This post is slightly more spiritual than most, but it was such a fun exercise putting all of it together. This is perhaps the most I’ve thought about all the topics down below. In some way, I think it’s the culmination of everything I’ve written about so far. It wraps it all up with a bowtie.

It’s a nice model of the concept of “God” that seems to align with me the more I think about it. There’s no more of this tug of “you’re a man of science, why do you believe in this?”. It’s fully consistent with the model of the world I have now after the incessant yapping the past few months. I see the vision here and am happy with the way it turned out.

In many ways, I think life is always moving you towards permanence – in private life, relationships, work, and quite literally every aspect of living. And IMO, the one thing that decides whether you’re achieving permanence in the things you care about is through the Language Games you play.

On Language Games

Ever since I read about the concept of Language Games (coined by Ludwig Wittgenstein in ) a few years ago, I’ve been obsessed1. It makes sooo much sense and kinda explains everything. I went back to vibe-read Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations to remember most of this stuff again when writing this post.

A Language Game is a system of communication where meaning emerges from use of certain words within a specific context and set of rules, rather than from correspondence to external absolute reality. This has crazy implications on how you choose to live life. Your internal monologue (which I consider different from pure thoughts) can entirely be controlled by what you tell yourself about yourself.

If you tell yourself the right stuff at the right time, you’re playing the game well, and winning just looks like living life with minimal angst. If you tell yourself the wrong stuff (eg: “do I even deserve XYZ-good-thing?”, “am I good enough?”, “would anyone care about me?”) that leads to quietism or lets your biases, insecurities, and tendencies win, you’re playing the game wrong and it’ll only lead to further doubt and crash-outs about random things you might have unresolved complexes about. It leads to paralysis and inaction. It leads to self-loathing. You can literally just tell yourself better things, and I’ve come to believe in the immense awesomeness and power of doing just that.

Before you even consider what you do when no one is looking, you must first consider what you say to yourself when no one else is listening. And I think this is a direct reflection of the language games you play, which in turn, dictates what you do when no one is looking — and with latent leakage, it’s very easy for things to get messy if you’re playing the wrong games.

Imago Dei and Infinite Recursion

“Do you know what it is to be a man? To be a man is to bear resemblance of the Creator. If you are conscious of the fact that you are created in the image of the Creator, you are a man. Man is a religious being. That is to say he must have some kind of belief – call it superstition or not.” ~ Marcus Garvey, Know Thyself, 1925

Some stuff to think about:

• Consider Imago Dei, the notion that humans are created in the image of God.

• Also consider the other saying, “the human mind was so powerful it constructed the concept of God”.

• Sarv reminded me this summer how, back in the day, Christians used to always keep God first, at the top of their minds above all else. Their spouses, children, loved ones, and even their own life??? All of them were secondary to God. This didn’t diminish the latter, just helped people order it all better.

If we created the Creator, and the Creator dictates (and embodies) what is considered good and noble and honorable, perhaps we all innately have something inside us (I talk about consulting your optimal policy in my other essay) that has the ability to guide us towards those ideals. It’s what the collective sum of human values tends towards in the limit to infinity. It’s pretty much recursive: if we created God but somehow God also created us in its image, our entire perception of who we are is this idealised self-projection that recursively defines itself.

How is this related to language games? If we tell ourselves there is an external God who looks out for us, we will live our whole lives aspiring to get closer to this external object … and ngl, we might never reach it because it becomes this game of comparison. But if we believe in this recursive notion of God and Self, you can always just … look within and the answers you hope to find will eventually unravel themselves the more you look.

“There are mysteries to the universe we were never meant to solve, but who we are and why we are here are not among them. Those answers we carry inside.”

~ Optimus Prime, Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014)

And the fun thing is that this specific formulation of God and Self is in itself a language game. Through its performance, you enact the recursion. On the other hand, if I chose to view God as this external thing (which you could do, as do many others), then you’d need to find ways of making peace with the reality in which that is true (because you told yourself that and constructed a reality where it’s a fact), which requires a whole other set of language games now. The recursion gets very convoluted very quickly, so I’ll leave it here.

If you view God as something you carry within yourself as a construction, this language game has a nice way of playing out, which I talk about next.

Continuous self-correction

I know I keep going back to the Gita (my mother would be so happy) but it’s such a good book2. Perhaps the most goated verses are 4.7 and 4.8 that fully relate to my abovementioned recursive definition of God and Self:

“Yada yada hi dharmasya glanirbhavati bharata
Abhythanamadharmasya tadatmanam srijamyaham
Paritranaya sadhunang vinashay cha dushkritam
Dharmasangsthapanarthay sambhabami yuge yuge.”

“Whenever righteousness declines and evil rises, O Arjuna,
I manifest myself. To protect the good and destroy the wicked,
to establish dharma, I am born age after age.”

Now, if we go with the above system of connecting 1) humans being created in the image of God; 2) how God is a concept our human minds create as a representation of their highest self (with maxxed-out capabilities on the skill tree); and 3) how you can control what you believe by playing the right language games with yourself, you essentially get a system of continuous self-correction. How?

