From Abraham through Esther Hicks:
Contrast helps you to identify desire. Desire is summoning. It’s always flowing through you. You have the opportunity of opening to the harmony of the vibration of your desire or not. As the desires are being summoned through you, and you go with the flow, you thrive, but if you use things to be your excuse for not going with the flow, you are arguing for your limitations. We want to show you how to go with the flow, which means nothing more than finding vibrational harmony with your own desire, and letting the universal energy that your desire is summoning to it flow to it through you. It is optimum creative experience.

You are in this game for the fun of it. You are a limitless infinite being, and yet here you are in this complex world you’ve created to experience what it feels like to have limits, to create new things, to awaken new desires and put your hands in the clay of life and build something new. And you cannot do that without contrast. So to those Abraham words we say Amen. And then we would add some because how you react to contrast is hugely important. How you react is everything. The trick is to stay away from “Woe is me” and move to “That’s interesting, now what do I want?” So let’s spend some time here thinking about three stages along the pathway to learning to pivot just like that.

Now we’re going to use the word “bad” here in these examples but just remember there really is no objective truth about what’s good or what’s bad. It’s all subjective. To some people being out in the rain is wonderful. To others of you the very idea of wet hair and water running down your face is very unpleasant. And it’s all circumstantial. If somebody breaks your door in and pours water into your house, you’re going to be very upset, unless of course your house is on fire when you’ll be very grateful for the intrusion. Can you see then that labelling some event as “good” or “bad” is a choice you make. You make those choices and then you practice them into thought habits.

Similarly, apart from the Absolutes, what for you is true or untrue is a choice. And those choices lead you to the decisions you make about what’s real and unreal. And once those decisions are made, the Law Of Attraction reinforces them as “real”. It can be no other way, because the power inherent in those choices of yours is such that that your world conforms. Then you observe that conformity and you practice that choice once more. And after you’ve day by day, and year by year, practiced that belief and observed that conformity, it’s long forgotten as ever being a choice at all. What it is now is just a self-evident truth. In fact it’s even beyond that because it’s so deeply instilled in you, it just is.

So this is where you start from at Stage 1. You’re just coming perhaps to an elementary understanding of the Law Of Attraction. At this point you mostly think consciously and subconsciously that the world is something external and inevitable, and you have to deal with it. You’re lined up at all levels with the concept that you’re living in a physical reality but flirting with the idea that maybe there are some things you can do to change your life a little. You’ve heard us or others talk about the importance of feeing good – that how you feel tells you whether you’re heading towards what you want (you feel good) or away from it (you feel bad), and you’re trying out a few of these concepts.

And then something bad happens. You instantly and automatically feel bad.
Why then do you feel bad? Because your thought is about why it’s bad and the inevitable consequence of what’s coming next, and those thoughts are not in line with what you want.
How is it that you feel bad so quickly without a conscious choice? Because you’ve already rehearsed what this bad event will mean and your subconscious is simply doing what you’ve taught it to do. It moves you onto that well-practiced train of thought.

So are you at Stage 1 or in Stage 2, where you’re beginning to open up to the idea that you’re the one writing the screenplay for this movie of yours? You’ve made the conscious choice that you’re the one in charge. You’ve made the conscious choice that your world is a stage created by you. Consciously you know about the importance of feeling good. Subconsciously however, much of the old belief system remains, and it’s at this powerful subconscious level that most of your decisions get made and the old ideas about your world keep pressing through that boundary layer and challenging your power to see things differently.

Then something bad happens. You instantly and automatically feel bad.
At some point after that it occurs to you that you’re feeling bad and you now know consciously that what you’re spending energy on is taking you away from what you want and heading you towards more of what you don’t want. You make a decision to change. Maybe you go through a Letting Go sequence or a Would-Be/Will-Be/IS sequence, and these processes make a difference, and your subconscious notices. You celebrate the difference, and your subconscious notices. You appreciate your ability to pivot away from negativity, and your subconscious notices. Your subconscious is learning a new game.

And then there’s Stage 3 – the mastery stage Let’s revisit that sequence with you after you’ve done some powerful rehearsing of a different story – about the world being a virtual reality, about who you are, and why you’re here. You’ve reached the place where the words “ongoing and ever-present awareness” have started to mean something. You’re carrying with you now a subconscious background awareness of your divinity. You’re imperturbable – not entirely because contrast still exists, but mostly.

And something bad happens. You instantly and automatically say to yourself “That’s interesting. Now what do I want?” And you quickly launch into new creative thinking.
How is it that you can do this instantly and automatically? Because your subconscious has received the message that there’s more to this game of life on earth life than just following the old program, and it’s absorbed that message to the extent that it’s now more actively participating in the adventure. You’ve collectively moved past the concept that survival is the driving factor in this game. You’ve accepted at all levels that you’re here for an entirely different reason. You’re here to experience the joy of creating new things.

You’re a time-less consciousness. You started in Stage 1 as a conscious thinking new-choice mind, and a way more powerful subconscious status quo mind. That subconscious of yours watched you as you learned to walk and to talk, and it walks you now and talks you. Its role was to learn what it can do to relieve you of the need to make the same decisions over and over, and it did just that. It has a concept of reality that it’s learned as you’ve participated in this game. Keeping you alive is its ultimate goal, and at each step along the way it has worked to make life as easy for you as it can. You can’t function in your space/time world without it, and you can’t move to Stage 3 without it supporting you in a new way.

So how do you get that subconscious support? Even more fundamentally, how do you push through Stage 1 to Stage 2 when the seemingly self-evident truth is that “you have to face reality”? Well by now you’ve probably figured out that just surviving isn’t enough. There has to be more to it than that. The good news is that even deeper in that tapestry of yours is the knowledge of who you are. If you think back to early times for you, your Peter Pan and Wendy times, you can get to a remembrance of magic being possible. It’s the same remembrance that whispers to you that there might be something to this Law Of Attraction stuff, that maybe you’re way more powerful than those self-evident facts suggest.

And you are. If you want to be scientific and logical about it, we would say that the explanation we offer of the truth of who you are, and who we are, is not only a simple and logical explanation of everything that exists, it’s the ONLY simple and logical explanation. But logic will only take you so far. At some point you have to be prepared to follow through on those glimpses of magic. And you don’t have to take our word for any of this. You can follow your heart a little here and try it out. All of this is verifiable by you if you just decide to go for it.

Just remember:
1. Contrast is a part of what you came here to experience.
2. Stop rehearsing what bad events will mean (as in “Woe is me”).
3. Start rehearsing your pivots (as in “That’s interesting, now what do I want?”).
5. Practice “reality” a little less.
6. Practice Peter Pan a little more.
7. Just surviving isn’t enough. Your intent was fun and adventure.
8. Mastery can be yours if you will bring your subconscious along for the ride.

So ask yourself, what is the primary goal of your subconscious? Is it surviving or thriving, because there’ll always be contrast? Contrast helps you to identify desire. Desire is summoning. It’s always flowing through you. So we say, allow that desire to flourish. When you step into contrast, notice what you’ve rehearsed as your responses. Catch yourself and correct yourself, because if you stay in the bad feeling place, you’re holding yourself apart from the joyful things the Universe wants to deliver to you. If you’re in Stage 1, choose to move to Stage 2. If you’re in Stage 2, stay the course. Just like those old constraining belief choices, new choices can be just as self-reinforcing. And what that means is .. the better it gets the better it gets,