Awakened Imagination

“You can revise the day to please yourself and by experiencing in imagination the revised speech and actions not only modify the trend of your life story but turn all its discords into harmonies. The one who discovers the secret of revision cannot do otherwise than let himself be guided by love. Your effectiveness will increase with practice. Revision is the way by which right can find its appropriate might. “Resist not evil,” for all passionate conflicts result in an interchange of characteristics.”

Neville Goddard

“It is a most healthy and productive exercise to daily relive the day as you wish you had lived it, revising the scenes to make them conform to your ideals. For instance, suppose today’s mail brought disappointing news. Revise the letter. Mentally rewrite it and make it conform to the news you wish you had received. Then, in imagination, read the revised letter repeatedly. This is the essence of revision, and revision results in repeal. The one requisite is to arouse your attention in a way and to such intensity that you become wholly absorbed in the revised action. You will experience an expansion and refinement of the senses by this imaginative exercise and eventually achieve vision. But always remember that the ultimate purpose of this exercise is to create in you “the Spirit of Jesus,” which is continual forgiveness of sin.”

“Revision is of greatest importance when the motive is to change oneself, when there is a sincere desire to be something different, when the longing is to awaken the ideal active spirit of forgiveness. Without imagination man remains a being of sin. Man, either goes forward to imagination or remains imprisoned in his senses. To go forward to imagination is to forgive. Forgiveness is the life of the imagination. The art of living it the art of forgiving. Forgiveness is, in fact, experiencing in imagination the revised version of the day, experiencing in imagination what you wish you had experienced in the flesh. Every time one really forgives — that is, every time one relives the event as it should have been lived — one is born again.”

The law and the promise

“To revise the past is to re-construct it with new content. Man should daily relive the day as he wished he had lived it, revising the scenes to make them conform to his ideals. For instance, suppose today’s mail brought disappointing news. Revise the letter. Mentally rewrite it and make it conform to the news you wish you had received. Then, in imagination, read the revised letter repeatedly and this will arouse the feeling of naturalness; and imaginal acts become facts as soon as we feel natural in the act. This is the essence of revision and revision results in repeal.” This is exactly what F.B did:

“THE VERY first act of correction or cure is always “revise.” One must start with oneself. It is one’s attitude that must be changed.”

“After your last lecture, I spoke to you of this situation. Although I had plenty of other ‘dates’ I could not forget this one man. Your lecture was based on revising our day; and after speaking to you, I determined to revise my day, every day. Before going to sleep that night, I felt I was in a different bed, in my own home, as a married woman – and not as a single working girl, sharing an apartment with three other girls. I twisted an imaginary wedding band on my imaginary left hand, saying over and over to myself, ‘This is wonderful! I really am Mrs. J.E.!’ and I fell asleep in what was – a moment before – a waking dream. “I repeated this imaginary scene for one month, night after night. The first week in October he ‘found’ me. On our second date, I knew my dreams were rightly placed. Your teaching tells us to live in the end of our desire until that desire becomes ‘fact’ so although I did not know how he felt toward me, I continued, night after night, living in the feeling of my dream realized. “The results? In November he proposed. In January we announced our engagement; and the following May we were married. The loveliest part of it all, however, is that I am happier than I ever dreamed possible; and I know in my heart, he is too.” …Mrs. J.E. By using her imagination radically, instead of conservatively – by building her world out of pure dreams of fancy -, rather than using images supplied by memory, she brought about the fulfilment of her dream. Common sense would have used images supplied by her memory, and thereby perpetuated the fact of lack in her life. Imagination created what she desired out of a dream of fancy. Everyone must live wholly on the level of imagination, and it must be consciously and deliberately undertaken. “…Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, such shaping fantasies, that apprehend more than cool reason over comprehends.” (William Shakespeare, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”) If our time of revision be well spent, we need not worry about results – our fondest hopes will be realised.”

“To know the truth, you must live the truth, and to live the truth your inner actions must match the actions of your fulfilled desire. Expectancy and desire must become one. Your outer world is only actualised inner movement. Through ignorance of the law of revision those who take to warfare are perpetually defeated.”

