“The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them.”
-Albert Einstein
It has been called the true indication of madness: doing a thing over and over and expecting a different result. And so it is in expecting solutions to the problems that plague us to derive from a mentality that fostered the problems in the first place.
It’s an insane world. Nothing will change that until we change the way we think.
"Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character."
How many times have you wanted to slap someone upside the head who responds with; “Like – whatever”
Such laziness and disrespect implied in such a phrase soon becomes more than an expression of attitude, but of character as well.
“The free, unhampered exchange of ideas and scientific conclusions is necessary for the sound development of science, as it is in all spheres of cultural life.”
-Albert Einstein
Science is the unfettered pursuit of pure knowledge. An ideal that can never be fully realized as even the most open human mind – the mind of an Einstein – carries with it the inevitable traces of personal bias. But we can maintain that ideal nonetheless.
Filtering science through moralistic dogma, political agenda, or simple delusion dooms what we would call “science”, and therefore the pursuit of knowledge, to ultimate failure. Knowledge is not advanced and human progress is diminished.
If we are not willing to follow in the path that knowledge takes us, we have no choice but to turn back toward the cave from which we came.
“He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.”
-Albert Einstein
The true secret of Albert Einstein’s genius was not his raw intellectual power but his ability to harness that intellect to a sense of pure wonder and intense curiosity in everything around him.
In a world of endless distraction and mindless entertainments are our senses simply numbed to the simple beauty that is all around us every day?
Look close, there’s an entire universe in a single rose, if we just take the time to look.
“I think and think for months and years. Ninety-nine times, the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right.”
It took years for Einstein to formulate his theories of special and general relativity. As he himself said, it was through “no special talent” that he unlocked these insights into how the universe works, but due to his “passionate curiosity”. Einstein thus found the will and inspiration to persevere, transforming physics and how we look at our world.
Now, I’m no Einstein, and you’re no Einstein, but what could you or I create if we had the same perseverance and “passionate curiosity” as he?
“We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God.”
-Albert Einstein, as quoted in Glimpses of the Great (1930) by G. S. Viereck.
It is simply Man’s folly to think he can divine the true nature of divinity; and then impose the “Wrath of God” on those that would not share, to the last detail, his own limited grasp and faulty notions of God.
“Relativity teaches us the connection between the different descriptions of one and the same reality”
-Albert Einstein
One man stands on a train platform inside a train station, another stands on a speeding train as it moves through the station. Both mean seek what is true - Reality.
To each man, the path to that Truth and Reality appears different, relative to the other man’s.
But the Reality both men seek, the one on the platform and the other in the speeding train, is exactly the same. That much is True.
“…one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought.”
-Albert Einstein
Despite our powerful intellect and “self-awareness”, we are still biological creatures tossed to and fro by hormonal and instinctual impulses.
Pain, fear, hunger, aggression, lust, longing – all inevitable consequences of life on earth. But escape from the baseness of our daily trod through life is possible. Through expressions and appreciation of art and science we can lift ourselves out of the biological soup and confinement of personal existence into the greater world of beauty, thought, and ideas.
“When you look at yourself from a universal standpoint, something inside always reminds or informs you that there are bigger and better things to worry about”
Albert Einstein, The World As I See It
Sometimes – many time, perhaps – we find ourselves in the grip of some self-absorbed dilemma of our own choosing, sure that the universe, and all those in it, must share our angst – or would if they only knew.
Chances are most people are caught up in their own personal drama and the universe is simply to vast, mysterious, and beautiful for our petty concerns to matter.
To paraphrase another historic figure: Ask not what the universe can do for you, but what you can do for the universe.
"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."
-Albert Einstein
If God created everything then the clearer and more rational our understanding of ourselves, the universe, and our place in it, the clearer our understanding of God himself. Fear keeps us looking at the ground, lashing out at anything laying beyond our narrow gaze, understanding little.
We slowly conquer our fear and look up toward that which is both the creator and the created. All roads lead eventually to what is unknowable, to the leap of faith.
Perhaps it is best to reach that point with our eyes wide open.
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