Crying Over Imaginary Chicken

In the current issue of the Christian devotional publication The Secret Place, a woman from Nebraska shared an experience with her two three-year-old granddaughters. She was driving down the interstate with the twins in the backseat. They were pretending to eat fried chicken that one of the girls had pretended to have cooked.

One of them began screaming because her sister had stolen the imaginary chicken off her plate. The grandmother writes: “It did not matter to her that it was pretend fried chicken. She was inconsolable, and no amount of reasoning could calm her. I had to admit, I shed a few tears myself – laughing hysterically.”

In the devotion the author proceeded to compare her grandchildren’s spat to petty squabbles that adults have. It was a good article, and the story got me thinking beyond her application. It is not an exaggeration to say that we live in an imaginary world.  I am not saying that we are coppertops plugged into the Matrix. I am saying that the world is not what we think it is. This is a theme in ancient philosophy from Plato’s allegory of the cave to the Indian teaching of maya.

Take our nation as an example. Countries are products of human imagination. They do not exist in reality. From the International Space Station the earth does not display national boundaries. There is no dividing line between the US and Canada from space. It is only in our minds. The same with our southern neighbor, in spite of the Rio Grande and the wall. Rivers and walls are national boundaries only in the human mind.

Nations exist only in our heads. They have their origins in early primate society, but they did not exist before humans came on the scene. They will not exist after our species is extinct. Politics is an imaginary game created to govern an imaginary national entity. Like three-year-olds, we scream at each other until we are red in the face over offenses which exist only in our imagination.

I am not saying that qualities like liberty, justice and human rights are not important. But they are important only within the story of human society. As we play our roles in this temporal drama, such ideals may be worth living, fighting and dying for – relatively speaking. But in the end it is like fighting over imaginary chicken. “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

There is an unimagined Reality, an eternal reality that existed before our species and will continue after it. It includes what we perceive as reality but transcends it. It goes by many names. I use words like the Divine, Ultimate Reality, the Absolute, the Ground of Being, Being Itself, and many more. Different spiritual traditions use different religious vocabulary to label it, but no labels stick. This Unnamable Reality is the subject of spirituality, as well as music, art, and all forms of creativity.

When I speak of spirituality, I am not talking about religion. Religion is just another human construct populated with imaginary beings, beliefs, and rules. People scream, fight and kill over these imagined differences between mental constructions. When religions join forces with nations, they can get really deadly. I am not talking about religion. I am talking about spirituality.

Spirituality grounds humans in Reality.  Spiritual Reality is beyond human ideas. It cannot be described in human words. This Truth cannot be encapsulated in creeds or doctrines. This Way cannot be enforced with rules or laws. It cannot be defined. For that reason many people think this spiritual unicity, which includes all multiplicity, does not exist. They think it is just another fantasy of the human mind. Perhaps these skeptics are correct. But experience says otherwise.

In every generation mystical souls in all religions bear witness to the self-authenticating experience of the Ground of Being that underlies the world. Their testimonies of transcendence strike a chord in our hearts. At some level we are all intuitively aware of this unspeakable Reality during moments of beauty, awe and love. This Holy Reality is the real world. Jesus called it the Kingdom of God.