Naming Earth Community

The term The Great Turning has come into widespread use to describe the awakening of a higher level of human consciousness and a human turn from an era of violence against people and nature to a new era of peace, justice and environmental restoration. Most people are not aware that this awakening is underway, because positive change rarely reaches the level of front page - or even back-page - news! YES! magazine is one of the few publications that is in the business of bringing these stories to public attention.

Living Democracy Movement is a term used by Frances Moore Lappe and Vandana Shiva to refer to the emerging global movement for social transformation. This movement goes by many names. It was originally known by many as the Anti-globalization Movement, a highly misleading term for what is arguably the most global and inclusive movement ever. Early in the new millennium it was commonly referred to as the global Peace and Justice Movement.

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.

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.

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.