Revision is the technique people reach for after the others, usually because something has already happened and a scene of the future does not touch it. The conversation went badly. The meeting went worse. Now you are lying in the dark replaying it, and the replaying is the problem.
Neville’s definition
He set it down in The Law and the Promise, published in 1961, in the first chapter, Imagining Creates Reality:
This going into the past and replaying a scene of the past in imagination as it ought to have been played the first time, I call revision
The same sentence goes on: revision results in repeal. Read the definition first, though. It is precise about the one thing people get wrong. You replay the scene as it ought to have been played. Not a scene in which you win. The one you would have been glad of.
What it is not
It is not pretending the thing never happened, and it is not rewriting the record for anyone else. The other person still said what they said. What changes is the version you rehearse.
And you are already rehearsing one. Awake at night, you replay the moment it went wrong, again and again, sharpening your own worst line. That is a nightly practice too. It simply rehearses the scene you do not want to carry into tomorrow.
How to do it tonight
The instruction is two chapters later, in Turn the Wheel Backward:
Try to revise your day every night before falling asleep.
- Pick one moment. The one you keep going back to, not the whole day.
- Decide how it ought to have gone. The calm answer. The sentence you said instead of swallowed. Small enough to be believable.
- Replay the new version from the inside, first person, short enough to loop.
- Let it finish the way the new version finishes, and stay in how that feels. Then sleep.
- If the old version pushes back in, do not argue with it. Start the revised one again.
An example. In today’s meeting you were asked for the number, and you hedged. The revised version is not a speech that wins the room. It is you saying the number, plainly, and the meeting moving on to the next item. Loop that. The feeling you are after is ordinary: it went fine.
The best time is the drowsy edge before sleep, for the reason given in how to do SATS, the state akin to sleep. The size rule is the same as for any scene: shorter than you think.
Revision or a new scene
Revision faces backward. A scene of the end faces forward. Use revision for the thing that already happened and keeps playing. Use the end for the thing you want next.
On a bad night you may want both, in that order. Clear the moment that is still running, then go to living in the end. A scene of the future does not hold well on top of a day that has not been put down.
The honest part
Neville believed revision reaches further than memory. You do not have to believe that to use it, and nothing here asks you to.
What you can see for yourself is smaller and still worth having. The version you rehearse last is the one you walk into tomorrow with. Rehearse the one you would be glad of, and the next conversation starts from a better place than the last one ended. It is the same mechanism as the law of assumption, pointed at yesterday instead of tomorrow.