Sorry for delayed response, it's so much easier to get sucked in arguing with the doubters than to answer someone curious like yourself.
To answer your question, part of it has always been there. Eg my parents raised me to always question and grow. Meaning, if I have a day where I just ate/played/slept with nothing to show for it, it didn't feel good. If I learned and understood something new then it's a good day. So I was kinda bootstrapped with that approach.
Then over my life (I turned 40 this year) I have been exposed to different things that I approached with open mindedness. When I got more exposure to at first yoga and then Judaism, I recognized on both of these things a tradition of people trying to push their levels of understanding, in the same way that I am compelled to. To a naive person religion comes across as dogmatic, just unquestioned answers, but I quickly recognized that religion is really about asking the biggest questions there are and then the smartest people of their generations have spent cumulative millennia contemplating the answers. So it slowly but surely resonated with me.
It's kind of like.. imagine someone never had watermelon until they were 30, but once they tasted it they loved it. The reality is that they must have always loved watermelon they just didn't know it. And luckily they were open minded enough to taste it which let them discover that they had this hunger within them to begin with.
To answer your question, part of it has always been there. Eg my parents raised me to always question and grow. Meaning, if I have a day where I just ate/played/slept with nothing to show for it, it didn't feel good. If I learned and understood something new then it's a good day. So I was kinda bootstrapped with that approach.
Then over my life (I turned 40 this year) I have been exposed to different things that I approached with open mindedness. When I got more exposure to at first yoga and then Judaism, I recognized on both of these things a tradition of people trying to push their levels of understanding, in the same way that I am compelled to. To a naive person religion comes across as dogmatic, just unquestioned answers, but I quickly recognized that religion is really about asking the biggest questions there are and then the smartest people of their generations have spent cumulative millennia contemplating the answers. So it slowly but surely resonated with me.
It's kind of like.. imagine someone never had watermelon until they were 30, but once they tasted it they loved it. The reality is that they must have always loved watermelon they just didn't know it. And luckily they were open minded enough to taste it which let them discover that they had this hunger within them to begin with.