Einstein, The Spiritualist. Who Knew?

    Hey, kids! How about an Albert Einstein story? You mean it? It’s okay? Thanks! Man, you guys are the best! Here you go! Did you know that when Albert Einstein was 10, his tutor (a medical student named Max Talmey), would often join the family for lunch. Talmey gave the young genius books on popular science and math to study, and it wasn’t long before he realized Einstein was different, an intellectual prodigy. “Soon,” Talmey said, “the flight of his mathematical genius was so high that I could no longer follow.” 

    The tutor stuck mostly to philosophy, and by the time Einstein was 13, the precocious teenager was well versed in Immanuel Kant’s mind-numbingly dense magnum opus The Critique of Pure Reason. “Incomprehensible to ordinary mortals,” Talmey observed, yet it “seemed clear to him.” Don't you just hate those people!

    “Reading Kant, I began to suspect everything I was taught,” Einstein said. “I no longer believed in the known God of the Bible, but rather in the mysterious God expressed in nature.”   

    Not long after, in his early 20s, while Einstein was putting together the ideas that would revolutionize the physics of space, time, and matter—leading to his so-called “miracle year” of 1905—he kept exploring this other conception of the divine. He read the philosophical reflections of Arthur Schopenhauer, who saw that the radical religious ideas of thinkers like astronomer Giordano Bruno and 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza—that nature and God are somehow One—mirrored similar notions in the oldest sacred Indian scriptures. His version of touching the divine was getting the mathematical equations from these visionary experiences.

    At age 51, Einstein was ready to put at least some of his spiritual feelings into words. In a 1930 article for The New York Times Magazine, “Religion and Science,” he explained his own contact with the divine. He called it the “cosmic religious sense.”

    “This is hard to make clear to those who don’t experience it, since it does not involve an anthropomorphic (the attribution of human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities) idea of a God,” Einstein wrote. The individual feels “the nobility and marvelous order which are revealed in nature and...seeks to experience the totality of existence as a unity full of significance.” Einstein continued. “How can this cosmic religious experience be communicated man to man, if it cannot lead to a definite conception of God or to a theology? It seems to me that the most important function of art and of science is to arouse and keep alive this feeling in those who are receptive.” 

    Einstein was certainly receptive. Envisioning the cosmos, he felt moved by the “beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable,” he wrote in 1939. “Life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution or destiny; only being.”

    That quote, to neuroscientist Kieran Fox, sounded awfully like an Eastern religious perspective. So he had to know more. Did Einstein study Buddhist and Hindu traditions, too? That question eventually led to Fox’s wonderful new book, I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein. If I could, I would like to share some of the things that impressed me most about this wonderful and eye-opening book. 

    It seems that Einstein’s father gave him a compass and showed him how the needle always pointed north no matter how he moved the compass around. Einstein was around 4 or 5 years old at the time, and he was mystified that some invisible power somehow controlled the compass needle. His uncle tried to explain that there’s this magnetic field that the Earth creates. Einstein asked him where that comes from, and his uncle told him it’s just out there, no one understands electromagnetism, but keep hunting if you don’t understand something. Call it x, and start searching for x.

    It shows how precocious he was. This little kid sees a compass and realizes there’s a giant mystery here. It’s a little microcosm of his whole worldview and everything that came later; his efforts to understand that we’re embedded in this bigger thing, that we’re a part of infinity.

    Something that really made me think, was Einstein’s describing his working out the general theory of relativity as a spiritual experience. He was a pretty proficient mathematician, but he thought through his physics in these visionary thought experiments or journeys. For special relativity, it is as if he is saying to himself: “I imagine myself in space, I’m out in the cosmos, and I join light, and I travel at the speed of light, and then I can see the universe from the perspective of light. And I realize that there’s no such thing as absolute time, because I’ve merged with the perspective of light.”

    That sounds really interesting if it’s just anybody talking about it—but it turned out he was right. The math matches that. His version of touching the divine or meeting with the gods is getting the mathematical equations that come back from these visionary experiences, and being able to actually apply that to reality.

    After his theory of general relativity was shown to explain a small abnormality in the orbit of Mercury, he wrote to a friend saying he was beside himself with ecstasy for days. He was reveling in what he saw as a divine truth that had been revealed to him.

    What I find so interesting is that many people in the spiritual world talk about the same things, but you can’t really turn it into something useful or applicable to other people. And yet, when you do the same kind of thing through science and through mathematics, you bring something back from that visionary experience that you can show to other people, and they can create really powerful and scary things, like nuclear weapons, from it. It’s almost what religious people have always dreamed of—that you come back from some visionary experience and now you have godly powers. That actually works in science, and it’s a huge responsibility.

    Someone asked me the other day, when they saw this book on the coffee table, what was it that I found interesting in such a way out in left field topic. And that’s a fair question. I usually blame these types of things on my evangelical upbringing and my subsequent divorce from my evangelical upbringing. I said to my friend, who knows me quite well, that I was trying to work out things in my head about the neuroscience of meditation and how our brains evolved to be capable of having spiritual, transcendental, and mystical experiences, because these topics fascinate me. I was looking for examples of figures who had contributed to science and who maintained their rational perspective on reality but also had these sort of religious feelings. And probably most importantly, these journeys, for lack of a better word, remind me of my father’s spiritual journeys. I came across Einstein’s writings on religion, and the quote of his that really caught my eye was: “A human being is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion.” My friend looked at me, took a deep breath, and said, “I know I'm going to regret asking this, but why that quote?”

