#75: Turn the Wheel Backward

Turn the Wheel Backward

A Lecture in the Voice and Spirit of Neville Goddard

You feel the weight of the past pressing upon your present. Events that once occurred seem to have fixed themselves in an unalterable chain, and you move through your days as though bound by what can never be undone. Yet this feeling arises only because you have not yet discovered that the past lives, and that its life is sustained by imagination alone. The past is not a sealed tomb. It is a living structure within you, and every unrevised scene still moves and still produces its fruit in the world you now inhabit.

Man and his past are one continuous structure. Nothing that has been disappears. The scenes you carry, the words spoken, the losses endured, the disappointments accepted—these remain alive beneath the surface of your mind and continue to give their results. You cannot leave the mistakes of the past behind you while they remain unrevised, for they are not behind you at all. They are within the very fabric of your present consciousness, and they are forever recreating themselves until their content is changed.

To change your life is to change the past. The causes of every present condition lie in the unrevised scenes of yesterday. When you look upon your world and see limitation, failure, or pain, you are looking upon the effects of scenes that were never revised. The present is not a new creation standing apart from what went before. It is the past, still alive, still operative, still shaping the form of your experience. Any alteration in the content of that past must therefore alter the present and the future that flows from it.

You turn the wheel backward when you enter that living structure and revise the scene. You do not deny that the event took place in the world of the senses. You change the meaning it carries. You replay it in imagination as it ought to have been played. You give it new content, new feeling, new significance. And because imagination creates reality, what it has made it can unmake. The old meaning, with all its power to bind and to punish, is repealed. The consequence that flowed from the unrevised scene ceases, for the cause has been altered at its root.

This is not a denial of fact. It is a transformation of fact through a higher fact. The unjust steward in the parable was praised for his mental falsification. He altered the records in his imagination and thereby changed the consequence for those who owed. The gospel does not condemn this act. It approves it, for it reveals that the meaning given to any event can be changed, and that the changed meaning produces a changed result. You are doing the same thing when you revise. You are not lying to yourself. You are exercising the divine prerogative of imagination to give a new and nobler meaning to what has been, and thereby to set yourself free from its old consequence.

The wheel turns backward when the direction of causation is reversed. Instead of the past pushing its unrevised content forward into your present, the revised scene draws the present into harmony with itself. The structure of your being is continuous. Past and present are not two separate things. They are one movement. When you alter the content of the past in imagination, you alter the entire movement. The present must reshape itself around the new meaning you have given. What was once a cause of distress becomes a cause of harmony, because you have changed the imaginal act that sustains it.

You feel this change first within yourself. The old scene no longer carries the same sting. The memory may remain, but its emotional power, its power to accuse or to limit, falls away. You have given the event a new garment. You have seen it as it ought to have been, and in that seeing you have felt the naturalness of the revised version. When a thing feels natural in imagination, it is already on its way to becoming natural in the outer world. The old consequence dissolves because it no longer has a cause to sustain it. The wheel has turned. The past no longer drives the present in the old direction.

Nothing possesses inevitable permanence. Both past and present continue to exist only because they are sustained by imagining on some level. When you withdraw your imaginal support from an unrevised scene and give your support to the revised scene, the old structure begins to crumble. The present condition, having lost its inner cause, must change. You do not fight the condition. You do not argue with it. You simply cease to feed it with the unrevised past, and you feed instead the new meaning you have accepted. Life has no choice but to reflect the change in the sustaining imagination.

Consider what it means to revise a scene of disappointment. The letter that brought bad news, the interview that ended in refusal, the relationship that seemed to close in loss—these are not fixed records. They are imaginal structures still alive within you. When you revise the letter, you mentally rewrite it so that it carries the news you would have welcomed. You read the revised letter until the feeling of it becomes natural. The old meaning of rejection or failure is replaced by the meaning of acceptance or fulfillment. The consequence that flowed from the unrevised letter loses its foundation. The present situation, which was the fruit of that meaning, begins to yield. Something new appears because something new is now being sustained in the depth of your consciousness.

The same turning of the wheel applies to every area of your life. The past you carry concerning health, concerning fortune, concerning love, concerning your own worth—these are all scenes that can be revised. You go back, not to relive the pain, but to give the scene its rightful content. You see the body as it ought to have been, the opportunity as it ought to have been received, the love as it ought to have been expressed. You feel the rightness of it until it dominates your consciousness. Then the unrevised past no longer operates. Its consequence is repealed. The wheel has turned backward, and the present is no longer compelled to repeat the old pattern.

