glossary

Cultural Consciousness is the condition of being conscious of culture, the lens through which we view and interpret our world, as a human construct subject to human choice. The cultures of healthy societies adapt over time to changing circumstances. The circumstances of humanity are now changing far too rapidly for the conventional, largely unconscious processes of cultural regeneration and adaptation to suffice.

The New Oxford Dictionary defines a trance as "a half-conscious state characterized by an absence of response to external stimuli." Such a state may be induced by hypnosis. It may also be induced by a cultural story field.

Every human community has a cultural story field comprised of the shared stories that define the community's shared values, understanding, and expectations. A cultural story field is essential to the coherent function of any community. Without it there is no community in any meaningful sense.

Culture: According to Wester's New Collegiate Dictionary,  culture is "a: the integrated pattern of human behavior that includes thought, speech, action, and artifacts and depends upon man's capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations b: the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group." Culture is the lens through which we view and interpret the world in which we live.  

The term Earth Community comes from the Earth Charter, a declaration of university responsibility to and for one another and the living Earth created through a process that began with the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and carried forward through a multiyear collaborative process involving hundreds of organizations and thousands of individuals of diverse religious faiths, cultures, races, languages, and nationalities.

Earth Community Navigators: Engaged citizens who are actively contributing to turning the human course from the dominator model of Empire to the partnership model of Earth Community.

Economic Growth is a process by which the wealthy exppropriate the resources of the poor and turn them into garbage at an accelerating rate to make money for people who already have more than they need. Strip away the carefully crafted illusions that growth creates prosperity and the truth is exposed that the larger consequence of economic growth is an acceleration of the consumption of real wealth (living wealth) to increase the finacial power of the rich and thereby increase inequality.