Contrast

"Contrast is necessary for you to be able to discern that which is meaningful from that which is not. This discernment is necessary to have in order for you to re-evaluate your life and to set yourself in a new direction born of your true inner need and the needs of the world."

"Genuine learning can only come through contrast. You must see the effects of living according to your ideas in contrast to the results of living according to real experience. This is vital and necessary. This shows you the difference between living with life and living apart from life, cut off by your own ideas."

Contrast between Knowledge and pretense

"To study The Greater Community Way of Knowledge is to reorient yourself to the true meaning of your life. You will take many small steps along the way as you proceed. Your other motives and your other attachments will become sharply contrasted so that you will be able to perceive them in a more objective manner."

"Wisdom is meant for you who have already tasted its beneficence, its grandeur, its grace and its simplicity—an experience that sets it in contrast to all other things in life, making them dull and mundane in comparison, an experience of certainty, open-mindedness and greater relationship with life."

Contrast between relationships of Higher Purpose and all others

"What confirms your approach is that you know it must be done. Along the way you meet certain individuals who point the way, and then you meet certain individuals who will join you. Some will join you temporarily; some will join you more permanently. They all provide encouragement, contrast, demonstration—all the things you need to recognize and to experience in order to proceed forward."

"Then you have a rendezvous with those who will take up a greater position in your life, who are here to serve a greater capacity that they are only beginning to recognize within themselves. Those who make this rendezvous will play such a great part in your life and will stand in contrast to every other relationship that you have tried to establish for yourself."

In the presence of the extraterrestrial presence on Earth

"Regarding the visitors that are in the world now, they are much more concentrated on their mission than you are. They are much more focused on achievement than you are. They are less compromised by conflicting desires, wishes and beliefs than you are. Perhaps they will seem mechanical to you and one-dimensional. This is not the case. When you think these things, you are reacting to being in the presence of someone who is very focused, very concentrated and very determined. Having this sense of contrast is necessary for you to recognize the need for intelligence and to prompt you forward in a practical form of development."

Further study

• Wisdom from the Greater Community, Book 2, Chapter 3: Pleasure