Self-Initiation for Serious Players
You are Already Playing the Sacred Game.
Before we begin, please note that you can listen to this post like a podcast episode by downloading the iOS app. In fact, would regarding this as a podcast episode change the way you engage with it?
There is a concept I call the ‘Duncehood of the Literal’.
The ‘Duncehood of the Literal’ is what I name this insidious trap any person can fall into when we take everything at face value and lose the ability to see deeper meaning. It has little to do with lacking intelligence and far more about being stuck in a way of relating to the present moment that needs everything to be obvious, spelled out, and black-and-white. People in this mindset often confuse simplicity with truth, believing that it is only worth understanding if it is simple to understand. How small our lives would be if this were always true. And then, how much do we miss, in the invitation to depth and meaning that is reaching out to touch us, if only we could drop the staid, literal mode of exchange that the modern world coerces us into.
Modern life is a fugue-construct written in the coding language of the reductionist literal left-brain. It allows us to navigate complex processes and interfaces, but then also generates a lot of sterile complexity. This is why we feel so overwhelmed, and why the overwhelm numbs us, because we cannot parse and process all the noise.
This mode of engagement stifles an equally necessary and more intuitive aspect of our sense-making, and critically, our sense of meaning-making.
This is why it is so critically necessary to appreciate when a conversation calls for symbolic language.
Literalism is not neutral; it is a distortion. It flattens the multidimensionality of reality into something static and sterile, which promises to be instantly digestible, which is why it thrives in bureaucratic systems, fundamentalist religion, and algorithmic logic. In contrast, real understanding; especially in leadership, art, or spiritual practice, requires us to engage with ambiguity, context, and nuance.
The Duncehood of the Literal is a default state we are induced into by modern life. This, then, is your invitation to drop the language of the literal and prime your awareness for its native form of conversation, namely our sense of the mythic. This is an archetypal language that speaks to the aspect of our psyche that is most effective at connecting with meaning.
When I use words like becoming, belonging, game etc. to assume only their literal face-value meaning is to rob yourself of the deeper essence of the conversation being held, and with it, to deny yourself the invitation encoded within it.
As always, this post is an invitation to slow down. You aren’t doing me any favours by reading this. I am quite sincerely trying to pass a gift of meaning your way. Do yourself the favour of being really present. If we don’t reset our state of presence, we allow the weight and intrusions of the previous moments in our day, to overshadow this one, and rob it of its gifts. Presence is what deepens connection, and connection is what deepens meaning.
Let’s Begin.
What I teach, is called The Sacred Game.
It is a game that I have been playing and getting better at for about seven years now. I have been teaching people this game privately for years. I initiated Chetan into this game, and it set his soul aflame so much so that we started the A Better Way project together.
I taught my wife this game, and now, together, she and I are teaching our daughter, Maia, this game. It is something of a comical understatement to say that this is non-trivial.
It works a bit like Jiu Jitsu in that it upgrades the way that you inhabit your experience, the knowledge you have of your own mechanics, your psychology and the language and pathways of possibilities. Just like Jiu Jitsu, it grows the paradigms and contexts of meaning we can inhabit recursively.
Even if we aren’t conscious of it, we are all already playing the Sacred Game. We are either living life by default or by design. Day by day we are becoming something. If we are not product managing our own becoming, our inherited default is doing that for us. If you are not making your choices from presence, discernment and intentionality, something or someone else is making that choice for you. Today we have systems of ideology, influence and control and even ones now that are non-human. What the masses have accepted has become the norm we live by.
There are ways to steer that evolution with more presence, discernment and intentionality. There are better and worse ways of doing that. That’s why I use the example of Jiu Jitsu.
Here is a good way to relate to the comparison:
Jiu Jitsu classes are part instruction, part drill, and part roll. The instruction is itself part demonstration and part repetition, part questions and answers and constructive challenge. Critical thinking in such a game is quintessential. This is where a new concept or aspect of the game is introduced to the players, sometimes for the first time. First-timers get their first exposure, and the rest get to deepen their appreciation and integration of the extra dimension or possibility of the game.
