I spent a good amount of effort putting together my worldview in elementary school and high school.
I had a notebooks filled with ideas that I would jot down at night before going to sleep. Often I would think of some new idea right before falling asleep and get up and write in down and then go back to bed.
It is hard to know if I would have been doing this thinking if the atmosphere of the time did not call for it.That was at the height of the hippie movement. The hippies had one basic message:"Tear down the system," and they assumed that after they would succeed they would build a utopia in its place. But most people did not think tearing down the system was the best idea. But people did accept that the system needed to be examined.
I did a great deal of readings: Plato, Dante, Spinoza, Herman Hesse, Chinese Philosophies. But Philosophy of the twentieth century seemed to me to be obviously false and vacuous. It was not just that it was self contradictory and full of circular reasoning, but also they (twentieth century philosophers) did not care about reason and logic at all. To them the more unreasonable their ideas were the better.
But my ideas had a lot to do with Socrates and living the good life. Not just philosophy for the sake of interesting ideas.
So going to Shar Yashuv and the Mir Yeshiva in N.Y. was about as a well thought out choice as I could have made.
There was also the issue that my parents obviously had a extremely happy marriage and sense of family values. And to me it seemed secular society was on the warpath against family values. I did not think I was going to manage to build a family in secular society.
In hind sight, the going to a Lithuanian yeshiva was the best possible choice I could have made in terms of family. But right outside the door of many Lithuanian yeshiva is a "kelipa" (a dark force of evil/ the religious world) which is a power from the Dark Side that is more destructive to family than secular society.
I was not aware (at the time) of the danger of the religious world. I am now.
[The way to understand the problem is that where holiness exists, the Sitra Achra (the Dark Side) surrounds it as it says in Psalms "Around and around go the wicked." Wherever there is holiness, around it is always found the forces of the Dark Side trying to get in.]
It is well known that Evil that does not pretend to be other than what it is, is much less dangerous than Evil which pretends to be Holiness.
I did a great deal of readings: Plato, Dante, Spinoza, Herman Hesse, Chinese Philosophies. But Philosophy of the twentieth century seemed to me to be obviously false and vacuous. It was not just that it was self contradictory and full of circular reasoning, but also they (twentieth century philosophers) did not care about reason and logic at all. To them the more unreasonable their ideas were the better.
But my ideas had a lot to do with Socrates and living the good life. Not just philosophy for the sake of interesting ideas.
So going to Shar Yashuv and the Mir Yeshiva in N.Y. was about as a well thought out choice as I could have made.
There was also the issue that my parents obviously had a extremely happy marriage and sense of family values. And to me it seemed secular society was on the warpath against family values. I did not think I was going to manage to build a family in secular society.
In hind sight, the going to a Lithuanian yeshiva was the best possible choice I could have made in terms of family. But right outside the door of many Lithuanian yeshiva is a "kelipa" (a dark force of evil/ the religious world) which is a power from the Dark Side that is more destructive to family than secular society.
I was not aware (at the time) of the danger of the religious world. I am now.
[The way to understand the problem is that where holiness exists, the Sitra Achra (the Dark Side) surrounds it as it says in Psalms "Around and around go the wicked." Wherever there is holiness, around it is always found the forces of the Dark Side trying to get in.]
It is well known that Evil that does not pretend to be other than what it is, is much less dangerous than Evil which pretends to be Holiness.
