The question of learning, circulation and production of knowledge has recently attracted scholarly attention in Ottoman history. For the formative period of the empire's intellectual institutions, the focus has been in finding the core texts that constituted the learning tools of scholars and intellectuals. The appearance of narratives about learning in the Ottoman world during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, points out to learning dynamics that developed out of a tension between the social and the individual. In this paper, I focus on Lami'i Chelebi's autobiographical introduction to his epistolary. Lami'i Chelebi was a renowned Ottoman stylist as well as a prolific and successful poet in sixteenth century Anatolia. Furthermore, his Turkish translations of Persian and Arabic religious works were widely demanded in the madrasahs of Bursa and Istanbul, together with his commentaries on the original pieces. In the introduction to his collection of letters (munsheat), Lami'i Chelebi's defends prose as a form of religious knowledge, and in so doing describes his education as a process of unlearning in order to attain truthful knowledge. I argue that in Lami'i Chelebi 's autobiographical literary narrative, the author places self-discovery at the center of the act of true learning, emphasizing the need to diverge from traditional learning institutions and focus on the truth that lies within the self. Lami'i Chelebi's discussion, phrased as a testimony of his own trajectory as scholar, poet, and believer, presents religious truth as the result of dialectic relations between the self, the community, and God. Finally, by using Lami'i Chelebi's introduction as an example, I show how an approach to literary narratives with a focus on the arguments presented by the authors instead of an attempt to determine "accurate" biographical information will allows us to problematize Ottoman understandings of the path for mystical knowledge, traditional education in the madrasah system, and the role of poetry and literature in the making of religious knowledge in the early modern Ottoman Empire.