“The question may arise as to how, by representing others to ourselves as better than they really were, or mentally rewriting a letter to make it conform to our wish, or by revising the scene of an accident, the interview with the employer, and so on – could change what seems to be the unalterable facts of the past but remember my claims for imagining: Imagining Creates Reality. What it makes, it can unmake. It is not only conservative, building a life from images supplied by memory – it is also creatively transformative, altering a theme already in being. The parable of the unjust steward (Luke 16:1-8) gives the answer to this question. We can alter our world by means of a certain “illegal” imaginal practice, by means of a mental falsification of the facts – that is, by means of a certain intentional imaginal alteration of that which we have experienced. All this is done in one’s own imagination. This is a form of falsehood which not only is not condemned but is approved in the gospel teaching. By means of such a falsehood, a man destroys the causes of evil and acquires friends and on the strength of this revision proves, judging by the high praise the unjust steward received from his master, that he is deserving of confidence. Because imagining creates reality, we can carry revision to the extreme and revise a scene that would be otherwise unforgivable. We learn to distinguish between man – who is all imagination.”

“When a man practices the art of forgiveness, of revision, however factual the scene on which sight then rests, he revises it with his imagination and gazes on one never witnessed. The magnitude of the change which any act of revision involves makes such change appear wholly improbable to the realist — the unimaginative man; but the radical changes in the fortunes of the Prodigal were all produced by a “change of heart.” The battle man fights are fought out in his own imagination. The man who does not revise the day has lost the vision of that life, into the likeness of which it is the true labor of the “Spirit of Jesus” to transform this life.”

“There is no inevitable permanence in anything. Both past and present continue to exist only because they are sustained by “Imagining” on some level or other; and a radical transformation of life is always possible by man revising the undesirable part of it.”

“You must take pleasure in revision. You can forgive others effectively only when you have a sincere desire to identify them with their ideal. Duty has no momentum. Forgiveness is a matter of deliberately withdrawing attention from the unrevised day and giving it full strength, and joyously, to the revised day. If a man begins to revise even a little of the vexations and troubles of the day, then he begins to work practically on himself. Every revision is a victory over his enemy.”

“Man, and his past are one continuous structure. This structure contains all of the facts which have been conserved and still operate below the threshold of his surface mind. For him it is merely history. For him it seems unalterable – a dead and firmly fixed past. But for itself, it is living – it is part of the living age. He cannot leave behind him the mistakes of the past, for nothing disappears. Everything that has been is still in existence. The past still exists, and it gives – and still gives – its results. Man must go back in memory, seek for and destroy the causes of evil, however far back they lie. This going into the past and re- playing a scene of the past in imagination as it ought to have been played the first time, I call revision – and revision results in repeal. Changing your life means changing the past. The causes of any present evil are the unrevised scenes of the past. The past and the present form the whole structure of man; they are carrying all of its contents with it. Any alteration of content will result in an alteration in the present and future. Live nobly – so that mind can store a past well worthy of recall. Should you fail to do so, remember, the first act of correction or cure is always – “revise.” If the past is recreated into the present, so will the revised past be recreated into the present, or else the claim… though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow (Isaiah 1:18)… is a lie. And it is no lie.”

“The first act of correction or cure is always “Revise.” If the past can be recreated into the present, so can the revised past. And thus, the Revised Past appears within the very heart of her present life; not Fate but a revised past brought her good fortune. Make results and accomplishment the crucial test of true imagination and your confidence in the power of imagination to create reality will grow gradually from your experiments with revision confronted by experience. Only by this process of experiment can you realize the potential power of your awakened and controlled imagination.”

“Late in July I wrote to a real estate agent of my desire to sell a piece of land which had been a financial burden to me. His negative reply listed all the reasons why sales were at a standstill in that area, and he forecast a bleak period of waiting until after the first of the year. “I received his letter on a Tuesday, and – in my imagination – I rewrote it with words indicating that the agent was eager to take my listing. I read this revised letter over and over, and I extended my imaginal drama using your theme of the Four Mighty Ones of our Imagination – from your book ‘Seedtime and Harvest’ – the Producer, the Author, the Director and the Actor. “In my imaginal scene as Producer, I suggested the theme, ‘The lot is sold for a profit. As the Author, I wrote this simple scene which, to me, implied fulfilment: Standing in the real estate office, I extended my hand to the agent and said, ‘Thank you, sir’, and he replied, ‘It was a pleasure doing business with you’. As Director, I rehearsed myself as Actor until that scene was vividly real and I felt the relief which would be mine if the burden were really lifted. “Three days later, the agent I had originally written phoned me saying he had a deposit for my lot at the price I had specified. I signed the papers in his office the next day, extended my hand and said, ‘Thank you, sir’. The agent replied, ‘It was a pleasure doing business with you’. “Five days after I had constructed and enacted an imaginal scene, it became a physical reality and was played word for word just as I had heard it in my imagination. The feeling of relief and joy came – not so much from selling the property – but from the incontrovertible proof that my imagined drama worked.” …F.B.

Neville Goddard

REVISION