Coping With Resurgent Nationalism

by Pranabh Bardhan

Einstein had called nationalism ‘an infantile disease, the measles of mankind’. Many contemporary cosmopolitan liberals are similarly skeptical, contemptuous or dismissive, as its current epidemic rages all around the world particularly in the form of right-wing extremist or populist movements. While I understand the liberal attitude, I think it’ll be irresponsible of us to let the illiberals meanwhile hijack the idea of nationalism for their nefarious purpose. Nationalism is too passionate and historically explosive an issue to be left to their tender mercies. It is important to fight the virulent forms of the disease with an appropriate antidote and try to vaccinate as many as possible particularly in the younger generations.

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Everything is Vibration

Swim in Silence

Einstein on liberation from ego

The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self.
- Albert Einstein

Why Does the World Exist?

In his book Why Does the World Exist?, Jim Holt explores the ideas of the great 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza. 
“Of all the possible resolutions to the mystery of existence,” Holt writes, “perhaps the most exhilarating would be the discovery that, contrary to all appearances, the world is causa sui: the cause of itself.” For Spinoza, all mental and physical existents were temporally modified expressions of a single substance, an infinite substance that he called God or Nature. Albert Einstein embraced Spinoza’s idea that the world was divine and self-causing, as more recently have other “metaphysically inclined physicists” like Sir Roger Penrose and the late John Archibald Wheeler.

read more: the american scholar
According to Advaita (Non-dual) philosophy, the Self and the world are one. The Self is uncreated, ever existing, and the cause of itself. 

Because the world is inseparable from the Self, it too is uncreated, ever existing and the cause of itself.

Economic Anarchy

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that mankind constitutes even now a planetary community of production and consumption. I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis in our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society. The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evil.

- Albert Einstein, 1949

Einstein on Self and the Mystical

"A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive."
-Albert Einstein, 1954

"The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms – this knowledge, this feeling is at the centre of true religiousness."

-Albert Einstein – "The Merging of Spirit and Science"

I think I may have posted these quotes before at some stage, but worth revisiting.

Einstein and God

For a long time there has been a debate about whether or not Einstein believed in God (whatever that word means). Many years ago, when I was a student, I attended a lecture by a famous physicist who had been an associate of Einstein. A Christian student asked him if he knew what Einstein's opinion was on the existence of God. The physicist replied, with a great deal of irritation at what he obviously thought was an irrelevant question, that Einstein did not believe in God. A rather biased recent article in New Scientist magazine came to much the same conclusion. But to say that Einstein did not believe in 'God' is simplistic, and ignors the many statements made by Einstein that evince a deep and lasting conviction that the Universe has a Self. The physicist who gave the lecture was an extremely dry, 'left-brain', individual; probably Einstein felt it was a waste of time sharing his pantheistic ideas about God, or a universal Self, with those who were unable to go beyond very limited definitions. Attempts to categorize his convictions, or to appropriate them for conventional theistic or atheistic purposes, miss their subtlety and their apophatic resonances. (Apophatic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_theology)

Here's a letter New Scientist published in reply to their article:

The interesting thing about Einstein's take on God and religion is not that he considered god to be impersonal, but that he recognised the vast and intense intelligence inherent in the universe. Perhaps in the first half of the 20th century it was easier to think of personhood as a separate thing to physicality, and to associate the idea of a personal god only with the abuses of that concept perpetuated by those in power. But compartmentalisation has broken down and the disciplines of physics, biology, psychology and philosophy are more integrated than ever before. Just as we ascribe personhood to the complex animated system of energy, mass and chemistry we call the human body, it is not unscientific to ascribe personhood to the universe. Science is at a crucial point, where we are finding that most of the mass in the universe is something we know nothing about and where we can look so closely at subatomic matter that it disappears before our eyes. At the same time, our ability to reconcile ethics with scientific capability is being challenged in many areas, from genetic design to space exploration. This is no time to write off god as an impersonal force of nature, nor to write off our fellow human beings as expendable units. Einstein, genius as he was, may have thrown out the baby (a personal god) with the bath water (abuses of religion), but he didn't get rid of the bath.
- Andy Smith, Ashford, Kent UK

The Intuitive and Rational Mind

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift
And the rational mind is a faithful servant.
We have created a society that honours the servant
And has forgotten the gift
- Albert Einstein


Einstein with Rabindranath Tagore

The Lives of 'Others'

More on Einstein, from New Scientist Magazine:

The day after Einstein spoke out on national TV, in 1950, about the dangers of US militarism, the director of the FBI "sent a top-secret memo to every FBI office in the country requesting any and all 'derogatory information' they had on Einstein...

When the FBI file was closed after his death in 1955, it contained more than 1800 pages of public statements by him and unsubstantiated allegations against him. The investigation remained secret until the 1990s. Even now, after the publication of Fred Jerome's eye-opening The Einstein File in 2002, this aspect of Einstein's extraordinary life often provokes surprise and discomfort."

Recently saw the excellent German film "The Lives of Others" (Das Leben der Anderen) about the destruction of creative lives by the corrupt and morally bankrupt Stasi in East Germany of the early eighties. The 1950's FBI didn't arrest Einstein, but their moral bankruptcy was obviously on a par with the Stasi.

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Einstein on the Illusion of Discrete Selves

Escher, 'Relativity'

"A human being is a part of a whole, called by us 'universe', a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison..."

-Albert Einstein

Free Will

"a human can very well do what he wants, but cannot will what he wants."

Einstein, among others, found that a comforting idea. "This knowledge of the non-freedom of the will protects me from losing my good humor and taking much too seriously myself and my fellow humans as acting and judging individuals," he said.

The implication of Einstein's statement (paraphrasing Schopenhauer) is that the only way to have 'free will' is to be desireless, to give up wanting. This was also the conclusion reached by the Buddha and many others.

One would imagine that a desireless state would be completely inert. Surely one must desire to act before one can act? However, if the desire is the ownerless pure desire of the Self, one can act dynamically without the obstructions of the limited 'I' consciousness.