Landmark Forum Leader Insights

We are what we imagine

By Laurel Scheaf

We have met on the plane of imagination where it is indeed possible to share everything we have come to be.*
Transforming our relationships with ourselves, each other, and the world with which we interact requires a radical departure from our familiar notions of selfhood. It takes becoming aware of how and why our assumptions have come to limit us, and requires exploring what’s behind our beliefs, choices, and actions—and most important, who and what we are. When we look at our experience, we usually compare it to something we hoped or expected, or experienced in the past—essentially reacting to the present in ways that were imprinted long ago—leaving us marching into life with a partial vision. There’s not a lot of excitement in a future given by the past. In just becoming aware of holding a limited view, we transform some part of how we make meaning out of the world. In unsettling these old realities, the infinite possibility of living a created life becomes available. We become interested in what might be, in what we could imagine, in establishing environments where possibility is created. “We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves.” **