#30: What Imagination Makes, Imagination Can Unmake

What Imagination Makes, Imagination Can Unmake

A Lecture in the Voice & Spirit of Neville Goddard

You who sit here tonight, perhaps weighed down by a condition that seems fixed, a circumstance that appears unalterable, a past that feels like iron chains binding your present—hear this eternal truth: what imagination makes, imagination can unmake. The very power that shaped your world is the power that can reshape it. There is no condition so solid, no event so final, no limitation so entrenched that the same creative force within you cannot dissolve it utterly and bring forth something new in its place.

Imagination is God in action. It is the only reality. Everything you see and experience in this outer world is but the out-picturing of your imaginal activity. You have imagined yourself into every state you now occupy. Consciously or unconsciously, through your feelings, your assumptions, your inner conversations, you have given form to the conditions around you. The body that aches, the purse that is empty, the relationships that wound—these are not accidents imposed from without. They are the fruit of what you have sustained in imagination. Man and his world are one continuous structure, and that structure is held together by the imaginal acts you entertain.

Yet because imagination is the creator, it is also the redeemer. What it has made, it can unmake. The past is not a fixed record sealed away in some distant vault. The past lives only in your consciousness, and there it remains plastic, malleable, responsive to the touch of your imagination. You need not accept the evidence of your senses as the final word. You need not bow before what has been as though it were eternal. For the same power that once imagined limitation can now imagine freedom, and in the act of imagining it, the old form dissolves like mist before the rising sun.

This is the great secret revealed in the pruning shears of revision. Every day, as you retire to your bed, you have the opportunity to take the day that has passed and revise it. You do not merely wish it had been different; you enter into the feeling of the wish fulfilled. You relive the scenes of the day, not as they appeared to the outer eye, but as you desire them to have been. You rewrite the disappointing letter in your mind’s eye until it bears the good news you longed for. You hear the kind word spoken where harshness once sounded. You feel the handshake of reconciliation where estrangement once stood. You see the body whole and perfect where pain once claimed dominion. You do this with such intensity, with such absorption, that the revised action becomes natural to you. You lose yourself in it. You become one with it.

In this act of revision, you are not escaping reality—you are entering the only true reality there is. Consciousness is the only substance. What you sustain in consciousness must externalize itself. When you withdraw your attention from the unrevised scene and give it wholly to the revised one, you are pruning away the old growth. You are cutting back the barren branches so that the new and fruitful may appear. Revision results in repeal. The old condition, having no further support in your imagination, fades away as though it had never been. It is repealed in the only place it ever existed—in your own awareness.

Do not underestimate the simplicity of this. You may think, “But the facts were otherwise. The evidence was plain.” Yet facts are only the outer echo of inner imaginal acts. Change the inner act and the outer must conform. The realist, the one who trusts only in what his eyes report, will call this fanciful. But you are not called to the way of the realist. You are called to the way of the imaginative man, the one who knows that all things are possible to him who believes. And belief is nothing more than sustained imagination. When you can feel the naturalness of the revised day, when you can lie down in the consciousness of it as a man lies down in his own bed, then the thing is done. Imagination has unmade what it once made.

Consider how gently, how persistently this practice must be carried. It is not a single dramatic gesture that changes everything. It is the daily, quiet revision of the day just lived. Each night you take the raw material of experience and mold it anew in the workshop of your imagination. You do not argue with the old scene. You do not fight it. You simply turn from it and occupy the new. You forgive in the deepest sense—not by overlooking, but by re-experiencing the event as it should have been experienced. Every true revision is an act of forgiveness, for it releases you from the burden of the unrevised past. It frees you to rise into higher and higher levels of being.

You may wonder how such a subtle inner act can affect the solid world you see. Yet the world you see is never solid except as you hold it so in consciousness. Your outer world is only the actualized inner movement. Through ignorance of this law, men struggle and fight against conditions, never realizing that the battle is won or lost in the imagination alone. But you who know this truth need not struggle. You simply revise. You prune. You cut away the old imaginal growth and let the new spring forth. Expectancy and desire become one. Your inner actions match the actions of your fulfilled desire. And because imagination creates reality, the new must appear.

Let no one tell you that the past is irrevocable. The past you remember is the past you sustain in imagination. Change what you remember and you change what is. Man and his past are one continuous structure. Revise the structure at any point and the whole is altered. A condition that has persisted for years, a limitation that has seemed immovable—these yield as readily as yesterday’s disappointment when you withdraw your sustaining attention and give it to the revised scene. The evidence of this truth lies only in your own experience of it. Try it. Revise the day. Make it conform to your ideal. Do this faithfully, joyously, and you will discover that what imagination has made, imagination can unmake.

There is no condition outside the reach of this power. Whether it is the body that suffers, the finances that are strained, the home that is divided, or the career that has stalled—all are but shadows cast by your imaginal activity. Turn the light of revised imagination upon them and the shadows flee. You do not have to force the outer change. You do not have to manipulate people or circumstances. You simply become the man or woman who would have experienced the ideal day. You feel it. You live it in the secret place. And because the secret place is the only cause, the outer world rearranges itself in harmony with your new inner state.

This is not theory. This is law. The law of revision is as exact as the law that governs the rising of the sun. What you sustain in imagination must come to pass. Therefore, sustain only the lovely, the noble, the perfect. Sustain the revised day until it feels natural. Sustain it until sleep claims you in the consciousness of it. Then, in the morning, you will move into a world that has been reshaped by your night’s work. The old limitations will have lost their power. New opportunities will open as though they had always been waiting for you to claim them.

You who feel stuck tonight, know this: you are not stuck. You have simply been sustaining an imaginal act that no longer serves you. Release it. Revise it. Unmake what has been made by making something new in its place. The power is in your hands—nay, in your imagination, which is the hand of God. Use it. Use it tonight. Take the events of this very day, however they may have appeared, and re-fashion them. See the letter that brought joy instead of sorrow. Hear the voice that spoke kindness instead of criticism. Feel the health that flows through a body made perfect. Do this with the quiet certainty that belongs to the one who knows his own creative power.

As you practice this daily, your effectiveness will grow. Your senses will refine. Vision will open. You will walk this earth as one who has discovered the secret of secrets: that all things are possible to the imaginative man. You will no longer be at war with yourself or with your world. You will live in the continual forgiveness that is the life of the imagination. And in that life, every day becomes a new creation, every limitation a forgotten dream, every so-called problem a vanished shadow.

What imagination makes, imagination can unmake. This is the truth that sets you free. It is not a truth to be believed in some vague future time. It is a truth to be lived now. Tonight, as you close your eyes, enter into the revised day. Feel its reality. Dwell in it until it possesses you. Let no doubt intrude, for doubt is the only thing that can delay the harvest. Faith is simply sustained imagination—imagination held steady in the feeling of the wish fulfilled. Hold it there. Hold it with the calm certainty that belongs to you as the imaginal man.

And when you rise tomorrow, you will not rise into the same world you left. You will rise into a world that has been pruned, revised, redeemed by your own creative power. The chains that seemed so real will have fallen away. The burdens will have lifted. For you have exercised the pruning shears of revision, and the prime fruit is yours.

This is the way. This is the only way. Imagination creates, and imagination redeems. What it has made, it can unmake. Go now, and live this truth. Go now, and prove it in your own experience. For the kingdom of heaven is within you, and the key to that kingdom is your own wonderful human imagination.

You are the operant power. Use it. Revise. And watch what imagination makes, imagination unmake—forever.