The second part of the class is the drill, which is the initial practice of the presented concept or technique. This involves troubleshooting it with collaborators in the class, and then getting adjustments and suggestions from the instructor, who also performs complex troubleshooting.
A good jiu jitsu instructor will pick up bugs and gaps and gotchas from the first round of drill and top off the instruction with a refinement, cleaning up misconceptions, pointing out interesting ideas, and thereby facilitating the integration process.
Part of their skill becomes not just being the vault of knowledge, but also adept at transmission, but can also teach the meta-skill and discipline of being able to step through an implementation or test, and debug and refine in near real-time. It is why the best black belts are not always the best instructors and vice versa.
The second round of drills works out the kinks in the space, and then the third phase of the class is called ‘rolling’, where players can collaborate with other players, and in short controlled rounds, keep working on an aspect of their game by agiling their way towards better, as they incorporate the new thing that was introduced.
This three-part structure of the class resolves to act as a modality of gradual and incremental Initiation, occurring over many cycles, that culminates in a grading of sorts and can be tested and validated in real life, on and off the mat.
The player is gradually, week after week, cycle after cycle, initiated into new levels of the game, while they apprentice themselves to their own game: their own craft and calling of expression and devotion. Some are called on to teach or specialise, and eventually they can become masters of their own and contribute to the evolution, preservation and custodianship of the game.
I explain all that because that is not unlike what The Sacred Game is. Except in this case, the vector of actualisation and integration is the context of a physical grappling art. It is more a form of how we actualise in our personal development, our relationships and our work.
The Sacred Game is fundamentally a game of Actualisation & Integration, along a pathway of self-mastery, deep alignment to dharma, which implies a devotional alignment to our sense of calling, the things we yearn for, desire, are duty bound to by love, like being a father, a husband, a brother, a leader, an elder or just a good fucking citizen of the world. We are all called be the unfolding gift we came here to share, our own way.
Like Jiu Jitsu, there are many schools of thought and practice, and in the end, any fool can fall to the floor and wrestle unrehearsed, even if badly. But Jiu Jitsu, like all good human technology, is abundant evidence of its own efficacy, and good human technology is always predicated on the foundational and critical principle that there might not be right or only ways, but better and worse ways undoubtedly exist.
That is the foundational premise of Agile, of continuous improvement, of Jiu Jitsu, of Yoga, and of any good human technology.
There are better and worse ways to grapple with our shadows, our sense of calling in the world, our burdens of leadership and duty in the world. And there is better and worse language and framings by which to appreciate those and our relationship to them, and the relationship these have to our ‘Becoming’. For example, there is a word for this, it is called Dharma.
Dharma includes all of these: our sense of calling in the world, our burdens of leadership and duty in the world and then the driving force at the heart of them, the way we are all indelibly shaped for a certain person sense of longing ‘to be whole and to be home’, which is the only understanding of god we can ever surrender our full sanity and meaning to, whatever that might mean for each of us. There is a way we can feel ‘whole’ and ‘home’ archetypally that can never be met adequately by the faith of the crowd. The Crowd do not understand this, because they do not feel this. But if you are something of a true seeker, this is all that this actually means. There is no secret magic special path. If a spiritual or mystical tradition does not guide unlearnings and simple understandings that each of us are actually called to our own path, then it is not a real path. It cannot be.
We can only ever begin to play a serious actualisation game, a game of real Becoming, if we can at last face that we have to walk our own path, our way, or it isn’t our path at all. Very specifically, we cannot keep subscribing to the same operating system as the crowd, who are more like sheep than shepherds, the uninitiated populace who themselves are not troubled by their own sense of spiritual longing. This is the archetypal Populus, the Crowd. If we keep sourcing our permission and our ‘say-so’ from ‘the crowd’, if we keep walking their well-worn path, we won’t respect or appreciate who we become while we’re doing it.
When we use words here like Becoming and Belonging, they are meant in the archetypal sense. Remember, to just consider them in the literal sense only, is to remain deaf to the deeper invitation of what is being said here.