    Because of the intellectual stew that made up my father’s life-philosophy, I’ve been interested in Eastern philosophy and meditating for my entire adult life, and that really struck me—wow, Einstein must have read this stuff! He must have known something about Buddhism or the Upanishads from ancient Hindu philosophy. As it turns out, he knew a great deal, much more than people realize. Einstein was reveling in what he saw as a divine truth.

    According to Fox, Einstein embraced ideals that can seem naive at first—world peace, nuclear disarmament. He thought we should all recognize that we’re “One” and get rid of our old prejudices. Other thinkers, like Carl Jung, were much more cynical. In some ways you could say that Jung and thinkers like him were wiser for having this cynical view of humankind. But the idea that Einstein was naive doesn’t really track. He was idealistic, but very consciously so. It’s not like he didn’t realize that humans could be awful. He lost a daughter. He had family members killed by the Nazis. He was driven out of Germany. He was a refugee even despite being the most famous scientist in the world, and he kind of lost it all, had to leave the whole European continent behind. But like Don Quixote, he goes after these high ideals regardless, deliberately pursuing this difficult path, and calling human beings to live up to the highest possible standard.

    I have to be honest, I was a little taken aback with the thought of Einstein being a spiritual/religious thinker. You don’t see that in your basic high school classes or college seminars that deal with him. Looking back, I found the omission of his interest in Eastern ideas mystifying, because there’s so much if you look at what he wrote—dozens of quotes that directly refer to these things. It felt like there was an unconscious drive to pigeonhole him. Nothing malicious in most cases. Many of the people who commented on his religious views were close friends, or his biographers. A lot of them clearly admired him. But it’s incredible to see how people just literally skip over this or that part of a quote, or omit key words.

    For example, there is a conversation with him and the mystic poet Rabindranath Tagore, where they are talking about Brahman and Atman, and that’s just left out of one of the biographies. The author just adds an ellipsis. I mean, how do you skip that? To me, that’s the most important part. People who think Einstein is a deist—that he’s not into miracles or heaven and hell, but believed there’s a Creator God who made the world and laid down its physical laws—that’s also a big misunderstanding. It’s not about a separate God who made things, standing outside of the universe. It’s very much an immanent idea of the divine, that the universe made itself, and physical laws are its own form of self-expression.

    Now, obviously, Einstein knew he was playing with powerful fire when he talked about the things that I have mentioned above. Evolutionary psychologists have tried to understand why we have the feeling of awe and wonder. It’s speculative, but what they think is that it came from social dominance hierarchies. Awe is what you feel for a monkey or gorilla who’s above you in the hierarchy. You feel they’re special and different; they’re some tremendous, magical thing that you can’t contest or understand.

    If that’s true, it’s an easily abused emotion. Einstein was very concerned about that, and if that’s applied to the wrong things, you get total disaster. Take Hitler and the Nazis, because well, we always seem to come back to Hitler and the Nazis! Hitler was obviously held in awe by so many people, and was seen as literally a Nietzschean superman by many people in Germany at the time. In and of themselves, those feelings of awe and reverence don’t contain any value judgments or any real intellectual component. That’s why Einstein thought wonder had to be coupled with curiosity and critical thinking, so that you don’t just get carried away with your awe of your God or your dictator.

    Which brings me to how Einstein thought that the appeal of an ethical life could be made compelling to the average person. What it boiled down to for him was being an exemplar, and trying to embody those principles of infinity in your own life. Of course, we have the right to ask whether this is someone we want to emulate, because there are pretty well known things now about Einstein’s shortcomings—his infidelities, cheating on both of his wives, for example. It’s generally considered that he was a pretty poor father to both of his kids. You can see from his letters that he was well aware of those personal failings. And I think that’s partly why he didn’t promote himself, telling people, “Hey, you should follow me.” He didn’t want to start a religion where he was the prophet at the center of it. But when he saw people like Gandhi, he said, Look, there are people who are living this way, maybe not perfectly, but more or less in accordance with this vision of existence. And look what they can achieve, and look at the good they put out into the world.

    His ideas of “free will” are even more interesting...at least for a scientist. He started off with the idea that we are born automatons, part of the natural world, essentially animals at heart. But later in life he argued, following Spinoza, that we could use our reason and better judgment to exert some control over our lives, instead of reacting blindly or instinctively to things. Becoming a conscious, free person is almost a process of learning to be that way, gradually acquiring agency and autonomy. Through conscious effort, you can become a more free being who develops free will, or almost grows freedom with increased exertion and with increased restraint. It’s a discipline-equals-freedom idea, where the more you discipline yourself, the more free you are to live according to your own ideals, regardless of what’s happening in the world.

    Lastly, Einstein had a son, Eduard, who was an avowed nihilist. Like many people, Eduard thought we were this tiny little species on this little speck of dust in the middle of nowhere, and so it’s all pointless. Einstein pushed back hard in his letters to him and said it’s a consistent viewpoint, the facts are correct, but if you participate in the cosmos fully, if you co-create with it, if you try to fathom its laws, and associate with people who are doing the same thing, trying to participate in the grand drama—that’s what is worth living for. It is also a duty from Einstein’s point of view; it is an ethical obligation to take part in the giant play, even though we are just a tiny piece and there are lots of forces beyond our control.

    Einstein had a great quote about that, as well: “If one wants to value society and, beyond that, what is alive, and rejoices in the fact that consciousness exists, it is impossible not to acknowledge the highest stage of consciousness as the highest ideal.”

Write to Peter:magtour@icloud.com