Creating our future

I remember once candidly engaging in discussion about my thoughts regarding religion with a student, who was a Baptist minister, in a "Faith-based Community Economic Development" course I was teaching. I stated something to the effect that because people have had different religious beliefs across time and space, GOD was a social construct. Boy did he rib me about that.

I am not an academically trained philosopher but am wont to wax philosophically from time to time. One area in which I dip my philosophically metaphorical and metaphorically philosophical toe is the discussion of the meaning of life.

Social construction
We agree on the meaning of things. Modernity looks back in time and snort derisively at the role the church played in the European conceptualization of the world before Martin Luther and the Enlightenment. The most familiar example of a collective mistaken reality is the notion that the earth is flat. But similarly there are other ideas and contemporary accepted explanations that are no better and just as fallacious as the pre-modern notion that the world is flat. Carter G. Woodson spoke to this phenomena when he opined that "if you control a man's thinking you don't have to worry about his actions.

Existentialism
Before this relatively recent social theory of the nature of reality there was the European philosophical movement that presaged it. While recognizing that there are differences, the glue that holds together the school of thought is that belief that each individual determines who they are by what they believe. This is the same process on the individual level that social construction attributes to a collective process.


Self-awareness
The experience of living in the moment, mindfulness, Zen and self-awareness are all states of consciousness that allow a break from the trance of social construction that results in the phenomena of flow. An experience of hyper-vigilance that allows a level of engagement that at times is described as disengagement. Within our mind there is the doer or will and the watcher or intention.Being aware of and having access to the ability to remain aware while disengaging contributes to the ability to achieve flow whether mentally or physically,

Intention
Parallels to the idea of intention abound. The Nicheren Shoshu Buddhist require adherents to focus on a desirable outcome daily while chanting an approved mantra. The combination of focusing to maintain the tone, cadence and enunciation of the words distracts enough to where the conscious mind, the will, is not in full control of your mental faculties. This allows the inner self that controls the anatomic system that keeps the lungs working and the blood flowing through the body. However, hypnotic demonstrations have established that if we believe it we make it so.

Vision
One of the keys to accessing this power is the vision that we each have of ourselves, who we think we are and  our vision of the world.  I think it was the prophet Amos who said,"my people perish for lack of knowledge/vision."