of discomfort and loneliness, moved, queenlike, across the way, giving the man her gratitude for his compassion -- and was gone. The lorry, too, went on its way.
No doubt the incident might fade from the minds of both man and girl within a few minutes. To the observer, however, it came as a revelation of that hidden, unifying higher self which underlies, in us all, the outer man of separateness.
The Egyptians believed that Osiris, the Sun-god, had to become shattered into fragments when entering into the manifested world; and that each individual human being, in his innermost reality, represents one of these divine fragments -- his own inner sun. The little incident shone, for me, in just such a light.
(From Sunrise magazine, February 1979. Copyright © 1979 by Theosophical University Press.)