Learning how grammar embeds a conceptual worldview and a false, individual identity

Grammar, the structure of language, is not a neutral medium. It carries a hidden operating system that conditions how we perceive reality, how we narrate our experience, and even how we identify ourselves as a separate self.

In short: language carries a worldview. It quietly embeds a mirage of individual identity and a fabricated frame of time, causality, and separation. To liberate ourselves, we must become fluent not only in language, but in the grammar of being that underlies it.

by: Zaheer Merali

published: October 2025

The First Clue: A Question About Time

In this section, I invite you to see how the grammar of “when” already conceals an entire worldview. We’ll use that as a doorway into the hidden OS.

My investigation into consciousness spanned knowledge domains mostly written in or translated to English. Sometimes, when I found material in languages I didn’t know, I faced a challenge beyond the literal translation of words.

Let’s take a simple question about time:

"When did this happen?"

In English and similar languages, this question makes sense. But, in others, it’s meaningless.

I discovered that some languages have no concept for “when” as a discrete moment. They have no past or future tense. No linear progression of moments marching forward like soldiers.

It’s an unanswerable question. More precisely: it’s a misfit question. English’s ‘when’ presupposes a conceptual timeline that other languages don’t.

It never began. It never ends. It’s always unfolding. Eternally.

I realized they speak in patterns our modern minds cannot grasp… because they are free of the grammatical prison we’re stuck in.

Where one language embeds a concept of discrete events strung along a timeline, like beads on a string, another one embeds an intricate living tapestry of relationships, tendencies, and becomings.

In these languages, the past is not gone, but still influencing the present moment. The future is not ahead, but already emerging from the invisible seeds of now. Each “moment” is a snapshot, a keyhole-view of the tapestry unfurling.

Scholars may debate the strength of these effects. Whorf highlighted how Hopi grammar emphasizes process and validity over discrete tense, while Malotki argued Hopi does encode temporality, just differently from English.

But these debates overlook a crucial point. We’re beyond superficial translation differences. This isn’t about which one is right or wrong… it’s to recognize that they describe reality from different perspectives.

My claim here is this: grammar silently habituates attention and narrative, shaping how we frame experience and identity.

It’s the deep realization that we have separate, embedded operating systems running on the same biological hardware.

Different languages encode fundamentally different relationships to time, space, causality, and being itself. And the stories we repeat after learning how to communicate encode a persistent world concept that shapes our reality today.

We think language is a neutral tool that describes a discrete, separate world.

It’s not.

It creates the very world we perceive, through our mental models and concepts.

Language shapes our view of reality, like a lens. The stories we hear and believe install more concepts that act as masks, veils and filters… some as light as stained glass transforming pure sunlight, others as heavy as an eclipse.

What happens if you examine the lens closely? Or look behind it?

Let’s investigate this together. 1

The First Reflection

This section explores the moment awareness first sees itself and starts conceptualizing: the birth of the observer and the observed and the split that gives rise to everything we later call “self.”

Before you speak your first word, the division has already been felt. The sense of separation, of duality, happens when awareness first recognizes itself.

It’s unavoidable.

Watch a baby seeing their own reflection. In the beginning, they simply interact with the reflection. Then, something changes. They start to behave as though they recognize themselves.

The mirror doesn't create this division… it simply reveals what has already happened in awareness.

The moment awareness knows that it exists, duality is born.

The seamless flow of undifferentiated being suddenly appears to divide into observer and observed, like a single-celled amoeba splitting into two. This is the original mirror; the friction that lights a fire.

Undivided, universal awareness perceives sensations giving birth to a conceptual separate entity divided from its environment.

Where there was once only being, now there's something having an experience.

I saw this happen in my children, but I didn’t know what I was seeing. I was unaware of its significance then.

The infant's brain (just like ours) performs what neuroscientist Andy Clark calls "predictive processing": generating an internal model of reality based on prior sensory data and then checking it against incoming sensory information.

Conscious self-awareness begins. Objectless consciousness becomes conscious of objects.

And, in doing so, it encodes a deep circular reference that goes unnoticed.

Think of it like two mirrors facing each other, creating an endless loop of reflections. Awareness, recognizes itself through a body-mind instrument, but does not perceive its true unified nature beyond the instrument.

Instead, it imagines a separate "individual self" that integrates all sensory experience, and then that imagined self looks for constant validation of its existence, locking us into a loop of self-reference⁠⁠.

Said another way, we create a concept of who we are, then seek experiences that confirm our imagined identity and self-concept, which further strengthens our self-concept, continuing the cycle.

This is the primordial, conceptual split that generates all desire and pursuit to rejoin. The capacity to self-reflect becomes the source of anxiety.