So what we are examining by considering the archetypal meaning of Becoming and Belonging, is this is the ache we feel at the centre of all striving—the yearning to belong without fracture, to return to a state where nothing essential is exiled, and everything we are, has a rightful place in the ordering of things.
To have such a sense of calling, of beckoning, of feeling deeply and painfully unrequited in our own lives, means to be reaching for sacred admission to a deep, abiding sense of connection we call ‘Belonging’; one that cannot be revoked or taken from us. And perhaps more importantly, we are reaching for a version of it, that can be found again if lost, and that, if taken away, can be restored by means within our means. This last part is no small detail; it is key, because it speaks to the possibility of prodigal return, the assurance of a sacred inheritance. How we understand this feeling in common language is this: We deeply want to know we are never going to find ourselves beyond redemption. Think about that.
I’ll say it again.
We all want to feel whole and home in a way that we cannot be banished from or shamed into not belonging to. And we want to know, in a very deep and private sense we haven’t often even admitted to ourselves that all the song and dance of life, the performative drama of it, is about us figuring out how to be good, how to be accepted, sometimes by who we don’t even know, so that we can feel psychologically safe enough to simply be ourselves. That is what we call true belonging. And we want to know that if that this state of grace is lost somehow that we can get it back again, that even if we fuck up, we can earn our way back into grace in a way that doesn’t cost us what we care most about in ourselves. We don’t want it to cost us ourselves in order to belong. That is what redemption means at the deepest, simplest psychological level.
Secretly underneath all your yearning is a wish to be whole and to be home, in the archetypal sense. And that feeling is deeply related to your sense of a kind of belonging that means you are safe, wanted, held, and that you feel fulfilled in the deepest, truest, surest sense of the word. This is what redemption means to the psyche. And the absence, the missing of this, the longing of it, is our prime and quintessential wound. We all long for redemption. Our religions didn’t invent that wound, they just weaponised it.
It is not some generic or universal state we all aim for in the same way, either—there is a universal impulse we can all relate to that nevertheless takes utterly singular form in each of us. The longing to be whole and to be home is not one ubiquitous destination, like Christian heaven, for example, but many such shooting stars, shaped by our own essence and story.
This means by definition it cannot be constrained or defined, it cannot inherit its whole sense of limitation via the consensus of the crowd. Where we get our permission is where we get our power, and Self-Mastery, true Sovereignty, true agency is based on Self-Permission, which is based on Curiosity and radical self-honesty.
Curiosity and Self-Permission are the two wings of the soul.
Without a doubt.
Our ability to find and follow our own golden thread in the dark, to scratch our own itches in this life, to let the cat of our curiosity access the temple as indifferently as it would access the sandbox. These two, Curiosity and Self-Permission, are the wings of Icarus.
So, how then, you might ask, do we not fly too close to the sun?
How do we take wing, and allow our souls to climb, to soar, to ascend towards the archetypal sun, without becoming a danger to ourselves?
What keeps us constrained and grounded is the root of human connection we have in this world, the limits of our lives. Even though our self-permission cannot be empowered by shared convention, the fruits of the game, the yield we get back for our devotion and investments, are only possible if the game we play is integrated into our lives. It must still grow from shared roots, and be nourished by some shared and sacred appreciation of value. We still have to ‘play well’ with others. This is a non-negotiable requisite of The Sacred Game; the Golden Rule. Our path, our core philosophy, has to honour the container it is rooted in, it has to honour what is “Better”, it has to be growth-minded and healthy. This is what we mean when we say it has to ‘Belong to Life’. This is how the Sacred Game is a Profession of Leadership.
The Necessity of Life is called Maturity.
Let us talk for a moment about this form of Leadership.
There is a sacred code of leadership you are choosing to uphold when you subscribe to this covenant. A real covenant, is like an oval wreath with two bows, one at the north node and one at the south node. This is what the two cherubs or sphinxes on the ark of the covenant depicted metaphorically. We all recognise this motif.
