The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein

QuandWhen we think of Einstein, we picture the ultimate scientist — the father of relativity, a genius who forever changed our understanding of space and time. But behind the equations lay a deeply spiritual mind. Neuroscientist Kieran Fox explores this lesser-known side of Einstein in his book I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein (“Sono parte dell’infinito - La biografia spirituale di Albert Einstein”, Egea, 2025, 352 pages, €28,90, in Italian).

“The phrase ‘I am a part of infinity’ is not just a metaphor,” Fox explains. “Einstein saw interconnectedness as both a physical and philosophical truth.” Convinced that science and spirituality were not in conflict but complementary, Einstein found echoes of the divine in the laws of the universe — without dogma, without churches.

You describe Einstein as an “apostle of sacred science.” In what way was his search for a unifying principle in physics also a spiritual quest?

Einstein, following Spinoza, was a monist — meaning that he thought mind and matter were merely different manifestations of a single underlying “substance” or “arch-force.” This idea that reality is ultimately a single unified whole is extremely ancient, going back at least as far as the Upanishads, and possibly even to ancient Egypt. Through most of history, people have tried to approach and understand this Oneness only through spiritual practices and mystical experience. But starting with the Pythagoreans in ancient Greece, there were people who tried to grasp this Oneness in a more rational way, using numbers and later mathematical equations. Einstein was part of this Pythagorean tradition, which was in essence a rational road to ultimate reality — an attempt to achieve a mystical sense of Oneness through mathematics.

According to Einstein, science and spirituality were not in conflict but complementary. Do you think the contemporary academic and scientific world is ready to rediscover this synthesis?

In some ways I think we have definitely been heading in this direction. Most of my research over the past 15 years has focused on the neuroscience of meditation, consciousness and now psychedelics. The fact that these topics are now seriously investigated by scientists, and that the results are published in major academic journals, shows that science is much more receptive to this side of the human experience. On the other hand, we’re still a long way from feeling Einstein’s reverence for physical reality. We still exist within an extremely dualistic worldview where matter is seen as dead and inert and uncreative, and consciousness somehow magically “emerges” out of the physical world. So perhaps unexpectedly, I think scientists are more and more willing to embrace the spiritual side of things and to explore consciousness and altered states. But, generally speaking, “spiritual” people still don’t have much respect for the physical world, or any reverence for the miraculous powers of matter. They don’t see the importance of scientific understanding and don’t appreciate that science itself can be a spiritual path and can lead to deep religious feelings, as Einstein’s experience shows.

Einstein believed that humanity needed to evolve toward a new ethical and spiritual consciousness. Do you see any signs of this transformation in today’s world?

I wish I could say yes, but I think that, like most people, I see us heading in the exact opposite direction. There is ever more emphasis on differences in culture, in religion, in race — all these false divisions and fake dualities that divide us and give us excuses to hate and harm one another. And what’s worse, I see increasing acceptance of the idea that violence is the solution to our problems — in fact, many people seem to celebrate it. We are in desperate need of new leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., who can help turn things around and lead humanity in a different direction. And of course the other part of ethics that Einstein emphasized, but that is so often forgotten, is not just how we treat other humans, but whether we have compassion and kindness for other living beings. 

In your book, you mention Einstein’s relationship with figures like Spinoza, Buddha and Gandhi. How did these thinkers influence his idea of a religion without dogma?

Religion without dogma was one important part of it, but the main issue for Einstein was to jettison the idea of a personal God (who rewards and punishes his creatures) and develop a different understanding of the divine. For Einstein, as for Spinoza and Gandhi, “God” was everywhere; the divine force was present in absolutely everything, from the tiniest speck of matter to the most transcendent insights of the human mind. No church was necessary, since in a sense all of reality was sacred, a single gigantic temple. Likewise, no priests or other intermediaries were required, because, whether we realized it or not, we were in touch with the divine all the time. And in the same vein, no special book was considered sacred, because the only “text” that really mattered was what Einstein called “the book of Nature,” which was written in the language of mathematics. 

What was the most surprising discovery you made while writing this book?
When I started writing the book, my plan and expectation was to trace how Eastern spiritual traditions shaped Einstein. I have been pretty deeply immersed in Eastern spirituality for a long time, and just looking at Einstein’s quotes, it was obvious that Eastern religion and philosophy had influenced his thinking. But what came as a total surprise was the prominence of what we could call the Pythagorean tradition, not just on Einstein but on every major physicist for the last 500 years, and also on the Western philosophers Einstein most admired, namely Baruch Spinoza and Giordano Bruno. Hardly anyone knows anything about the Pythagorean tradition today, but their strange mystical-mathematical worldview has shaped all of modern science and was the major inspirational force for most of the great theoretical physicists who sought to understand the ultimate nature of reality with mathematical constructs. The Pythagorean worldview is the closest anyone has come in history to a kind of scientific spirituality, and Einstein was well aware he was carrying on this ancient tradition in his own work. It came as a huge shock to me just how oblivious most of us are to the deep spiritual roots not only of science but of our entire Western culture, and of the secret spiritual motivations that drove our greatest scientists to make their greatest discoveries.

If you could ask Einstein one question today, what would it be?
I would ask him to tell me more about the subjective side of his “cosmic religious feelings,” which he tells us so little about in his surviving writings. I think that in writing the book I was able to get a good grasp of the intellectual ideas and the philosophical theories that led to Einstein’s worldview. But I wish I could know more about the subjective side, the actual first-person experience, and how this motivated and inspired him to keep pursuing unity in physics. What did it actually feel like for him when his ego dissolved and he felt himself merged with the cosmos? What was it like for him when his crazy new theories were confirmed by careful experiments? (Einstein says, “I was beside myself with ecstasy for days!”). What was it like to feel that he was channeling divine truth through the limited vessel of the human mind? Sorry, this is more than one question! But these are the kinds of things I wish I could ask Einstein about today.