Sunday is Message Day on the blog. Monday through Friday we look at contemporary events and day-to-day occurrences at the intersection of Life and the New Spirituality…but on Sunday, we reserve this space for a specific teaching derived from the material in Conversations with God
This week’s message: The Triad Process
Conversations with God makes the astonishing statement that all of life is an illusion. If this is true, how do we deal with it? God says that we are like magicians who have forgotten our own tricks. We are living in an Alice in Wonderland world, wherein we swear that what is so is not so, and that what is not so is so.
Yet, the fact that we are living in an illusion is what makes our lives so exciting, and their possibilities so endless. For only in a fantasy can we have anything we want, and do anything we please, and create anything we desire.
As Lewis Carroll wrote:
“There is no use trying,” said Alice; “one can’t believe impossible things.” I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
The trick in all this, of course, is to know how to live with the Illusion, and not within it. Or, as the Bible says it, to be “in this world, but not of it.”
There is a way to do this, and in the CwG book Communion with God, we are given that way in the Triad Process of Reality Creation.
Says Communion with God on page 175…

“The Master and the student on the journey to mastery, knows that the Illusions are illusions, decides why they are there, and then consciously creates what will be experienced next within the self through the Illusions.
“When facing any life experience, there is a formula, a process, through which you, too, may move toward mastery.
“Simply make the following statements:
1. Nothing in my world is real.
2. The meaning of everything is the meaning I give it.
3. I am who I say I am, and my experience is what I say it is.
“This is how to work with the Illusions of Life.”
The first step in the Triad Process is for many people the most difficult. It proclaims that everything we look at, everything we experience, is unreal. Nothing is actually what we imagine it to be.
This does not mean that it is not there. What it does mean is that it is not “real.” That is, it is not “really” what it “looks like.” It is not what we assume it to be.
For greater insight into this phenomenon, I suggest reading The Holographic Universe, by Michael Talbot. This extraordinary book brings us insight, from a scientific point of view, into the make-believe world in which we live.
The statement “Nothing in my world is real” is more than an insight of quantum physics, however. It is a psychological and spiritual reality as well, and can be very healing—particularly in times of great trouble or great stress.
If you think that what you are experiencing during times of difficulty is real, you will quite lilterally make it real in your world. If you think that it is unreal, simply the figment of your imagination, have no sum or substance whatsoever, you will disappear it right before your eyes. That is, you will cause it to no longer exist within the Illusion.
CwG says, “What you resist persists, and what you look at disappears. That is, it ceases to have its illusory form.”
Now, if you are thinking, “This is very much along the lines of the message of the science fiction movie, The Matrix,” you are absolutely right. You will remember that, in that film, the characters will depicted as living in a make-believe world, created by their thoughts, and that the lead character, Neo, became a sort of “God” among men by simply training his mind to resist the appearance of things (like bullets coming at him) and deny their reality.
By literally denying the reality of anything that is now happening to you that you do not wish to have happening, you are, at the very least, reduce its effects. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, a popular Christian minister, pointed this out in the late 1940s in his revolutionary book The Power of Positive Thinking. So did new age author James Allen in his classic, As a Man Thinketh.
Of course, the master teacher Jesus said it directly and perfectly when he announced, “As you believe, so will it be done unto you.”
So the first step in the Triad Process is one of denying the reality of anything. This means the so-called “good” as well as the so-called “evil.” Now, what is the point of denying the so-called “good?”, you may ask. And it is a good question.
The answer is that, by looking straight into the face of your greatest joy and calling it what it is—an illusion—you fail to become deeply attached to it. You can continue to enjoy it, but you literally “enjoy the hell out of it.” That is, you take the hell of becoming addicted to the enjoyment right out of it.
It is addiction—to people, to places, and to things—that creates misery where once there was joy, pain where once there was pleasure, sorrow where once there was happiness. This has never been more clearly described than in the breathtaking book by Ken Keyes Jr., A Handbook to Higher Consciousness.
It is important to note that by denying the reality of everything we think, say, and see, we are not necessarily sending it away from us. We are merely recontextualizing our experience to cause ourselves to notice that what we are looking at is an illusion. Only then can we empower ourselves to either (a) cause the illusion to continue, or (b) cause the illusion to come to an end.
So long as we think that what we are experiencing is real, we will imagine ourselves to have no such power. That is, we will see ourselves as powerless in the Life, simply moving through the experience and constantly being at the Effect of it.
