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When Albert Einstein was 10, his tutor, a medical student named Max Talmey, would often join the family for lunch. Talmey gave the boy 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 notoriously dense magnum opus The Critique of Pure Reason. “Incomprehensible to ordinary mortals,” Talmey observed, yet it “seemed clear to him.”
“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 is 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 in The New York Times Magazine, “Religion and Science,” he explained his own contact with the divine. “I will call 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 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 certainly was. 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, 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 new book, I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein.
I spoke to Fox on a recent afternoon in his high-rise apartment—the 26th floor offered panoramic views of San Francisco, where he works as a physician-scientist at the University of California, San Francisco. Two floor-to-ceiling bookshelves greeted me at the entrance. The top shelf was lined with thick white volumes containing all of Einstein’s collected papers, and below those were books on Einstein’s life, his travels, his ideas, and his relationships. Fox is a meticulous researcher, and it shows.
In our conversation, we discussed what gave Einstein an early taste of awe, whether discovering his theory of gravity was a genuine spiritual experience, and the rumor that Einstein once dropped acid.
What was Einstein’s first experience of intense awe or wonder?
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.
Do you think working out the general theory of relativity was a spiritual experience for Einstein?
He definitely describes it that way. He was a pretty proficient mathematician, but he thought through his physics in these visionary thought experiments or journeys. For special relativity, he’s like: 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.
You’re a neuroscientist and a psychiatrist. How did you become interested in Einstein’s thoughts about religion?
I was working on a different book, on the neuroscience of meditation and how our brains evolved to be capable of having spiritual, transcendental, mystical experiences. 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. I came across Einstein’s writings on religion, and the quote of his that really caught my eye went: “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.”
Why did that line of Einstein’s grab you?
I’ve been involved with Eastern philosophy and meditating for my entire adult life, and that really struck me—like, 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.
You tell us in I Am Part of Infinity that Carl Jung called Einstein a “sentimental idealist with shallow enlightenment.” And at one point Robert Oppenheimer said Einstein was “completely cuckoo.”
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.
Those other two thinkers in particular were much more cynical. In some ways you could say that they’re 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.
When most of us think of Einstein, we think about E=MC2 and the relativity of time. We don’t think about his engagement with religious ideas.
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.
What’s an example of that?
There’s a conversation with him and the mystic poet Rabindranath Tagore, where they’re talking about Brahman and Atman, and that’s just left out of one of the biographies. The author just adds an ellipsis. Like, 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.
Why do you say that, with his worship of wonder, Einstein knew he was playing with powerful fire?
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. 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.
Was Einstein’s pacifism, which he notably didn’t apply to the Nazis, connected to his conviction that he was part of infinity?
For Einstein it’s like, once you have that Oneness experience, you see the folly of the normal human viewpoint. Because if it’s all really “One” thing that’s developing and changing and manifesting in different ways, then it doesn’t make a lot of sense to be crushing or fighting those other parts of “yourself.” In Einstein’s view, it’s almost counter to the nature of the universe to be wantonly violent. Animals eat one another, of course, and there’s a natural cycle of life. But what the Nazis were doing, wholesale slaughter for the sake of power, or in the name of hatred and racism—to Einstein, that was an aberration of nature. To deviate that much from the natural order of the cosmos was, in a word, evil.
For Einstein, physical laws are the universe’s own form of self-expression.
How did Einstein think 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’s 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.
What was Einstein’s take on the supposed paradox of free will?
He started off with the idea that we’re 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.
Why do you say that if Einstein was an atheist in letter, he certainly wasn’t one in spirit?
For Einstein, atheism is just mere disbelief, and in some sense that’s how he felt about the gods of our contemporary religions. But there’s no positive or affirmative doctrine to atheism. And Einstein did have this Pythagorean faith that there is an underlying harmony to the cosmos, and we can understand it because we are united with it. So for Einstein, just saying there’s no God isn’t enough for him. You need to go further and understand that the universe is really mysterious, and your mind should be blown when you’re looking at it. It’s not enough to say: It’s just matter, just atoms, and why it follows these laws is not important. It is important! Why does it work that way? Why is it structured in such a fashion that allows for all this complexity and life and consciousness?
How did Einstein respond to his son Eduard’s nihilism?
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’s worth living for. It’s also a duty from Einstein’s point of view; it’s an ethical obligation to take part in the giant play, even though we are just a tiny piece and there’s lots of forces beyond our control.
Einstein had a great quote about that: “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.”
How has Einstein’s scientific religiosity shaped your own approach to science and your work as a clinician?
It’s a big divide to bridge. It all sounds so nice when you read Spinoza and Einstein. And then you go into a hospital, and you see pretty much nothing but death and suffering. I think it is a daily discipline, or a daily effort, to remind myself of what I’m doing here. Can we make this better? Can we reduce suffering? Can we increase understanding?
Where is your scientific journey taking you now?
Currently I’m working with a group that does research on psychedelics. What interests me the most is that psychedelics, by all accounts, offer quite straightforward access to the same feelings of Oneness and transcendence, or personal encounters with the divine. I don’t think just reading about it is enough, and I don’t think getting a list of rules—Einstein said this, or Gandhi said that—is effective, or what people want. Accessing that experience yourself is much more powerful. It gives you a personal sense of everything we’ve been talking about from a mostly intellectual, rational perspective.
What do you think Einstein would make of psychedelics?
An old friend of mine who works in the same research group once said, “I think Einstein tried acid!” I was like, “What, that can’t be. Come on, I would have heard about that by now.” So Einstein didn’t try acid, but the year he died, in 1955, was around the time when Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond—coiner of the term “psychedelic”—were writing letters back and forth. They had this crazy plan to introduce acid to all the great intellects of the world. They said, we should give it to Carl Jung, we should give it to Einstein. They wanted to turn him “on,” in Timothy Leary’s words. But Einstein had just died when that letter was written.
If Einstein had still been alive, do you think he would have taken up the offer to drop acid?
Freud once offered to psychoanalyze him, and Einstein told him he wasn’t interested. And Einstein knew about meditation. He met Buddhist monks. He was in Asia for a long time. He was exposed to this stuff before it was cool, so to speak, long before most Westerners were, and yet he didn’t engage with it personally. So I’m not sure he would have gone for it, even if Aldous Huxley had showed up at his door. 
Lead image: Vectorku Studio / Shutterstock
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