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What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.

The first is the matter of judging evidence–well, the first thing really is, before you begin you must not know the answer. So you begin by being uncertain as to what the answer is. This is very, very important, so important that I would like to delay that aspect, and talk about that still further along in my speech. The question of doubt and uncertainty is what is necessary to begin; for if you already know the answer there is no need to gather any evidence about it.

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It is not sufficient to know the right answers. One must also know the questions that produced them. Indeed, one must also know what a question is, for not every sentence that ends with a rising intonation or begins with an interrogative is necessarily a question. There are sentences that look like questions but cannot generate any meaningful answers, and, as Francis Bacon said, if they linger in our minds, they become obstructions to clear thinking.

What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as a certain knowledge must precede every action. The thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wishes me to do: the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die. ... I certainly do not deny that I still recognize an imperative of knowledge and that through it one can work upon men, but it must be taken up into my life, and that is what I now recognize as the most important thing.

What is necessary is not to find out the answer to the question, but to understand that the question which you are asking, posing to yourself, and putting to somebody else, is born out of the answer you already have, which is the knowledge. So, the question and answer format, if we indulge in it for long, becomes a meaningless ritual. ... If you are really interested in finding reality, what has to dawn on you is that your very questioning mechanism is born out of the answers that you already have. Otherwise there can't be any question.

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