Denying the reality of all that we see is, therefore, an extremely powerful and important tool in the Creation Process.
Now we are ready for Step 2. If nothing I see is real, then what does anything mean? That’s a fair question, and the answer is, the meaning of everything is the meaning you give it.
If you thought that the first step in the Triad Process was powerful, you haven’t seen anything yet. This second step puts you firmly in command of your experience. You may not have changed anything in your outward reality, but your inner reality—that is, the exact experience that you are having—can be changed in the blink of an eye.
You and you alone decide what anything means to you. You and you alone get to decide what matters and doesn’t matter, what is “good” and what is “bad,” what is “okay” and what is “nmot okay.” You and you alone get to determine whether you are going to react positively about something or negatively about something—or, interestingly, have no reaction at all. Your emotions are entirely under your control. Your feelings are what you want them to be.
“That’s not true!” you may protest. “I do not want to feel badly about this or that, I just do.” Yet this is not so—and the sooner you understand this, the sooner you move to mastery in your daily living.
You decide, and you alone decide, what something means to you, and how you are going to respond to it. This is a decision that most people make based upon past feelings and experiences and understandings and desires, or future fears and apprehensions or wishes and desires. None of these have anything to do with what is going on right here, right now, however.
The trick, as Eckhart Tolle made it so brilliantly clear in The Power of NOW, is to stay in the moment. Don’t “futureize” and don’t “pasteurize.”
I have come to see the real power in this in my own life. When I “come from yesterday,” I frequently overlay meanings on things that are not in those things inherently, but that I have placed there as a result of my previous thought about them—or about something similar to them—from my past. (Going to the dentist is a perfect example.)
When I “come from tomorrow,” I overlay an idea about some imagined future (and usually, some imagined fear) on the events of today. These future realities may never come to pass (in fact, my life has shown that they rarely do), but what they often do is ruin any chance I had to maximally profit from the experience of the moment.
Now, when I get out of my past and stay away from my future, I can consider what’s happening right here, right now, within the context of just that: what’s actually occurring in the present moment. And—free from the interpretations of the Past and the Future—I can give that occurrence any interpretation I desire. I can call it “good” or I can call it “evil,” I can judge it “right” or I can judge it “wrong,” I can label it “pleasure” or I can label it “pain.”
This was the great liberating lesson of my life. When I learned this, I understood at last that my experience of everything that is going on, is going on in my mind. I can stare into the face of events and I can choose to BE whatever I wish to BE with regard to them. I can be “okay” or I can choose to be “not okay.” I can decide to be “happy” or “unhappy,” “optimistic” or “fearful,” “powerful” or “powerless.”
The decision is all mine. The meaning of everything is the meaning I give it.
In the third step of the Triad Process of Reality Creation I decide that I am who I say I am, and my experience is what I say it is.
I have a vivid memory of a woman who spoke up once at one of our Foundation’s ReCreating Yourself retreats. She had been sexually abused as a child by her uncle, and she spoke about it in very calm terms. She spoke also about a woman’s support group that she had attended on a regular basis, and remember how, when she told that group about her experience, its members raised their voices in concern. “You should be furious about this!” they told her. “How can you speak so calmly?”
“Well,” she had said, “that was a long time ago, and besides, I understand why he did what he did, and I’ve forgiven him. So I’m not angry anymore.”
“Not angry anymore?”, they protested, “How could you be not angry anymore? Don’t you know what happened to you?” Then they told her that she had apparently “sublimated” her feelings and buried her rage, and was angrier than she knew. “A walking time bomb,” they called her.
Problem was, she didn’t feel that way. Her experience is what she said that it was, and she became unwilling to “buy into” the way others in her group told her that she was supposed to be feeling.
I never forgot this example of Reality Creation. The exterior experience of this woman was not different from the experience of many other women who have been abused as a child, but her interior experience was remarkably different. She simply chose to hold the experience in another way.
In my own life, when something crazy or unwanted happens, I never ask myself, “Now, why did that happen…?” Rather, I ask myself, “Now, if I could give that a reason for happening, what would it be?”
I assign everything a reason, rather than looking for one. And I decide how I am going to feel about things, rather than looking to see how I feel. And I choose with great deliberation my responses to everything, rather than watching my responses from the sidelines as if I was not the major player in my life.
The Triad Process of Reality Creation is what I call a Turn Around Process. That is, it is one of those teachings that, once internalized and utilized, can turn around one entire life.