Einstein's World

Everybody knows Einstein. Probably the second-most popular poster on dorm walls (after the buxom lass-of-the week) is a picture of Einstein's mug with his tongue out and his hair exploding in all directions. We all know that Einstein wasn't good at math as a kid, that he was really smart anyways, and that people keep trying to blame him for the atomic bomb. That's about the scope of what the average Bloe knows.

But the dude was also a man - a fellow who lived a whole lot of days - moment by moment - and had a lot of banal thoughts. He ate and excremented and thought about women. He also said some stuff about everyday life and living, which I read on the internet nobbut a few days ago.

His general braininess gives his words a whole lot of credibility. What really makes his thoughts interesting to me, though, is that a lot of it sounds a lot like this Ghandi proverbiage I've been quoting left and right. While I don't agree with everything Einstein or Ghandi said, it just seems telling that two guys like this seem to have come to a lot of the same conclusions, conclusions which also seem to resonate within my mind as being true.

To me, this is a bang-up argument for the existence of a Truth (emphasis on the capital "T") that exherts an almost magnetic pull on the minds of those who earnestly seek it. Who gets closest? Well, I've got my own ideas. The important thing, though, is that you and I try to be one of those people who tries. I believe heartily that if we humbly do, the doors will be opened and we will find an ever-more clear view into the ever-expanding mystery of the way things really ARE.

I doubt that you or I will ever get much closer than Ghandi or Einstein. We'll always have those U2 moments when we feel like we still haven't found what we're looking for. But, ah, what a journey.

So with no further ado, I give you Albert Einstein (cut a bit short by whomever made the site off of which this was cribbed) on The World as He Sees it....

..."How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people -- first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving."

"I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves -- this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me. The trite objects of human efforts -- possessions, outward success, luxury -- have always seemed to me contemptible."

"My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a 'lone traveler' and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude."

"My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the desire, unattainable for many, to understand the few ideas to which I have with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle. I am quite aware that for any organization to reach its goals, one man must do the thinking and directing and generally bear the responsibility. But the led must not be coerced, they must be able to choose their leader. In my opinion, an autocratic system of coercion soon degenerates; force attracts men of low morality... The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling."

"This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor... This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!"

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery -- even if mixed with fear -- that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man... I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence -- as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature."