Maybe he was talking about “Eternal Flo”

From here to eternity

Albert Einstein died on this day in 1955.  He once wrote in a letter:

“I feel myself so much a part of everything living that I am not in the least concerned with the beginning or ending of the concrete existence of any one person in this eternal flow.”

When Albert Einstein was a boy, he was fervently religious. According to his sister, it was an early tutor who aroused these feelings, by teaching him the principles of Judaism, while Einstein’s first biographer claimed in 1920 (Einstein  was born in 1879) that it was the splendor of Nature and of music that turned the trick.

Einstein himself said his faith grew from his realization of “the nothingness of the hopes and strivings which chases most men restlessly through life,” and his recognition of religion “as the first way out.”

Max Jammer, the author of “Einstein and Religion,” says that “such an attitude toward life can hardly have been entertained by a young boy,” and that Einstein’s recollection must have been a projection from his later years to his youth. Never mind that Albert Einstein was probably not your average young boy.

At the age of 12, Einstein lost his religion. “I reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true,” he recalled. “The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking…” From that day forward, Einstein never attended a church service or prayed in a synagogue.

In place of “the religious paradise of youth,” Einstein said, there was the huge world outside, “which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking. The contemplation of this world beckoned like a liberation.”

Having cast off the trappings of religion, Einstein gained a mature religiosity. “I am of the opinion,” he said, “that all the finer speculations in the realm of science spring from a deep religious feeling, and that without such feeling they would not be fruitful.”

Ten years later, in 1940, Einstein famously declared, “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”

Einstein was deeply influenced by the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who put forward a system based on a superior intelligence behind the curtains of existence, so to speak – an intelligence that hinted at itself through the beauty and majesty of nature. “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists,” Einstein said, “not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.”

Like another philosopher, Immanuel Kant, Einstein thought that the world – or our experiences of it – could be put in order by thinking about it. “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility,” he said, a somewhat mysterious statement in itself. Did he mean that men are not smart enough to understand it now, but one day might be?

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious,” Einstein wrote. “It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead…It was the experience of mystery—even if mixed with fear—that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds—it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.”