Whenever there is incongruence within yourself (ie, evil rising) that crosses a certain threshold where you can no longer ignore its influence, you recognise your fall (ie, you manifest “God”, which is this internal, deep-rooted divinity), and wish to do something to correct it (ie, destroy the wicked). This divine aspect is what restores balance (ie, protect the good). And this process is continuous: every time you notice something within you that’s incongruent and can’t be ignored, you will fall back to this correction mechanism repeatedly (ie, being born age after age).

The language game here is to believe (with strong conviction) that you want to correct the stuff that’s causing some incongruence within yourself, and tell yourself whatever you should to perform said correction. And you do it again and again, forever – and this is exactly what character development is (lol).

This also aligns with what I say about doing one thing the way you do everything. As you discover more sides of you that are incongruent with the inner divinity, there is this internal self-correction mechanism that gets triggered, and more often than not, it has this divine energy/vibe to it that makes it pure in some way??!

Now this is really cool to me because if you’re struggling to pick a side on whether someone is looking out for you or not, if you agree with this model of “God” and its relation to You, it is equivalent to you saving yourself by invoking this supposedly “divine” aspect from within and using it as a vehicle for some good change.

If you think about it further, this is exactly the kinda stuff that leads to permanence! You get to appreciate things more and not take them for granted. You possess the skill and maturity to handle and preserve something well. You get to forgive and forget more easily. You get to hold things with a lot more grace without having weird complexes about the things that once affected you. You don’t feel fear or temptation that causes you to duck down and cower. This is quite literally the definition of permanence.

And this is also why this model of “God” and how we are an image of what we create in our own minds are a lot more aligned with what I already believe about the power of language games and the stuff you tell yourself about yourself. It’s a strongly connected loop. When you “hijack” this recursive loop, nothing much changes, except you approach life with significantly less angst and put out this radiant energy that you’re somehow ALSO feeding back to yourself simultaneously – and that’s awesome.

On the different “forms” of God and Worship

I think such a framework also gels well with monotheistic and polytheistic religions across the east and west. In Hinduism, there’s all this talk about The Creator, The Preserver, and The Destroyer3. In Christianity and Catholicism, there’s the standard argument of God residing inside you and of “letting him in”. In Buddhism, there is no deity: there is just oneness with nature and to find peace in our construction of reality by giving up suffering and pain (and angst) … or whatever’s causing the crash-outs.

Through the use of the right language games, I get to invoke different forms of divinity based on what the situation dictates and requires of me. So maybe, the meta-game I should play is learning what to tell myself to balance it all better. Something something Aristotle’s golden mean. I still get to be messy, but in a way that allows me to come out positive and not jaded about things in life one would consider “dreary” and saddening. There is no longer this urge to do things “right” but to be able to manage it all well in spite of the mess.

Then, to worship “God” is to simply thank the inner divinity for its existence and to be glad I’m not tripping over my own leg often because of my own skill issues. Worship becomes this cool celebration of being chill with life and having very few reasons to crash out. Why? Because you’re moving towards permanence in the things around you. Very few things become fleeting and temporary. And the things that just end up being fleeting? They shouldn’t be affecting you significantly. This isn’t to say “become devoid of emotion”. It just means allowing yourself to fully give in without letting the weight of things get to you.

To be “God-fearing”

I think a big part of looking into Indian spiritualism and religion is the notion of being a “God-fearing” person. This framework of Language Games as a way of reconciling God and Self is also pretty congruent with being a God-fearing person – and I don’t simply and naively mean fearing your own ability to construct reality.

If we view karma as a continual enactment of your biases, insecurities, and patterns, erasing all of this by invoking your inner divinity to self-correct would help you trip on your leg less. Obviously. Then, perhaps, the FEAR is in underestimating or even subconsciously ignoring your optimal policy enough because of your ego and patterns. If we conceive the notion of a God who is an idealised version of yourself, representing the best of us and what we can be, perhaps being God-fearing just means yielding to your optimal policy at all times to guide your actions, driven by things like love, honor, justice, and discipline.

And if we believe we hold “God” inside us (ie, your construction), we must then also accept that we are ALWAYS capable of pure love, honor, and nobility. So to be God-fearing entails a sense of fearing yourself should you instead listen to ego, pride, and your patterns. And perhaps the innate quality of this God-like construction is only as good and useful as your ability to use the right language to aid in its construction. The more expressive you are with the way you view the world and your place in it, the purer this construction. Then, what we call our somatic/nervous system (and its ability to control how to show up and construct reality around us) is essentially our subconscious (carrying our ego, pride, traumas, patterns, beliefs, and biases) coming in between us and the inner pure divinity.

