The Two Knowledges: Playing the Game and Knowing It’s a Game

In my previous blogpost I touched on how life is like a movie, and how we are both the audience in the theater and the actors on the screen, here on planet Earth. Building on that, I want to explore a related idea: our intelligence, and how we use it to decode and understand life.

The key is to recognize that there are two distinct kinds of knowledge.

First, there is absolute knowledge. Second, there is a knowledge that is continuously changing, which is, in essence, unreal. How do you understand an illusion? The simplest, most absolute way is to just know, "This is an illusion." There is nothing more to study or do; the realization itself is complete. The second way is to enter the illusion, to experience it, study its patterns, and decipher its internal logic. As you go deeper, you find there is no end to it. So many things happen within the illusion. You keep decoding, building a repository of data and information. This collected knowledge begins to make sense; it allows you to predict what will happen next. You can develop wonderful algorithms that accurately forecast events within the illusion. Based on these, you gain control and learn to "win."

Consider the game of chess. It is an illusionary battle. There are no real kings, queens, or bishops; no actual swordfight occurs. It is a game that simulates conflict. Today, computers play chess by analyzing every move with logic and reason. But this logic is built upon a fixed set of rules that create the framework for the game to exist. If you decided tomorrow that your king could fly across the board and kill the queen arbitrarily, the entire game would collapse. What makes chess predictable is its skeleton of rules: you cannot do this; you must do that; a bishop moves only diagonally; a knight moves in its peculiar L-shape. Why these rules? There is no deeper reason. In real life, a horse does not move three squares and stop; an elephant can go in any direction. But within the illusion of chess, these arbitrary rules are sovereign. By obeying them, the game becomes predictable, fun, and entertaining. We can have world championship matches.

Now, imagine a child who understands this whole setup is an illusion. He sits across from a grandmaster like Magnus Carlsen or Viswanathan Anand. With a glint in his eye, knowing it is all a construct, he watches the grandmaster make the first move, advancing a pawn. The child then picks up his own king moves it across the board and strikes off the opponents king throwing it off the board. He then triumphantly declares, "I win!"

Technically, he has removed the king, which ends the game. But would the chess ecosystem consider this a victory? No. They would see an arrogant child who broke the rules. Why was it not right? Because he violated the agreed-upon framework of that illusion. By breaking the rules, he ended the fun.

The key thing to remember is that in life, we are following certain rules of an illusion. All the information we gather exists within this framework. So, like the child who ended the game by throwing the king, we also have two kinds of knowledge available to us. The first is the realization that everything is an illusion. This knowledge allows us to remain detached, like oil on water. But that is all it does. The second kind is where we try to understand the illusion itself. We study its framework, grasp its logic, go deeper, and participate. This is a wonderful form of knowing. We grope around in something that does not ultimately exist, yet we hold onto emerging patterns. These patterns coalesce into understanding; that becomes our knowledge. With this seemingly solid knowledge, we navigate the space of illusions. This is our current world. This is how we survive and live.

But this hard-won knowledge, born from struggle and decoding, is itself illusionary. The day the illusion collapses, this knowledge collapses with it. That is its nature. Therefore, when we strive to understand spirituality or to comprehend God from within this framework, we must realize that the striving itself leads to an illusionary outcome. In a way, spiritual studies can still be a pursuit of the illusion; to believe there is a God "out there" is based on belief, on trying to find something within the format of the game. Even if you understand spirituality in this way, it will not redeem you or get you out. The entire intent of being in this game is that you want to be in it. You do not want to invoke a divinity that says, "Everything is destroyed, you are out." You do not want the movie to end. You want to be here, just as the chess child, by ending the game prematurely, robbed himself of the experience.

We want to be in this movie. We want to enjoy it and be a part of it. All the information we gather, whether material or spiritual, is intended to help us play this game properly. We have two types of information. The first is materialistic; it helps us understand and predict the illusion so we can participate effectively, like playing a good game of chess. The second is spiritual; it keeps reminding us, "This is a game. Do not take it too seriously. Whether you win or lose, there will always be a new game." But it also teaches us resilience. It shows us how to be bold and brave, how to plan, how to come back from defeat, how to keep trying until we experience victory. The spiritual part makes us tough, gives us confidence, and provides motivation when there seems to be none.

This is the key.

In our life, we need both the material and the spiritual. While it is crucial to know that neither is absolute, it is equally important to understand both, as they help us have a balanced, wholesome experience in this theater 'Earth, where the movie of life unfolds.