The cure to all problems is the curiosity to find the answer! And asking questions is an expression of curiosity and is the crucial essence of the reasoning process!
It is because of your absolute need to know the truth, because your life depends on it that you are programmed at birth to be curious. Your natural curiosity, your desire to know, is your innate predisposition to set about the process of questioning ideas and methods and using your rational faculty to find answers.
Babies and young children all display it, until such time as it is knocked out of them. Over-controlling parents limiting the extent of their child’s exploration in the name of protecting them from danger or by answering “Because I said so” to the child questions. Modern schooling continues the conditioning (or programming) of young minds away from asking questions and being curious by the method of presenting information already assumed as true and the concept of the one right answer, the one on the curriculum. This is reinforced with the discouragement of any inclination to question it.
The practice of asking and answering questions is the expression and manifestation of curiosity. and it is as crucial to truth-seeking as breathing is to your continued existence. living. For the truth seeker or detective, the asking and answering of questions must become automatic, it must be a reflex action. The habit of asking and answering questions is like the motor that drives enquiry and the reasoning process forward into new territory.
Questioning as a thinking technique
Questioning is not something specifically to aim at others. The truth seeker or competent detective asks him or herself questions all the time. You can ask yourself questions in your mind, or out loud. In the same way that vocalising your thoughts out loud is helpful because it exposes your reasoning to logical scrutiny, it does the same for the questioning process.
More efficient than just musing or pondering over an issue in the hope that some insight will spring to mind. Asking yourself specific questions is an efficient way of pulling up knowledge you already have stored away in your subconscious. if you know the answer it comes to mind. If you don’t know the answer then you know what you need to find out next.
In this way, your line of questioning determines accurately what you do know and what you don’t. It then helps gather all the pieces of the puzzle you need in order to understand an issue. As you manage your line of questioning it steers you to find out what you need to learn and merge it with what you already know.
Questions to self help you set your purpose and plan the course of your enquiry. It is the means of actively steering your investigation where you want or need it to go. They are the means of placing your attention selectively on one subject or another.
Although it takes practice to know precisely what questions to ask, the best place to start is with the question ‘why?’ Those simple questions such as ‘why? ‘and ‘how?’ aim you directly towards any potential logical argument. This gets you appealing to reason from the outset, and remember, reason is your only guide to knowledge.
Why is that true? What causes this? Why do you believe this? What is the reason for that?
Questioning must be done continuously at every step of every enquiry. It is the means by which you move through each specific different thinking technique as well as checking to see if you are adhering to the general principles of effective thinking.
Each time you ask a question it’s like opening up a new box and finding yet more boxes inside each box you open. You have to keep on digging until you get to the bottom of the issue at hand.
Questions help you manage your investigation
They are the means by which you …check the full context.
What other issues are related to this? Who is saying this? What else do they stand for? What is their record on telling the truth? What else has a bearing on this Who has an interest in me believing this or doing that?
They are the means by which you …un-pack the issues.
How many related issues are involved here, and what are they? If someone is telling you that you should be vegan, is it due to animal cruelty motives or optimal human nutrition? If someone is telling you CO2 is a problem are they confusing it with pollution?
They are the means by which you …identify and check all assumptions.
What is being assumed by that claim or assertion? All of the statistics on which the alleged pandemic is based assume an accurate and meaningful RT-PCR test! But the investigator can quickly satisfy himself from the facts that this assumption is unwarranted.
They are the means by which you …identify the fundamentals.
What is the fundamental issue here? What is a primary causal factor and what is a secondary issue or result? Am I respecting cause and effect? What is a root cause and what is a downstream effect?
Of course, the fundamental issue at the base of any claim of a pandemic is the un-proven assumption of contagion. This assumption is so full of contradictions that any competent detective would reject it as a hypothesis immediately.
They are the means by which you …spot implications.
Again, the principle of cause and effect will help you answer questions such as, where will this lead? If that happens what will follow? Are there any published agendas that benefit from this claim? Cui Bono? Who has an interest in this outcome?
They are the means by which you …identify principles to explain seemingly disconnected issues.
Have I seen an example of this before? Where else does something like this happen? Is there a pattern here? What principle explains all these individual examples of something.
And they are the means by which you …check your own adherence to thinking principles.
Am I being objective? Am I seeing the bigger picture? Am I gathering all the evidence BEFORE I attempt to explain what I see? Is my reasoning sound? Am I thinking longterm? Do I welcome challenges to my hypothesis? Am I prepared to be wrong?
They are the means by which you …evaluate certainty.
How certain can I be that this is true? What is the proof that backs up that claim? Why am I convinced this is true? What persuades me? How much evidence is there for this claim? Remember that certainty is a function of how much evidence there is in support of a claim or idea.
Are there any awkward questions?