To truly move past issues and fears and angst-causing Ls from the past is to shed ego. Being too hard on yourself is a form of ego. Being too lenient with yourself is a form of ego. Your urge to and audacity to believe you can just “get away with things” is a form of ego. You expecting a prize or reward for all your past suffering and pain is a form of ego. They keep you from truly fearing your inability to consult the inner divinity and self-correct. And, it’s exactly these innocent but dangerous manifestations of ego that cause you to trip on yourself and fall prey to your naive tendencies and patterns that get you stuck in life. So, maybe this ultimately means not to take things so deeply? But not taking things deeply and believing how good you are for doing so is also ego. You never escape. But, in seeing yourself and God this way, perhaps you can live with lower angst, knowing your optimal policy lies within you (ie, your God-like construction) beneath all the messy bits.

To reiterate, I’ve come to believe ego, pride, and an inability to handle certain truths about yourself are what prevents you from playing the Game right and accessing “God”. The moment you let any of this dictate your actions and beliefs, you’re already playing the wrong language game. And I use ego loosely here: your insecurities, bias, conscious and unconscious tendencies, and undesirable behaviours will find their way to mess with you. In many ways, it’s a very meta-game to tell yourself that your insecurities etc etc no longer affect you, and when you repeat it long enough, it tends to be true.

Then what of prayer?

Again, I can’t talk about the concept of “God” without talking about prayer. Back in the day, prayer was meant to be silent introspection … some alone time to process afflictions, to regroup, to rebuild, and to find ways to get the things we want. I see prayer as playing the exact same role in whatever I’ve said so far. If God is supposedly housed inside, behind all the junk, prayer is a chance to access that internal divinity. Pretty straightforward.

Did I just suck the fun out of living?

Nooooooo. I think all of this just made it more fun for me. For all those people who go back and forth on humans having free will or not, such a model of “God” is the closest I think I’ll get to having free will. It puts some form of agency back in your hands. You might also say I’m just giving in to being a control freak. Again, being able to deal with uncertainty and being OK with things not going my way despite my best efforts – that’s a language game too! Being able to tell myself it’s alright when things fail and allowing myself to feel the sting of it organically (and somatically!!) still aligns with this version of “God” and Self.

Maybe I’m completely wrong, and maybe, I’ll get struck down by lightning tomorrow. But at the very least, it’s finally something I can get behind. With the pro-agency push, it finally allows me to figure out what my construction of “God” would look like, and find my way to it.

The biggest irony

It’s kinda obvious that nothing is permanent. I can’t quote the Gita here and talk about permanence in the same essay. I’d be stupid to do so. I think it’s great to eventually accept that impermanence is the final resting state of everything. But it comes through first doing things to maximise permanence. It’s ironic: to first be OK with impermanence, you must move towards permanence. This means coming to terms with things changing, life surprising you in crazy ways, and continuing to do whatever you can to access inner divinity to self-correct. And when things seem like they’re on fire, remember: fate will always yield its reward, and it’s up to us to play the right language games to find beauty in the new realities and worlds we fall into.

Finally, I was drafting this post and realised midway how egoistic it is to actually feel like you’re entitled to permanence just because you think you’re playing the right language game(s). If you feel entitled to it, then you are not playing the right game, obviously. Perhaps another meta-game is realising that no amount of language games will ever give you 100% access to, or guarantees of, permanence in any aspect of life. If you believe playing the right language games will allow you to live life perfectly, think again. You may or will still fail. And that’s OK. There will be days when the repurcusions of the actions of your former incongruent self from the past may catch up to you, but as long as you do what you can to play the right language games in the present to ensure you live life honorably filled with love and optimism, you’re fine.

This use of language games to reconcile God and Self is not a system to become perfect but a way to manage the imperfection of it all. You will be contradictory, but you’ll now be able to navigate that contradiction better by playing better language games. I think this version of “God” sits well with me, and I no longer am crashing out about my allegiances. So if you needed a proper answer, then yes, I do believe in God. But only if it’s defined in the way I’ve set up above. I think any other format of “God” would have me crashing out, so best not to go there lol.

At a meta level, me being so deep about all this and thingifying it in hopes of reaching/achieving some greater, grander purpose and higher calling is also a form of ego. People who read this might see me as some pretentious dude trying to be holier-than-thou to wash away all the Ls. And that’s OK too. because even that is a language game they play with themselves. Not to say people are wrong to be skeptical. Even the name-calling and assuming are recursive that way through the use of language games 🤔 And no, this does not mean I’ve science-ified and logic’d my way out of religion and God. I still believe there may be certain “powers that be” that do some magical stuff when you least expect it. But hoping for such things to be in your favor when you want them to probably causes more angst than necessary. It isn’t that deep, though: let the magic people do what they have to, and I get to exist, business-as-usual.

And perhaps, me believing I carry something so pure and good and beautiful as “God” inside myself, with all my inner mess and ugliness (and their opposites 🤞🏻) is a form of ego. If I think this will reveal some deeper answer to who I am and why I’m here … well, that’s also a form ego. And I think once you accept this truth that all this is just a piece of knowledge to know and do nothing with (except live life trying to become your highest self), you can either let it crush you because you tell/ask yourself “what is the point?” and fall into quietism, OR you can use other more positive language games and convince yourself to just be optimistic and silly. Maybe it’s all just cope, but I choose not to see it that way (aha, more language games).

So maybe Alan Watts was right all along:

Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the Gods made for fun.