Understanding is not a matter of time. If you set out to understand each influence, you will be dead by the time you understand all of them. But if one fully understands one influence, you smash through all influences. But to understand one influence – whether it is good or bad, noble or ignoble, is irrelevant – to understand one influence you have to go into it thoroughly, completely. To go into it completely, there must be no fear. To go into this whole question of authority is very dangerous. Not outward authority – we’re not discussing that – but the mind that follows, the mind that seeks patterns, the mind that wants beliefs, that has committed itself to certain activity – to be free of all that is to invite danger because nobody wants to live in uncertainty. It is only the uncertain mind that is a young mind, not the certain mind which is a dead mind.