The North Node is the star of your own desire and yearning, the signal of your own becoming. It is the guardian of your own truth.
The South Node is what you Belong to, the Body of it, the brotherhood of it, the Ordering of it. This is the guardian of the truth of the world.
You must choose the cost of the gift.
You must choose to follow your own truth, your own sense of calling and desire. The growth of a child and an adolescent happens by seasonal and cultural peristalsis, they are carried along by processes designed by nature and by their societies. The real growth of the psychological and spiritual adult, however, can only be done in the context of what we call a covenant. There has to be ownership of the process.
You have to product manage your own becoming.
This form of leadership involves this idea of Product Management.
Product management is the discipline and practice of guiding the development, positioning, and lifecycle of a product from conception through to delivery, use, and evolution. In a business context, a product manager is responsible for ensuring that the product solves real problems for real people, creates value for the business, and stays viable and relevant in its ecosystem.
At its core, product management sits at the intersection of strategy, design, technology, and user experience. It involves:
Understanding user needs through research, empathy, and data.
Defining product vision and strategy—clarifying what should be built and why.
Prioritising features and managing trade-offs based on impact, cost, and timing.
Coordinating teams—working closely with design, engineering, marketing, and sales.
Measuring outcomes to ensure the product is meeting its intended goals and iterating accordingly.
Good product management does not just ship features—it stewards coherence. It ensures that what is built is meaningful, usable, and sustainable, not just functional. In many ways, it is less about managing a thing and more about midwifing a solution through every stage of its life.
The usefulness of this metaphor should really speak for itself.
True Desire is just the blueprint of what the Soul and the Spirit conspire together in secret, to whisper to the heart what we only ever truly feel as Real Fulfilment—the kind that we mean when we use words like Whole and Home, in a profound and deeply personal archetypal sense.
This is our sacred Fuck Yes!
This is the only ‘god’ of your Covenant. Our covenant is with Legacy, but then by the Golden Rule, and the Necessities of Life, Maturity demands that our Covenant is also with The Ordering, the Community and Fellowship of that, and the ownership and vulnerability and then the spiritual courage and endurance those demands in turn.
A devoted product manager has to contend maturely with the reality that emerges, on its own terms, and has to respect the limits and necessities of that reality. Idealism is naive and cannot actually work.
And then, ultimately, you have to care about something greater than yourself.
This means both the great self you can become, and then just as meaningfully, the wider project of humanity, towards realising a time when this understanding is integrated into society and has become the basic operating model for every human being.
How do we know this?
Because that is what you would want. This being real in the world is exactly what you would have wanted.
That is what you would always have wanted in your yearning and desperate longing to be whole and to be home. Just like me, you would have wanted the world and society, the village, to have wrapped its arms around you and have initiated you into this way of being in the world. You would have wanted society to have held sacred space for your arrival and becoming, so that you could figure your own path out in a way that didn’t involve so much shame, pain and confusion.
That’s exactly how I know that helping this happen is core to my purpose and calling in this life.
This is real Legacy.
And that is the invitation on the table here today.
There is a way to play what is called the Sacred Game. Hieron Paignon.
This is the kind of Jiu Jitsu I teach, and for the first time ever, applications are open now.
You can join the weekly classes and be initiated into the deeper levels of the game, where the Human actualisation game really begins.
If the smallness of our current reality is like Plato’s cave, what I teach is spelunking.
Spelunking is the act of exploring caves. It refers to the activity of entering, navigating, and studying underground cave systems, often requiring special equipment and techniques due to the dark, narrow, and sometimes dangerous terrain.
This is the terrain where the Sacred Game is played.
And what I teach is this kind of spelunking—learning how to navigate these caves, not as a linear escape, but as a recursive ascent. It is caves all the way up.
Wriggling free of the first set of chains is only the beginning. Understanding the strange, counterintuitive setup of each cave—its false light, its distorted shadows, its inherited norms—is part of the work. The transition between caves is disorienting, like passing through a birth canal. And what awaits is not immediate clarity, but a new paradigm and reality that always requires orientation and deeper forms of reckoning.