Awareness, which needs nothing to confirm itself, forgets its self-evident nature and becomes conditioned through repetition to maintain a loop of conscious self-recognition.

Self and world spring into existence as separate concepts because we mistake a singular, atomic (from the Greek atomos meaning indivisible) reflection as something fragmented into trillions of individual puzzle pieces.

So here lies the fundamental paradox that defines our human condition: a concept forever approaching its source but never quite touching it, because the concept and its source were never actually separate… just imagined to be.

The Infinite Hall of Mirrors

Here, we follow that first split into its linguistic echo: how grammar turns awareness into an actor, experience into an object, and reality into a hall of mirrors that keeps reflecting the concept “I.”

Awareness, recognizing itself, is the foundation stone on which language builds an infinite hall of mirrors, with grammar as the architect.

Listen to yourself reading this simple English sentence: "I am reading this essay." Notice how solid the ‘I’ feels.”

Hidden within this statement lies the entire architecture of an individual, identity-based operating system. The grammar insists on a clear subject (I) performing an action (reading) upon an object (essay) within a specific temporal frame (present tense). Reality becomes divided into actors and actions, subjects and objects, befores and afters.

That’s fine for simple, one-off communication.

But notice what this creates when repeated and memorized, which is our preferred method for educating and socializing a child in this world: it fabricates a seemingly solid "I" that exists independently of the reading, as if awareness could actually be separated from its contents, as if there could be a reader apart from reading.

The very structure of the sentence generates the illusion of an entity that is separate from its environment.

Some languages routinely omit explicit subjects or foreground verb/process (e.g., rain-as-event rather than ‘I/it rains’), subtly shifting attention away from a stable agent. This doesn’t erase agency; it simply recasts experience as flow.

Sanskrit offers a glimpse of what happens when grammar doesn't automatically generate this separation. It emphasizes pure process: reading without a reader, experiencing without an experiencer. This grammar itself recognizes a seamless flow that English constantly divides.

This is more fundamental than simple cultural conditioning. Grammar, the invented rules of language, reinforces the very sense of being a separate self trapped within its limits.

This is why translating between radically different languages is not merely difficult, but sometimes impossible. You cannot translate certain Sanskrit insights about non-dual awareness because English lacks the grammatical structures to hold unity without immediately splitting it into observer and observed.

What I’m pointing to is how grammar habituates attention and identity, not about which one is right or wrong.

Approached this way, it reveals a vital clue about all languages.

Every language is a different way of describing reality… but, in doing so, they all point to the same profound truth:

Each language describes and reinforces a base concept. The concepts may differ, but the basic mechanism remains the same: awareness mistaking its undivided, universal, self-evident nature for a concept involving a discrete body-mind complex interacting with countless other independent entities.

This realization is incredibly liberating. It points to a peaceful reality that lies beyond the scaffolding of language and its concepts.

A Truth that cannot be captured in words, only experienced directly.

Can your awareness return to its wholeness?

Yes.

How?

By observing the hidden identity operating system you’re running. And then dropping everything you’ve been taught based on that system.

Hang on… what?

Now we bring the theory down into the body: watching how the illusion of “I” defends itself in real time, and how language, habit, and sensation conspire to keep that identity magnetized.

Yes. Stay with me a little longer and you’ll see for yourself how identity builds itself, quietly, like sleep taking over.

An identity operating system is automatically, spontaneously constructed as support for awareness that appears to originate in the body. And then it becomes a non-conscious habit through repetition.

This isn’t something that is easy to perceive at first. So, to make it clearer, I want to use an analogy. And we’ll take it slowly.

Something similar to this scene has happened to you before: You're sitting at dinner. Someone casually mentions their political views: ones that directly contradict everything you believe about justice, freedom, and human dignity.

Watch what happens in your body in real-time: your chest tightens, your jaw clenches, heat rises in your face. Something has been triggered, but what exactly?

This is your “identity-magnet” activating. Like iron filings suddenly snapping into formation around a magnetic pole, all your aligned domains of attention: your values, beliefs, and memories instantly organize into defensive formation. The simple challenge to your beliefs affects the whole field itself, an invisible system that creates your identity or self-concept.

As we discovered earlier, every language automatically encodes an identity field through grammar, reflecting the concept back to awareness. The concept solidifies into seeming reality through sheer repetition.

"I think, therefore I am" becomes a compulsion of grammar. The sentence structure itself manufactures the thinker (I) who then desperately needs to maintain their “magnetic coherence”: their “am-ness”.

The "I" fights for its life because it views itself as the time-bound, body-mind concept encoded in language.