You may wonder how so simple an act can affect what seems so solid and so far away. But the solidity of the present is an illusion created by the unrevised past. When the cause is changed, the effect cannot remain the same. The structure is continuous. Alter any part and the whole responds. This is why the prophet could say that though your sins be as scarlet they shall be as white as snow. The revised past is not a patched past. It is a new past, and it carries a new present within it. The old color is gone because the imaginal dye has been changed.

Tonight, before you sleep, you can turn the wheel. Take one scene from your past or from the day just ended that still carries a burden. Do not argue with it. Do not rehearse its old pain. Simply enter it in imagination and give it the content it ought to have had. See the persons involved as they ought to have been. Hear the words that ought to have been spoken. Feel the outcome that ought to have been realized. Persist until the scene feels natural, until you can accept it without effort as the true record. When this naturalness is achieved, the old meaning has been replaced. The consequence that flowed from the unrevised scene has lost its cause. Something in your world must change, because something in your inner structure has changed.

This turning is not an occasional act. It is the constant privilege of the one who has awakened to the power of imagination. Each night you can review the day and revise whatever fell short of your ideal. You relive it, not as it happened in the senses, but as it ought to have happened in the spirit. You turn the wheel backward upon every unrevised scene, and you prevent the accumulation of new causes that would otherwise continue to operate. The day that is revised before sleep leaves no unrevised seed to grow into tomorrow’s limitation.

The freedom you seek is not in the future. It is in the revised past. When you change the meaning of what has been, you change what is now possible. The present is never more than the present expression of the past you are willing to sustain. Revise the past, and the present is released from its old bondage. You discover that you are not the victim of a fixed history. You are the author of the meaning that history carries. By turning the wheel backward you become the one who determines what the past shall contribute to your life.

There is no power in the outer world that can prevent this turning. The world of effects has no life of its own. It lives only as it is fed by the inner structure. When you withdraw your imaginal support from the unrevised scenes and give it wholly to the revised ones, the outer world has no choice but to rearrange itself. The persons, the circumstances, the conditions that seemed to be fixed by the old past begin to move in harmony with the new meaning you have accepted. This is not magic. It is the simple law that imagining creates reality, and that what imagining has created it can transform by a new act of creation.

You stand tonight at the point where the wheel can be turned. The past you have carried is not your master. It is your servant, waiting to be given a new content. When you revise, you are not pretending. You are exercising the creative power that is your true identity. You are declaring, in the depth of your being, that the meaning of your life is not determined by what happened, but by what you now cause to have happened in imagination. The old chain is broken. The new meaning flows forward. The wheel has turned backward, and you are free.

This freedom is not something you will attain. It is something you assume when you revise. You assume the past as it ought to have been, and in that assumption the present is already transformed. The feeling of release, of lightness, of rightness that comes with the revised scene is the evidence that the cause has been changed. The outer world may take time to reflect the change, but the inner change is immediate. You have turned the wheel. The structure has been altered at its root. Everything that flows from that structure must now flow in a new direction.

You are not asked to believe this with the outer mind alone. You are asked to test it in the depth of your own consciousness. Take the scene that has troubled you most. Revise it until it feels as though it had always been so. Feel the naturalness of the new meaning. Then observe what happens in your world. The consequence that once seemed inevitable will begin to yield. Something new will appear, not because you forced it, but because you removed the old cause and supplied a new one. This is the turning of the wheel. This is the repeal of the unrevised past. This is the discovery that your life is not the slave of what has been, but the free expression of what you have made it to be in the silence of your own imagination.

The past, when revised, becomes the servant of your desire rather than its tyrant. The events that once seemed to close doors now open them, because you have changed what they mean. The persons who once seemed to oppose you now cooperate, because the imaginal scene in which they appeared has been given a new content. The conditions that once limited you now expand, because the inner structure that sustained the limitation has been revised. All this follows from the simple act of turning the wheel backward.

You need not wait for some future day when conditions will be better. The condition of your world tomorrow is being determined tonight by the meaning you give to your past. Revise tonight. Turn the wheel tonight. Let the unrevised scenes that still live within you be replaced by scenes that carry the meaning of fulfillment, of harmony, of rightness. When you do this, you are not escaping reality. You are entering the only reality there is—the reality created and sustained by imagination. The outer world must conform to the inner change, for there is no other power that forms the world.

In this turning you discover your true freedom. You are not bound by yesterday. You are not the product of an unalterable history. You are the one who, by strong imagination, turns the great wheel backward until the Troy of your past unburns, until the scarlet becomes white as snow, until the consequence that once seemed fixed dissolves in the light of the new meaning you have given. Tonight you can do this. Tonight the wheel can turn. And when it turns, your present is no longer the victim of what was. It becomes the expression of what you have caused to be, in the living depth of your own consciousness.