GATE: Global Alliance for Transformational Entertainment

New Entertainment & Media Values for a New World

by Kathy O'Keefe Kanavos

"Only a New Seed Will Yield a New Crop."

This phrase was the repeated motto for GATE II, held in California on February 4th. The star-studded event had one goal: planting thoughts of enlightenment in the global mind of the entertainment industry.

GATE is a major venue for networking between industry people and movie stars like GATE hosts and founders actor/activist Jim Carrey, author/spiritual leader Eckhart Tolle and media professional John Raatz. Comedian Louie Anderson introduced the various speakers and played Master of Ceremonies for the event.

According to their website, GATE is an evolving community of creative, business and technical professionals in entertainment, media, and the arts, who realize the vital and expanding role media and entertainment play in creating our lives.

Classified as a nonprofit 501c(6) membership trade association, GATE aspires to provide knowledge, resources and services to a wide range of professionals in the media, entertainment and arts industries, to aid in their personal transformation and to help them create and distribute content that expresses a transformational worldview.

The transformational seeds GATE hopes to plant should grow a new crop of media messages focused on the "Hero's Journey" rather than the "Victim's Downfall." Focus is the key to change.

The "Hero's Journey" is a popular storytelling structure, best explained by American mythology professor Joseph Campbell, in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell also called it the "monomyth," and points out that the steps of a hero's transformational journey are similar across myriad cultures throughout history.

Much of our world, self-image and values are shaped in large part by the messages we receive from the media. Those messages can either interest the audience by spotlighting the hero's transformational journey, or they can center their focus on the victim's downfall, with gratuitous blood and guts.

GATE aspires to be a global version of Kevin Costner's 1989 hero's journey in the movie Field of Dreams – with the message, "Build It and They Will Come."

As author Peter Canova said, "No work of art can be personally transformative unless it engages both the heart and mind of the viewer. To be touched intellectually is to be affected; to be touched emotionally is to be moved. To be touched by both is to be raised to a new perception of being."

Barbara Marx Hubbard, author and founder of the Foundation for Concious Evolution, said, "We are all agents of the Consciousness Evolution that never stops. I'm 85 and still evolving. So, don't die – because if you want to carry a vision through, you must stay alive."

Wise words indeed.

On February 4th, the line to gain entrance to the Saban Theater in Beverly Hills stretched around the block. A theater that exemplifies Old World beauty and charm was filled to capacity by new existential ideas for a sustainable planet.

This fitting venue demonstrated the goal to plant new within old – a fresh mind/body/spirit market within the established media. It is a global undertaking that must begin with the fourth-dimension thoughts of writers and manifest in the third-dimensional movie industry.

They came, they listened and the new seeds left enlightened.

We are all connected to the Greater Oneness of Existence. We can create a future of dreams by conscious choice. Plant them and they will grow.

For more information about the GATE community and its mission, visit http://gatecommunity.org/gate2

Kathleen O'Keefe-Kanavos is an agented author and has penned SURVIVING CANCERLAND. Visit her website at www.suvivingcancerland.com.