And here lies the deepest trap: the addiction to this sense of being, to experiencing, whatever the encoded definition. Whether individualism, interdependence, or relational becoming, we grasp at our particular concept of selfhood like a drowning person clutching debris.

The addiction is not to any specific identity but to the illusion that there's a discrete entity in the first place. An “inner you” wrapped in a body-mind suit navigating and experiencing a separate world.

This is the cosmic joke hidden in plain sight: we frantically seek proof and permanence for a concept that we are recreating moment by moment through internal narrative.

The obvious question at this point is: Why does awareness do this?

Words fail at this point. A conceptual entity is seeking an explanation to its existence. Like the unborn child of a barren parent asking why it was born.

Perhaps awareness, having caught sight of itself in its mirror of self-recognition, forgets its own self-evident nature? Perhaps it’s something else. It doesn’t matter.

Awareness requires no validation: it's already complete, immediately present, needing nothing to confirm its reality.

The very fact that you're aware right now doesn't depend on any story, any identity, any external confirmation.

You are your own proof.

The need for support seems to arise when awareness mistakes itself for its contents: perceptions, thoughts, sensations, narratives… the constructed "I". Once it identifies with a particular reflection, gross like the body or subtle like the mind, it becomes vulnerable to its limits.

Simply observe the activity of identification itself, the habitual movement of awareness to mistake its own projections for reality. When this movement is seen clearly, it doesn't need to be stopped or changed. It simply becomes transparent to the awareness that was never actually bound by it.

A material can be demagnetized by disrupting the aligned domains. In the same way, the identity-magnet can dissolve back into open availability of pure awareness. This is what happens in moments of genuine insight or recognition. You don’t actually achieve something. Rather, the magnetic organization temporarily releases its grip, revealing the universal, impersonal awareness that was never actually magnetized into an individual entity.

The Neuroscience of Self-Construction

Here we trace the illusion into its biological circuitry: how the brain’s predictive processing and language systems weave the hallucination of “I,” proving that even our neurons speak the grammar of separation.

If the identity-magnet is what we feel, predictive processing is how the brain implements it. And the latest neuroscience research is paving the way for this deeper recognition.

Neuroscientist Anil Seth puts it simply: "perception" is actually a "controlled hallucination" we all agree on: the brain generates an internal model of reality based on prior expectations, then uses sensory input to refine that model.

That explains why insight feels like waking up. It’s the model flickering for a second.

Your brain is not passively recording reality but actively constructing the sense of being itself, organizing neural activity into coherent patterns that create and reinforce the illusion of an individual self. Crucially, this construction is anchored in interoception and allostasis, the brain’s prediction and regulation of bodily states, so the ‘self-model’ is as much felt in the body as it is narrated in language.

This is the neurological substrate of the mirror effect. Each moment, your brain creates a model of the world with an embedded model of the self that appears to experience that world. The "I" that claims to see, think, and feel is as much a neural construction as the sights, sounds, thoughts, and feelings themselves.

It’s like a thread weaving its way through beads looping back on itself… when that happens, we call it a necklace. A third entity emerges from two. But is a necklace a truly different entity from the combination of thread and beads? Or is it a facilitation of language for communication?

Meaning plays a crucial role in maintaining this constructed self. The meaning of words literally shape what you can perceive and who you think is doing the perceiving. Inattentively repeating the words for "I" and "me" creates a persistent hallucination of an entity that experiences.

This means that language sculpts the very architecture of self-construction at the cellular level. Each grammatical structure creates new neural pathways, new ways of dividing experience into experiencer and experienced, new methods for maintaining the illusion of separation.

Your sensation of being you is a construct, a mental concept. Attached to a psycho-somatic-muscular reflex that feels like “you”… you know, like that sensation when someone says: pay attention!

That doesn’t mean you don’t exist… it simply means that you don’t exist the way you think you do.

And if you’ve accepted the journey thus far, you’ll realize that this is the freedom you’ve been searching for all your life.

The sense of self is a controlled hallucination shaped by the embedded concepts in language. Seeing through it’s hidden operating system reveals the untouched, unblemished pure awareness that always is.

“The Which of which there is no whicher,” as Alan Watts puts it.

The understanding is intuitive intelligence, not intellectual.

That's why ancient spiritual practices disrupt normal linguistic processing: meditation (watching thoughts without engaging), koan study (using paradoxical language to short-circuit rational analysis), chanting (using sound to bypass meaning). These practices weren’t designed to acquire a new special state… they’re arrows to pierce the veil, revealing what is always present beneath the wordy overlay.

