#22: The Pruning Shears of Revision

The Pruning Shears of Revision

A Lecture in the Voice and Spirit of Neville Goddard

You have lived under the illusion that the past is a fixed and unyielding chain, binding you forever to its regrets, its failures, its disappointments. You have carried its weight as though it were carved in stone, unchangeable, determining your every tomorrow. But I tell you tonight, the past is not dead. It lives within the structure of your own being, sustained only by the imagination that gave it form. And you, this very moment, hold the pruning shears of revision with which you may cut away every unlovely branch and reshape the entire tree of your life.

Consciousness is the only reality. Everything that has ever appeared in your world—every event, every circumstance, every condition—has its root in what you have been conscious of being. The past you remember is not a distant history sealed away in some inaccessible vault. It is a living, continuous structure, carrying all its contents with it, operating below the surface of your senses to influence your present and your future. Nothing disappears. Everything that has been still exists, and it continues to give its results unless you act upon it with the shears that are yours by right.

The pruning shears of revision are the power given you to go back into that structure, to replay the scenes of yesterday exactly as they ought to have been played, and in that replaying to repeal their former effects. You do not argue with the past. You do not fight it. You simply revise it in imagination until the revised version feels natural, until it takes on the tones of reality, and then you let it be. For when you have revised a scene, you have altered the content of the whole structure. And because consciousness is the only reality, that alteration must appear in your world as a new present and a new future.

Each night, before you surrender to sleep, take the day just lived and relive it as you wish you had lived it. Go over every incident, every conversation, every circumstance that fell short of your ideal. Do not accept them as they appeared. Withdraw your attention from the unrevised version and give it wholly to the version that conforms to your highest conception of yourself and of others. Feel yourself in the revised scene. See the faces around you radiant with the fulfillment you desire. Hear the words spoken that would have been spoken had the ideal been realized. Move in that scene with the ease of one to whom it is perfectly natural. Let the feeling of the revised day flood you until every detail of the old version fades and the new version stands alone in your consciousness, vivid, alive, real.

This is not a light exercise to be performed half-heartedly. It is the deliberate act of a creator. You must become wholly absorbed in the revised action. You must arouse your attention to such intensity that the revised scene absorbs you completely. In that absorption the old impress is erased and the new impress is planted. Revision is not mere wishing. It is not daydreaming. It is the controlled use of your imagination to rewrite the script of yesterday so that today and tomorrow may bear different fruit.

You may think the past is too far gone, too deeply rooted, too costly in its consequences to be touched. But I assure you, the past can be unmade. The causes of your present evils are simply the unrevised scenes of yesterday. Change those scenes in imagination and you change the causes. The structure that seemed so solid, so inevitable, yields at once to the pruning shears. For the past and the present are not two separate things. They are one continuous whole, carrying all its contents forward. Any alteration of content alters the whole.

See this clearly. You are not at the mercy of yesterday’s mistakes. You are not condemned to repeat the patterns you once set in motion through ignorance or sleep. Every night offers you the opportunity to prune. Every night you may enter the structure of your own being and revise. And as you revise, the old causes lose their power. They are repealed. The effects that once flowed from them are cut off at the root. New causes, nobler causes, are established in their place, and new effects must follow.

This is the true meaning of forgiveness. Not a sentimental overlooking of wrong, but a radical revision in imagination. To forgive is to relive the event as it should have been lived. To experience in imagination what you wish you had experienced in the flesh. Every time you do this sincerely, you are born again. You rise to a higher level of being. The spirit of continual forgiveness awakens within you, and you discover that freedom and forgiveness are indissolubly linked. You are freed according to your capacity to forgive through revision.

Do not revise from a sense of duty. Revise because you want to. Take pleasure in it. Let the act itself bring you joy. When you withdraw your attention from the unrevised day and give it full strength, joyously, to the revised day, you are performing the most practical act imaginable. Your outer world is only the actualized inner movement. By revising, you are changing the inner movement at its source. The outer must follow.

You may have carried some condition for years—some limitation, some pain, some recurring discord. You may have accepted it as inevitable, as part of the unalterable past. But I tell you, that condition exists only because the original scene that gave it birth has never been revised. Go back in memory to the moment of its inception. Replay that moment as it ought to have been. Feel yourself free of it from the very beginning. Feel the naturalness of the ideal condition. Do this with conviction, with absorption, until the revised scene feels more real than the old memory. Then watch the condition dissolve. It must, for its cause has been repealed.

