Radiant Light Spiritual Center

The evening review is designed to expand our consciousness and help us see and correct areas of our behavior, automatic reactions, attitudes, or habit patterns detrimental to our spiritual growth.

Retrospection is a useful procedure for mind clearing.  The following exercise has an ancient history as an important discipline in many traditions.  It is recalling the events of the day in reverse order.  This process is called the “nightly review”, “evening review” or “daily review”.  By doing this, we keep our attention on the corrections we chose to make in our daily life. It is to be done prior to sleep. As sleep is a restorative for the body, the Evening Review is a Spiritual restorative. It cultivates and establishes harmlessness (ahimsa, Sanskrit) within oneself—the harmlessness of thought, speech, emotions, and actions.

 Instructions: After achieving physical comfort, direct the awareness to the mind and begin to review, in reverse order, each event of the day as if it’s on a movie screen. Maintain objectivity. Wherever there was difficulty, inappropriate or less than kind actions, thoughts, communications, or emotional reactions from the self or others, use the imagination to change the event into one that is positive and loving. In effect, we are reviewing the astral pictures etched upon the ethers.  We go into the memory of the event, call it up, and reconstruct “the file."

When the evening review is complete, and all transgressions righted, the day will have been transformed into a conditioned state of right harmonies and sleep will be focused not in the emotional/astral plane but in the mind, where further teaching can then begin.

Continual use of this evening review produces control of speech, love, poise, skill in action, and the release of the creative will–all qualities of the Soul. For the more courageous, this review can also be applied to ones entire life—a practice for disciples along the Path.