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El Foro Landmark
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New horizons—the province of possibility
The maps we start out with are mostly handed down, inherited with all the peculiarities and standards of our cultures. We often end up living within their parameters, filtering what we see through a somewhat distorted lens. When we accept things as “that’s just the way things are,” we confine ourselves to those realities—often leading us further from ourselves rather than closer. James Joyce saw maps differently—to paraphrase him, as errors to arrive at truth. Errors for him were “volitional,” and “portals of discovery”—not a drift through particular landscapes, but a drift through the spaces of the imagination in order to arrive at an invention of reality.
What we do and how we act aren’t correlated to “the way things are—a fixed world”; but to how the world occurs for us. And they occur that way because that’s the conversation we have about them. We mostly don’t see the way things are as a product of our conversations (and how those conversations set the values, limitations, and direction of our daily lives) until those conversations are revealed to us as “constructions” that we’ve put there. When our background conversations shift, the foundational maps on which we construct our understanding of the world shift, too. We feel, think, and act in new ways—fluidity of boundaries is everywhere. Unanticipated directions, surprising connections, new horizons emerge and become the province of possibility.
“Nothing in the horizon limits vision, for the horizon opens all that lies beyond itself.”
–James Carse
David Cunningham
Landmark Forum leader
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