The battle is fought entirely in your imagination. The man who does not revise the day has lost the vision of the life into which it is the labor of the awakened spirit to transform this life. But you who practice revision are reshaping your world moment by moment. You are pruning the tree of life so that it bears only the fruit you desire. You are living nobly in imagination so that your mind stores a past worthy of recall. And tomorrow will take up the altered pattern and carry it forward.

Do not be concerned with how the revised past will externalize itself. That is not your concern. Your concern is to make the revision natural, to feel it as already accomplished, to accept it as fact in consciousness. The ways of imagination are past finding out. It is marvelously resourceful in adapting means to realize the end. Once the inner act is complete, once the feeling of naturalness is reached, the outer world will rearrange itself in harmony with the new cause you have established. It cannot do otherwise.

You may doubt at first. The realist within you may protest that such changes are improbable, that the past is too solidly fixed. But the realist sees only with the outer eye. You are learning to see through the eye of imagination. And imagination knows no impossibility. What seems wholly improbable to the one who lives in the senses becomes the most natural thing in the world to the one who lives in the spirit of revision.

Practice this nightly. Make it your last conscious act before sleep. Review the day. Revise every scene that fell short. Rewrite the letter that brought disappointment. Rehear the conversation that wounded. Re-see the event that disturbed. Make each one conform to the ideal. Read the revised version over and over in imagination until it takes on the tones of reality. Fall asleep in the feeling of the revised day. Do this faithfully, and you will discover that your effectiveness increases with practice. The changes will become more radical, more swift, more certain.

For revision is the way by which right finds its appropriate might. It is the art of living. It is the art of forgiving. It is the daily Easter in which you rise transformed. Resist not evil by fighting it in the outer world. Revise it in the inner world, and the evil dissolves of itself. For all passionate conflicts result only in an interchange of characteristics unless they are resolved in imagination.

Know this: your ideal of yourself and of your world is your truest self. Live imaginatively. Think into the revised scenes. Personally appropriate them. Make them yours by feeling their reality. Expectancy and desire must become one. When they do, the outer world is compelled to actualize the inner movement.

Do not blame anyone or anything for the conditions you now encounter. Blame has no place in the practice of revision. Resolve instead. Resolve to revise. Resolve to prune. Resolve to enter the structure of your being each night and reshape it according to the pattern of your ideal. In that resolve lies your freedom.

The evidence of this truth can lie only in your own experience. Try revising the day. Try it tonight. Take the scenes that trouble you most and replay them as they ought to have been. Feel the difference. Feel the release. Feel the joy of the revised version. Then sleep in that feeling. Tomorrow you will begin to see the first fruits of your pruning. And as you continue, the prime fruit will appear—the abundant harvest of a life lived in the spirit of revision.

Man and his past are one continuous structure. But you are the gardener. You hold the shears. You decide which branches shall remain and which shall be cut away. You decide what new growth shall be encouraged. The tree is yours. The life is yours. The power is yours.

Every night you are given the opportunity to be born again. Every night you may rise from the contemplation of the unrevised day into the new day of your own creation. Every night you may forgive completely, revise completely, and enter tomorrow free of yesterday’s burdens.

This is not theory. This is not philosophy to be debated. This is the practical, workable law of your own being. Consciousness is the only reality, and you are that consciousness. What you revise in consciousness must appear in your world. What you leave unrevised will continue to bear its former fruit. The choice is forever yours.

So tonight, as you close your eyes, do not accept the day as it was. Relive it as it should have been. Prune it lovingly. Shape it nobly. Feel it fully. And let sleep overtake you in the naturalness of the revised scene. In that act you have used the pruning shears of revision. In that act you have changed the structure of your being. In that act you have set in motion a new series of events that will externalize in perfect harmony with your ideal.

You are the Lord of your life. You have always been. Now you know it consciously. Now you use it consciously. Now you prune consciously. And the tree of your life shall bring forth fruit in due season—beautiful, abundant, perfect fruit—because you have learned the secret of the pruning shears.

The past is yours to rewrite. The present is yours to reshape. The future is yours to create. Begin tonight. Revise the day. And watch your world transform.

For nothing is impossible to the one who knows that imagining creates reality, and that revision is the surest, most direct way to reshape that reality from the very root.

You are free. You have always been free. Now exercise that freedom through the daily, nightly practice of revision. Prune fearlessly. Prune joyously. Prune with the quiet certainty that what you do in imagination must come to pass in the outer world.

This is the great secret. This is the pruning shears of consciousness. Use them tonight, and every night thereafter, and you will live in a paradise of your own making—a world where every discord has been turned into harmony, every limitation into freedom, every failure into victory.

The structure is yours. The shears are in your hand. The power is within you now.

Go, and revise.