culture

• Culture-

  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.  

• Cultural Trance-

  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-

  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.