The other day, I saw a poster. It’s the iconic picture of Rambo with bulging muscles and a bazooka. But, instead of the head of Sylvester Stallone, it has the head of Donald Trump. The caption goes, “Trump. No Man. No Woman. No Commie Can Stump Him.”

My first reaction was to think of it as satire, making fun of Trump’s exaggerated opinion of himself. But, no, given the context, this was meant as a prideful statement by one of his followers.

Do his followers not know that he is obese and averse to exercise? Is it possible that they don’t know that he avoided the draft? How could they believe in something that is so far from the truth?

Pausing for inner experience

I pause a moment as I’m pondering these questions. I pay attention to my inner experience. I notice that what this brings up for me is some mixture of outrage and smugness. Outrage: how dare they represent something that is so far from the truth? Smugness: the sense that I am more in touch with reality than these people.

I know that, if I stay with my sense of outrage and smugness, all I do is reinforce my preconceptions. So I try, for a moment, to shift into a different perspective. I tap into a sense of curiosity about what this picture might mean to the people who proudly display it. Does one need to take it as literally true to be inspired by it?

Probably not. We, human beings, have the ability to use symbolic thinking. We use metaphors. Sometimes, the metaphors we choose are very carefully related to the topic. Occasionally, we voluntarily choose metaphors that present a stark contrast to highlight an aspect that is especially important to us. For instance, I remember how Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa liked to use the metaphor of warriors to reflect the quality of courage. Mindfulness practitioners are certainly not warriors in the typical sense of the term. They are not belligerent, far from that. The warrior metaphor serves to draw attention to their hero quality.

But what if the metaphor is so over the top that it loses any power? When Vladimir Putin displays pictures of himself bare-chested, it is consistent with his background as a sportsman, a judo practitioner. But what could the man who avoided the draft because of bone spurs possibly have to do with a Rambo-like figure?

Calvin & Hobbes

To better understand this, I find it helpful to think of one of my favorite comic strips, Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin is a little boy, and Hobbes is his tiger. Clearly, for Calvin’s parents and all the other characters in this strip, this is what Hobbes is: a stuffed animal, a toy. But, whenever Calvin interacts with him, Hobbes is represented as fully alive. A magnificent, powerful tiger. More than that, a tiger who is also able to speak and play with Calvin.

You could say that all of the stories take place in Calvin’s imagination. So what? Saying that misses out on what gives these stories their charm. They don’t just talk about the fantasy world of the kid. They draw us into it. To enjoy the story, you suspend disbelief that this is a stuffed animal. You see and experience Hobbes as a full-fledged character, not a toy but an animal. Actually, an animal who is also a person. But also a stuffed toy, because the story works on many levels. You have to follow it on all the levels as it unfolds.

The story that unfolds does not have an “as if” quality. It would be boring if it were possible to reduce it to what’s happening in Calvin’s imagination. What makes it captivating is that it is also happening in our imaginations. The power of good stories is that they draw us into the world of fantasy. What makes a story enjoyable is not how closely it hews to literal truth. It is how it captures something compelling that literal truth cannot capture as well. It is akin to how a simple drawing can capture a sense of a p...