From the perspective of the detective and truth-seeker, there are no such things as awkward questions. A question can only be awkward to those disinclined to answer – either through evasion, laziness, or some desire to conceal the truth or let it remain hidden.
Are there any pointless questions?
Yes, there are. Don’t question everything! The direction of your questioning should always be towards the relevant. Evaluate priorities, make a judgment of what is important – your time is precious. So avoid asking ultimately pointless questions, or questions that should rightly be low on your list of priorities.
The ultimate pointless questions are things like “Why are we here? How did we get here?”
These are dead-end questions that lead you nowhere. You could spend a lifetime attempting to answer them while not addressing issues that are pressingly and practically important to you? What is going on in my world? How can I make sense of it? Can I trust the government? What is really important in my life? Zoom out and clock the bigger picture to help keep it relevant!
Questioning as a predisposition to check long-held convictions
No idea that you hold as true should be exempt from questioning. Not one premise in your mind should remain exempt from scrutiny and checking against the facts of reality. In childhood and throughout our formative years, indeed at any age, we arrive at many unwarranted generalisations and false conclusions through error or misinformation or lack of knowledge. The rational and fully functional thinking individual should ALWAYS be prepared to question any conclusion, generalisation, theory, belief or premise. To NOT do so, or to refuse to do so, is to condemn one’s self to non-growth, non-learning, non-education, non-truth. And to remain with a mind that is set in stone, forever to cling to the first conclusion it reaches.
The habit of questioning should therefore be written into your mental operating system as a predisposition to continuously revisit long-held beliefs and to check the assumptions beneath them in the light of fresh information.
Because propaganda and deception are part of the territory in our current cultural context this also necessitates a process of continuous questioning towards all convictions that we have ever formed. If you are serious about discerning truth you should be rightly suspicious of many of the fundamental conclusions that you have been raised with Your parents had various ideas drummed into them and they would most likely have simply passed them on to you. And the cultural environment in which you grew up was awash with marketing campaigns and propaganda that was obscuring and diluting truth with falseness and disinformation.
Seeing a predictable pattern
As you build your contextual knowledge by investigating one issue after another you will begin to spot the pattern of which sources are reliable and which are not. You will inevitably notice that some sources consistently promote information that is contrary to the facts of reality as true. It soon becomes apparent who you can and cannot trust. You will develop an appropriate suspicion towards the official narrative and any information it puts out and any course of action it advocates.
If it were due to error there would not be the remarkable consistency of things being so wrong. But on all important issues in the mainstream, all those that pertain to health and political freedom, all those that pertain to the control and manipulation of populations, are consistently untrue. Maybe not 100% but sufficient for the pattern to be seen. When this is combined with contextual knowledge of various agendas, of who is calling for what and why, the picture becomes even clearer.
This should rightly steer the rational person to question a series of myths that are culturally embedded into the minds of everyone as a result of being endlessly promoted by the mainstream narrative. The kind of things that everyone just knows. Namely…
- … that fat makes you fat
- … that weight gain is simply a matter of overeating
- … that fluoridation of water is done to help our dental health
- … that greed is responsible for so many human problems
- … that feelings are a guide to knowledge
- … that self-sacrifice is a noble ideal
- … that government is a necessary institution for human civilisation
The rewards are Priceless
It takes effort to drive this inquiry process. You must bother to initiate it, but once your curiosity is fired it can be exciting to uncover answers. You begin to build a bigger picture and see how each issue relates to other issues. It feels good to expand your contextual knowledge, this helps you understand other related issues as well.
Questioning issues, conclusions and assumptions is a technique that is in pursuit of the most fundamental life-serving cause. It serves your accumulation of knowledge. Because it is so pro-life it feels good! And like any other activity, the better you get at it the more pleasure you derive from it. You will eventually get on an unstoppable upward spiral with success building on success. It’s fun and it is rewarding. Remember that truth is the most valuable commodity that you will ever deal with! All of the techniques that I espouse on this website and in my book “The Truth Seekers Guide” add immense meaning to your life. The emotional rewards are enormous and beyond price.
Anxiety is a natural response to a lack of knowledge. It is a normal reaction to not knowing what to do or how to act in a given context. Knowledge is the antidote for anxiety. Knowledge is the correct identification of some aspect(s) of reality in conceptual form. Truth is key to your success and your happiness. Thinking skills are the means to achieve everything you have ever valued.
Summary:
The asking and answering of questions is a specific technique, but one that must be used continuously. It must be habituated and become automatic. Your truth-seeking process depends on it because it is like the motor that drives the process forward.
It’s as crucial as walking or breathing so you must make it just as automatic – a reflex action.
It is the essence of the reasoning process! Be curious. Be rightly suspicious.
I hope this helps you in your quest to better understand your world.
Nigel Howitt, treehouse Farm,
November 2nd 2020.
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