The Power of Revision

Dwelling on past irritations or hurts perpetuates them and creates a vicious circle that serves to confirm these negative emotions.” “The cycle can be broken by starting now to revise anything that you no longer wish to sustain in your world. – Neville Goddard

To tell you the truth, I wasn’t a master of revision in the past, but lately, I noticed that I had this subtle belief that I wasn’t very good at it, so no wonder that it was true for me. So I decided to change that. I know that revision is powerful, so why not use it? So, a few nights ago, I decided to do the exercise that Neville encouraged people to do, which is to revise our day as we are going to bed. Interestingly, the first night that I decided to REALLY do this, I had a very interesting dream. In that dream, I was saying, “I am a master manifester.” I had never dreamed that I was a conscious manifestor before. So, needless to say, I was encouraged right from the get-go to continue this exercise of revising my day before going to sleep.

So, if you too have convinced yourself that you are not good at revision, don’t persist in that assumption, and give it a try. I am convinced that it will change your life.

Your Past Advances Into Your Future

You simply revise, and as you revise the day you repeal the day, for the day is not slipping into the past, it does not recede as people think, it is always advancing into the future to confront you, either pruned or in some strange weed-like state. So it’s entirely up to us – I hope that every man and woman here today will take me seriously and start this day pruning your garden. pruning your mind. – Neville Goddard – The Pruning Shears of Revision

Because there is no such thing as past, present, and future, and because the mind lives just as well in what we call the past, the present, and future, our past is not just the past, but it actually advances into the present and the future, as Neville said. This is why revision is golden. Your past is affecting you right now, no matter what it is, so if it does not serve you, why not change it?

Interestingly, ever since I have been coaching people, I’ve always compared the mind to a garden and negative thoughts to weeds, and while re-reading The Pruning Shears of Revision the other day, I noticed that Neville is comparing the mind to a garden and negative thoughts to weeds. I had totally forgotten about that, but how pleased I was that Neville was using this easy-to-understand analogy that many coaches have used and are still using today.

It totally makes sense that if we let the past be without revising it, it won’t go away. It doesn’t matter “how long” something was, if we let it be, it will come back and back again to hunt us. How marvelous it is to know that with just a little effort, we can train our minds on a daily basis to revise the day and make what was bad good and what was good great. Neville says, “If you do it daily, it will awaken in you the spirit of Jesus, which is continual forgiveness of sin.” This means (in modern language) that it will awaken your God-Self/Higher-Self, and you will become better conscious manifestors. Reading this sentence in The Pruning Shear of Revision helped me understand why, after having spent some 20 minutes revising my day before I went to sleep that first night, I had that amazing dream where I was conscious of being a conscious manifestor. I know that this is no coincidence, as there’s no such thing.

If you are bothered by anything in your past, revise it. “Do it over and over in your imagination until this seemingly imagined state begins to take on the tones of reality.“ The best way to know when you have succeeded is when the memory of the original event is fading away, while the new version of the event is what you can remember and feel the most.

If you feel that you are not good at revising, then do the daily exercise of revising your day before going to sleep. You do not have to do it as a SATS exercise, just revise the day as you hit the pillow before falling asleep. If you do fall asleep while doing it, all the better, as you will take your revised version into your sleep right into your subconscious mind. If you are not good at doing this right away, that’s OK; you just need to persist. Neville actually said that it wasn’t going to be easy at first, but like anything else, practice makes perfect.

Why Revising Your Past?

Then rewrite the script and just imagine the conversation to have taken place that now you are rewriting for the first time. And it will take place, for everything in your world that you behold, though it appears without, it
is within, in your imagination. And this wonderful imagination of yours is Christ Jesus. Imagination is the actual habitation of every created thing. No matter what you see in the world, it springs from your imagination. So
that’s where you go, that’s the workshop, the garden of God. – Neville Goddard – The Pruning Shears of Revision

Everything is imagination, as Neville reminds us above, so whether it’s a past, present, or future event, it’s all imagination. It was all imagined. However, the past, even though it had been created in our imagination, seems so very real to the point that it affects our present and future. So what better way, than revising it to change its outcome? I have heard and read so many success stories about revision. This is because revision really is powerful, and the reason why it is is that everything is imagination, including the past.

So as long as you change the memory of that imaginal act that had hardened into fact, that imaginal act, even though it had hardened into fact (in the so-called past), will be transformed. Thus. like an echo, it will transform your present and future. So, why don’t you take on this challenge starting tonight? As you lie down in your bed, close your eyes and revise your day, starting from the moment you went to bed to the moment you got out of bed that morning. Do this every day for a whole month, and see the miracles happening in your life.

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