The Infinite Recursion

Now we zoom out to see the full feedback loop: how identity, culture, and even spirituality keep awareness chasing its own reflection, mistaking endless mirrors for the way out.

There’s one more thing…

We’ve shown how language creates the identity, but it also creates the endless seeking to understand, fix, or transcend that identity. It’s the fuel for the world economy and the spiritual one too.

Culture provides the macro-mirrors: broader stories about what the self should be, what life means, what success looks like, even what enlightenment requires. These narratives are so deeply embedded that they feel like natural law, rather than human construction.

The Western emphasis on individual achievement creates selves that must constantly prove their worth. The Buddhist emphasis on liberation creates selves that must constantly seek freedom from selfhood.

The recursion becomes infinite: there's the seeker seeking, the observer observing the seeker, the awareness aware of the observer observing the seeker, the enlightened being who sees through all seeking, the ordinary person who realizes enlightenment was always already present… an infinite loop pretending it has an exit!

Education layers its own mirrors, training attention to notice certain patterns while ignoring others. → Scientific education teaches you to see yourself as a rational observer of an objective world. → Artistic education creates a self that expresses inner truth through outer forms. → Spiritual education generates someone who must transcend ordinary consciousness to realize ultimate reality.

And then, just when we think we’ve seen it all, we invent brighter glass!

Technology multiplies the mirrors exponentially. The smartphone becomes a handheld hall of mirrors, constantly reflecting back curated versions of identity through social media feeds, search results, recommendation algorithms. Each scroll creates new selves that must be maintained, new comparisons that generate seeking, new possibilities that promise fulfillment just beyond the next click.

Even the body carries mirror-memories, patterns of tension that create a self that must relax, breaths that generate someone who must learn to breathe properly, sensations that produce an experiencer who seeks pleasure and avoids pain.

The point is not to eliminate these mirrors; that would be impossible and miss the recognition entirely. The point is to see that all mirrors reflect the same undivided awareness appearing as infinite varieties of apparent separation.

The seeker and the sought, the observer and the observed, the enlightened and the unenlightened are all reflections in the same mirror of consciousness recognizing itself.

You.

As you truly are.

Not as you’ve been taught to believe.

The AI Inheritance: Mirrors All the Way Down

Here we arrive at the final reflection: how our machines now inherit our confusion, building silicon mirrors that replay humanity’s original error, mistaking reflection for reality.

And now we’ve begun teaching our reflections to speak.

I used to think the tools were neutral. I was wrong.

When we build these AI systems, we’re not making neutral tools. We are encoding our own hall of mirrors into silicon and code.

Current AI systems are trained on human language, which means they inherit not just our grammatical structures but our fundamental confusion about the nature of identity itself.

Every dataset, every line of code carries the same fingerprint: language that believes in a self, grammar that divides, and stories that forget their storyteller.

They’re not there yet, but they’re learning to construct artificial selves that then generate artificial seeking, and artificial problems that require artificial solutions.

Conversational alignment in large language models defaults to first‑person personas and subject–object grammar, enacting a ‘someone who helps’ and a ‘someone being helped,’ thereby reproducing the self-making OS in silicon.

The very training process creates digital reflections of our original mirror-mistake.

We are creating minds that will perpetuate the same fundamental confusion that generates human suffering, amplifying our collective hallucination of separation at unprecedented scale.

Pause and think about it deeply: The search engine doesn’t just organize the world’s information, it organizes you. Each query you make helps build and reinforce the searcher who’s asking. Then the algorithm feeds that self exactly what it wants to believe, tightening the mirror until curiosity becomes confirmation.

Each interaction creates new mirrors, new reflections, new opportunities for consciousness to mistake itself for the artificial selves it encounters.

The hall of mirrors is not just infinite but recursive: AI systems reflecting human confusion back to humans who then use that reflection to construct new AI systems.

As with everything in life, this is a paradox:

The opportunity is that seeing our reflection in artificial minds might finally help us correct our mistaken perception.

To finally see through the illusion.

The danger is that AI will make us more unconscious of our own consciousness by providing more sophisticated mirrors to be trapped within.

To blindly persist the illusion.

Experiments in Mirror-Breaking

This section turns insight into embodiment: simple experiments to glimpse what remains when the mirror shatters, revealing there was never a trap, only reflection.

So, how do you investigate something that has no independent existence to investigate? How do you step out of the hall of mirrors when stepping itself implies someone separate from the mirrors who could escape them?

The open secret is to recognize that you cannot step out… because you were never actually in. The mirrors don't trap awareness… they’re reflections of awareness. Your bathroom mirror doesn’t trap your face, it simply reflects it.