There are better and worse ways to attempt this game. And there are certainly better and worse ways to facilitate it. The act of “waking up” is not a one-time event. What we really need is a commitment to continual rebirth—a willingness to outgrow the truths that once gave us shelter, and the containers of our lives in which we can practice.
The Sacred Game
The Sacred Game refers to the real-world framework by which human beings participate meaningfully in emergent reality. It is not a symbolic or abstract idea—it is a practical framework for engagement, actualisation, and collective coherence.
You have been playing this game mostly unconsciously your whole life. Children and Adolescents are carried along by the peristaltic cultural and biological processes defined by when and where we arrive. The one process evolved biologically and the other culturally. Both have bugs in the code that are clashing with our emerging reality and that we are struggling to maintain and integrate.
This is why it is so hard to feel coherent.
This is why you are experiencing overwhelm, burnout, depression and anxiety. This is why it is so hard to actualise towards deep fulfilment, because the bugs are undermining your efforts. The operating system you inherited is not fit for purpose; it was clumsily scrabbled together, its parts are not compatible, and you are stuck like a chameleon on a smartie box, trying to pull it all together, function, and then still make your way towards your own destiny.
To be an ‘adult’ in the true sense—psychologically and spiritually—is to take responsibility for engaging in the Sacred Game as a conscious practice, what some traditions have called an integral yoga: a whole-life process of maturation and coherence. This is what real actualisation means.
For most of human history, becoming a true adult required initiation. We still carry faint echoes of this in our rites of passage, but modernity has hollowed out the structures that once held them. We have no widespread institutions, no shared frameworks of practice, and too few true elders or custodians to hold these thresholds. And while some draw strength from indigenous or ancient models, many of these are place-bound, culturally specific, and cannot be universally transplanted, again not without informed initiation. What we need now is a renewed, living architecture of practice—one that can hold us where we are, and guide us toward who we are meant to become. Not in the jungles of Peru, or in a sweat lodge, but a path that begins right here, and works, in the urban, exciting mess of it all.
The Game is “sacred” not because it requires belief in anything esoteric, but because it operates within a lawful structure that cannot be ignored without consequence. It refers to the way individual choice, agency, and coherence influence not just personal outcomes but the shared trajectory of our relationships and ultimately our reality.
It is the basis of a covenant with Life, a framework for ongoing self-initiation, and a method for integrating Understanding and Wisdom in a way that leads to action, meaningful contribution, and real leadership. How can we have rewarding relationships or any notion of ‘work’ without this?
There are better and worse ways of playing the game well. The wider aim is to bring coherence to our lives and participate with integrity in the larger system of meaning and causality we are part of.
The Sacred Game is:
Voluntary – no one is forced into it, but participation is unavoidable; you are already playing by living.
Structured – there are real consequences for incoherence, and real opportunities for growth through alignment.
Recursive – each action conditions future actions, each insight recontextualises the path forward.
Civic – it includes not just personal development but contribution to shared systems of value, culture, and practice.
Initiatory – the transition from unconscious participation to conscious participation is what we call initiation.
My work is to teach, facilitate, and steward this process. This includes helping individuals:
Understand the structure of the Game they are already in,
Upgrade their capacity for coherent participation through Autoeia, and
Step into the responsibilities of the Future Human—actualised, integrated, and aligned.
This is not anything so banal as a course or a prescriptive belief system. It is better understood as a developmental framework rooted in structural reality, matured through practice, and directed toward long-term benefit, for the individual, for culture, and for the ongoing viability of Life itself.
Like any sacred space, there is a discernment and selection process required.
If you understand this, then you know something already.
Let’s Play The Game!
The A Better Way project and community exist to raise awareness of what is necessary and possible, and to create and hold space for the pursuit and practice of these philosophies and practices, in service of a better human legacy. We need all the help and participation we can get. Please regard this as your invitation to see how you can get involved and be of service to this noble, necessary and desperately overdue human cause.