November 2019

YOU’RE A DOVE, NOT A DUCK
     Instruction. Realize the only way to stay encouraged is to stay with only things that are truthful.
     Summary of a Vernon Howard story: The little dove didn’t know he was a little dove. He thought he was a duck. He imitated them. He had a wrong identity so he tried to quack like a duck. He had lost his naturalness, was a depressed, discouraged and a sad little dove. See where you’re trying to quack when you can coo.
     You’re taking your feelings of life from duck-land. Understand you’re the little dove put in the duck yard. Triple your spiritual suspicion that a false nature of yours is trying to prove to you that's it’s a true nature. The evidence that you’re a little dove in the duck yard is so obvious. Pain, etc. is unnecessary. You imitated people when you were little. All evil is nothing but acquired imitation that you believe in. See through thought-pangs and heartache.
     You are a human being put onto this earth to discover that you are not a duck. You don’t have to be accepted, liked by anyone. God has said you don’t have to prove you’re right. Be firm; recognize those evil forces wanting to draw you away. There’s another world for you.
     Only God can save you. He starts with the mind. You’re a dove, not a duck — a spiritual entity. You can fly away. Your real nature is glorious!

PUT SELF-DISSOLUTION FIRST
     Be very vitally concerned with your own life. To give proper attention to your life as a human being, you must realize you don’t have a higher life at all. Get rid of the illusion that you are now serving yourself. You search desperately around for assurance from someone to assure you that you’re all right. Everyone is doing that. Don’t do it.
     The key thought is for you to know that you must stop living your life as you now live it. Cease to emotionalize as you now do. The power and intelligence is available, but only when you obey the rules.
     You’re apart from what you could have. You have nothing but yourself. You are afraid, isolated from anything else higher. When living in the basement, you don’t know there are fine living quarters up higher, that there is a God. You’re apart from anything else higher.
     Start to have a genuine concern for your real life. Thinking is not spirituality. Emotionalizing is not spirituality. Imagining is not spirituality. If you feel bad it is because you are living in a bad place internally.
     You have been depending on some magical means and you wait for them to happen. You must now — every moment is now — say, “Now is the time to catch myself believing in false parts.”
     Say to everything and everyone, “Sir, you just yell at me all you want. I’m going to find my way out.” Do this because there is something stronger in you that wants out more than you want the pretense of being out.
     Unless you put self-dissolution first — the same as putting God first — with ten times the effort you now have, you aren’t going to make it. You must die inside to your self-deception. Your responsibility is yours. Don’t fail yourself! Those of you who can be saved — your intensity has to be much greater. You have to collapse and stay collapsed. Stay down. If you die to vanity — do what you have to do — God will do the rest.