If one were to choose a single person who advanced the evolution of the species, can you do much better than Albert Einstein? He was intellectually advanced, obviously, but he was also a political progressive with strong pacifist tendencies, and a deeply philosophical and spiritually practical man. “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” In 1954, a year before his death, he spoke of wishing to “experience the universe as a single cosmic whole”. The work of physicist David Bohm and his followers has been to illuminate the science behind this beautiful thought which echos from ages past in the ancient texts of the sages.
It’s not all logic.
What impresses me perhaps most of all is the creativity with which he pursued his scientific quest. His powers of visualization and intuition were the envy of any artist who ever lived. He said, Imagination is more important than knowledge, and Logic will get you from A to B, imagination will take you everywhere. He would see a new level of reality in the multi-dimensional space of his mind, and then work very hard to describe the new reality in the language of mathematics. Experimental proof would often take decades to manifest, but when it did, an unsurprised Einstein had already moved onto new challenges.
As revolutionary as his breakthroughs in science, his courageous humanitarian political stance points the way to a future without war, if we can only learn. He was strongly considered a leading candidate to be Israels first President, though it was probably a romantic notion on the part of Israels new leaders. It took the rise of Nazism to convince him that the world was not yet ready for the pure form of nonviolent philosophy he cherished.
