Rav Israel Salanter's and the idea learning books on Ethics.

 Rav Israel Salanter's and Musar [learning books on Ethics]. Learning the books of Musar tends to give a different impression of what Torah is about than what one would assume. Without Musar the tendency is to imagine Torah being about all kinds of things that it really is not. Even though that can exist even inside of Litvak yeshivas where Musar is learned, still the tendency is a lot less.

That is to say that Musar more or less defines the major emphasis of Torah as being about Love and Fear of God and good character traits. And it goes at length into defining what is good character. Since that is not at all obvious not easily apparent to pure reason, there is a need for Musar.

Why is it that Musar [books on ethics written during the middle ages] does a better job of this than later books is not clear, still the fact is that later books that are claiming to show what Torah is about are usually just examples of religious fanaticism and insanity, --the result of schizoid personalities. 

[Musar  refers to a small set of books written during the Middle Ages, but also can include the books of the disciples of Rav Israel Salanter or the Gra.] 

[The idea of Musar is predicated on the more general idea of Litvak Yeshivas that the Rishonim [medieval thinkers] define what Torah is all about.]

Hegel has an idea he adapted from Goethe that the universe is one organic whole like a plant. Not just that each part is possible to figure out, but that all parts are part of one system. There can not be any part of truth that contradicts the other. This is similar to the method of Socrates who was able to find self contradictions in the opinions of others. He was thinking that once one gets to truth, contradictions will not be there. 

Particles do not travel through what we would normally consider to be space and time

 Particles do not travel through what we would normally consider to be space and time. They can not have that kind of trajectory since then at any specific place on that trajectory they would have  a definite position and a definite momentum. Rather they travel through Hilbert space.[i.e. a complex vector space with inner product. But that is an inner product where the first term is complex. Not the same as the inner product with just the cosine. (QM needs the "i" for it does not work without it.)] So they do not have classical values in space and time as the Bell inequality shows. That is: the Bell inequality does not show non locality [or as sometimes called causality] as some people have suggested that are not familiar with QM. Rather  they have values in Hilbert space. [So Bell's inequality does not show anything against relativity.]

[The way to conceive of this is that particles travel on a sphere inside the Hilbert space.]

There is a sort of limit to the areas where pure reason can reach as Kant showed.

 There is a sort of limit to the areas where pure reason can reach as Kant showed. And he also saw that when human reason attempts to pursue areas beyond what is beyond the possibilities of experience, that it comes up with self contradictions. Furthermore he saw a sort of psychological insight from that observation. That people that do attempt to probe into areas beyond the possibility of experience tend to go insane. So you can see why in the Litvak Yeshiva world, interest in mysticism is usually discouraged.

[However, that does not mean that I distrust anyone with spiritual insight. For example, the Gra himself   and from the middle ages, Rav Avraham Abulafia. Rather, it is just not something to do unless one is really on that level. Plus, there is the problem of discernment.]

The kind of approach that I take towards issues of faith is more or less this. That moral principles are universals. [I.e., laws or characteristics. Moral laws are universals since they are laws that things have in common. Like: it is wrong  to torture people for the fun of it. That is a law that applies to people, and they have in common.] And some universals are known or can be discerned by reason. Also morality is objective and not reducible to physical laws. See G.E. Moore and Prichard.  

x71 music file

 x71 Needs editing--but I have no way to access an mp3 program right now

Most of what you think and say are things you picked up from others

 Most of what you think and say are things you picked up from others. They are not original thoughts. That is why there is this idea of Rav Nahman of talking with God while being alone and trying to get in real contact with who you really are, and talking with God from your inner essence, not just what you have heard from other people. 

Why is authenticity important? After all if one is thinking of it as being important because I picked up the idea from the existentialists, then it in itself is not authentic.

The reason is that there is a discernable limit how much one can pick up until his whole inner essence gets erased. You can see this in undergraduate of high school papers which are often a large mixture of clichés.

You can hear this in people's conversation where almost every word is some "buzz word"  they picked up from he media or friends. 

I admit even after learning the existentialists I was not very impressed until I heard Jordan Peterson point out some of the good points that some of them brought up.]

I should mention in terms of Rav Nahman, that he was highly suspicious of doctors.

 I should mention in terms of Rav Nahman, that he was highly suspicious of doctors. [See Conversations of Rav Nahman, paragraph 50] And there is plenty of reason for that. However I also want to mention that in Uman there were great doctors. [Not trained during the time of the USSR, but later under Capitalism.] They were amazing at diagnosis and treatment. During my last period there, I had broken my foot by being chased by dogs outside of Sofia Park. I had not known how serious the injury was and collapsed on the street. Passersby called an ambulance, and I was brought to the local hospital. [Immediately given tests to see in anything else was wrong and then a bed, and never a word was said about payment.] The doctor, Sergei Alexivitch, and the whole group of doctors and nurses did an amazing job. The woman in charge of anesthesia was supper careful about not over doing it, but gave only local anesthesia-(instead of general which she realized could have been dangerous).  A nurse, Irina, held my hand to give me encouragement the whole time of the operation. [He is a young doctor who took his training after the USSR in the Institute at Dnieper. I would not have agreed to an operation if the doctor had been the same one that had been there during the time of the USSR  because even among the general people that doctors had a reputation as terrible. But not all that were trained during the period of the USSR were like that. I had experiences with older doctors also there that were highly competent.] 

The degree of care, concern and quality of care was astounding.

[That was just one example, but there is more to say because I was hanging around in that area because of my learning partner in Gemara, David Bronson. I should mention here also that the level of learning that  received from David was not less than Rav Shmuel Berenbaum at the Mir in NY, or Rav Naftali Yegger in Shar Yashuv.\

 As far as the vaccine is concerned see: 

Sonia Azevedo, a mum-of-two had no prior health conditions and hadn’t had any adverse effects after getting the Pfizer jab.

A 41-year-old health worker in Portugal suffered a “sudden death” just two days after receiving the Pfizer vaccine. According to the EuroWeeklynews, Sonia Azevedo, a mum-of-two had no prior health conditions and hadn’t had any adverse effects after getting the Pfizer jab. Sonia worked at the Institute of Oncology in Porto before she collapsed on New Year’s Day. An autopsy is expected to be completed in the coming days to establish the cause of death.

I should mention that near Uman is a hospital called the regional hospital that I went to also. That was after my foot injury I had been in bed and so my intestines were not moving as if I had been walking around. So I had abdominal pain and went to that regional hospital. The medicine they recommended for me worked within a about two minutes after taking it. And that was my general experience with doctors in Uman. They knew exactly what to recommend for what ever my problem was. They were extremely\ competent\.