In today’s apparently shrinking economic climate, it may be hard to think in terms of abundance consciousness, or the abundance meme as I call it. There are a few things to consider about this.

First of all, if we are willing to accept the possibility that we create our own reality, then we don’t have to buy into the definitions given to us by the media or government. They always deal in abstractions, like “the economy.” They are dealing in broad generalizations. At every time in history, some people have prospered, and others have not. “The Economy” is really a very limited idea.

The mainstream media and other institutions also think very traditionally or conservatively. They measure everything in terms of the present paradigm. What if new possibilities for an abundant future are right in front of us? For example, right now unemployment is rising. Yet jobs are not the only way to experience abundance. In fact, the traditional nine-to-five concept of employment has been in decline for decades. Innovative people may have to create new ways of making a living, probably as freelancers of one kind or another. This can be a very liberating concept if we aren’t tied into the old paradigms.

Another way the mainstream paradigm tends to distort things is in its assumption that bigger and more expensive is always better. Housing prices, the stock market and the GNP, for example, are supposed to rise forever, according to conventional economic wisdom. Yet is this really possible, or even desirable? Similarly, the complaint about retail sales assumes that people should be spending a certain amount on retail items. This is where we might ask ourselves if abundance and materialism are really the same thing.

I am not suggesting that we should lower our expectations and get into a mode of just surviving. But, in many ways, the assumptions about consumer spending rely on an environment of excess. For example, consider the automobile industry. It’s entirely possible, even likely, that our most abundant possible future will be one in which cars play a much smaller role. Yet conventional analysis of “the economy” will never consider such things.

The point is, we don’t have to define abundance in the same way as the economists, politicians and media. If we define it for ourselves, and then go about creating it, we don’t have to pay so much attention to what we are told. Don’t let others define your reality!