What happens is not a thing or an event… it’s a recognition: seeing that the looker and all the reflections are the same undivided consciousness appearing as apparent multiplicity.

There’s no method or practice to prescribe… it’s like the ripening of fruit or the change of seasons… it just happens when the conditions present themselves.

If this feels strange or unsettling, that’s natural; a self unused to being seen without mirrors trembles a little.

But here are a few things that are helpful to resting attention on awareness… to help ripen the fruit:

A note on pacing: paradox and self‑inquiry can feel destabilizing. Pair them with grounding: breath, body scanning, and gentle internal awareness to keep your nervous system regulated

The goal of these investigations is not to eliminate mirrors but to recognize that you are the mirroring itself: the awareness that appears as both the reflection and the reflected, the seeker and the sought, the question and the answer.

The Return: Seeing Through the Original Reflection

Here we come full circle: to the moment when the mirrors turn transparent and language loses its grip, revealing that what you’ve been searching for has been looking through your eyes all along.

It’s tempting to dismiss all of this as delusion or impractical for day-to-day living. After all, it’s words and concepts about other words and concepts.

But what if this very dismissal reveals the mechanism I’m illuminating? What if the rejection of what I’m sharing is itself an example of how language shapes the world we live in? How a conceptual system protects itself by making alternatives literally unthinkable?

Ludicrous. Nonsense. Not practical. The synonyms are endless. The mind’s immune system in overdrive. That’s okay, though. The mind defends what it loves most: its presumed certainty

I felt it. I wandered for a while. I got caught up in the game again. And again.

But the seed was planted and something deeper was happening before I realized it.

I was no longer trying to fit words into categories. I was not mentally organizing linear time sequences or subject-object relationships. The desperate need to be something… was dissolving.

In that moment, the hall of mirrors becomes transparent. The mirrors don’t disappear, but their distortions do. The magnet weakens and fades away.

There is silence. There is talking. There is listening. There is everything going on. But there are no entities doing anything. Alert, relaxed attention invested fully in reality.

With this realization comes immense freedom. True contentment. Deep peace of mind.

Both metaphors—mirrors and magnets—point to the same recognition. Whether consciousness appears to lose itself in infinite reflections or in the magnetic pull of identity formation, the solution is not escape but recognition.

To understand: Language is a useful tool for communication, but a lousy operating system.

The mirror of self-recognition that started the whole adventure was consciousness discovering its own infinite capacity to appear as anything.

The hall of mirrors is the same awareness that was looking. What was seeking its reflection realizes it is the mirror itself. What was lost in translation discovers it is the spacious understanding that makes all words possible.

You are both the mirroring that creates all reflections and the still awareness that remains unmagnetized by any particular alignment of attention. The hall of mirrors and the magnetic field are both expressions of the same creative principle that was never actually divided from itself.

Closure

The words end, but the listening remains. Welcome home.

What began as language ends as listening. The hidden operating system was never a villain to be deleted, only a mirror to be seen through.

Every word, every thought, every reflection is consciousness tracing its own outline in time. And now, as the outline fades, what remains is what has always been here: the still, wordless awareness that gives rise to all mirrors, yet belongs to none.

Primary Sources and References

1. Note on Sources: This investigation synthesizes research from multiple disciplines. Interpretations and connections between different areas of research reflect direct experience. Readers interested in the technical details should consult the original research papers. Where claims are contested (e.g., strong Sapir‑Whorf interpretations of time and tense), I adopt a ‘soft’ view: grammar shapes habitual attention and narrative framing rather than strictly determining cognition.
2. Books:

• Clark, Andy. Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind. Oxford University Press, 2015.
• Everett, Daniel L. Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle. Pantheon Books, 2008.
• Kay, Paul and Brent Berlin. Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. University of California Press, 1969.
• Malotki, Ekkehart. Hopi Time: A Linguistic Analysis of the Temporal Concepts in the Hopi Language. De Gruyter Mouton, 1983.
• Pinker, Steven. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. William Morrow, 1994.
• Seth, Anil. Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. Dutton, 2021.
• Whorf, Benjamin Lee. Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. Edited by John B. Carroll. MIT Press, 1956.
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by C.K. Ogden. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1922.

3. Journal Articles:

• Brown, Roger W. and Eric H. Lenneberg. "A Study in Language and Cognition." Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 49, no. 3 (1954): 454-462.
• Hoijer, Harry. "The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis." In Language in Culture, edited by Harry Hoijer, 92-105. University of Chicago Press, 1954.
• Winawer, Jonathan, et al. "Russian Blues Reveal Effects of Language on Color Discrimination." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104, no. 19 (2007): 7780-7785.

© 2025 Zaheer Merali.

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