# What Questions To Ask

Most of the time, by asking ourselves the right questions, we unravel the 
underlying motives of why we ask ourselves the wrong questions. This is an 
important process because these questions plant the seed for many beliefs 
that will define how we act and look at the world. Combine this with our 
tendency to easily get emotionally invested in our beliefs and we can avoid 
a lot of dissonance by making sure we ask ourselves the right questions. 
When we're young, we don't have the intellectual capacity to challenge our 
conditioning. But as we grow up we can course-correct a lot of the flaws by 
asking the right questions. Sometimes that's all it takes, answers aren't 
even needed.

Here is a personal example of a question that has been responsible for 
quite some inner conflict when I was younger: Why care about the world if 
every action is inherently selfish? With all my logic, I couldn't find a 
satisfying answer up until a decade ago when I learned about the brain and 
understood that you have to define the concept of 'self' before talking 
about selfishness. And as already explained in the neuroscience chapters, 
everything we experience takes place in our consciousness and the 'self' 
encompasses more than just our flawed concepts of identity. While this 
entire train of thought started with a question that could have potentially 
led to the justification of egotistical behaviour, it should have started 
with me asking "What is the self?".

This also relates to many of the existential questions we have such as 
whether there is life after death. An even more important question to ask 
first is: What is time? Does time even exist? Because if the flow of time 
would just be an illusion of consciousness, then there is little use to 
wonder about the afterlife. For all we know, everything might be taking 
place simultaneously in a timeless now and time is merely a byproduct of 
perception.

Certain questions can also paralyze you as you become fixated on trying to 
solve them, such as "What do I do with my life?". This is a difficult 
question since it makes you look at your entire life with the limited 
information you have right now. It is very hard to predict the future and 
most of the time in life, one thing leads to another. The current moment 
can be very simple and being aware of that can be very relieving. A more 
efficient way to deal with these types of questions is to make the best out 
of the information you have now, since it makes you more capable of 
adapting to all the unknowns being thrown at you.