The World As I See It

In the summer of 1950, a child died. The father wrote that his son's death had shattered "the very structure of [his] existence" and that his life had "become an almost meaningless void." In a desperate attempt to find meaning in the cruel finality of death, he wrote to Albert Einstein and asked him whether the brilliant scientist could say something that might "assuage the pain of an unquenchable longing, an intense craving, an unceasing love for my darling son. The grieving father had just read Einstein's The World As I See It, in which the scientist wrote, "Any individual who should survive his physical death is beyond my comprehension . . . such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls". Coming from the mind of one of the world's greatest thinkers, these words dashed any hope the anguished man had of finding meaning in his son's death. He wrote to Einstein, "Am I to believe that my beautiful darling child has been forever wedded into dust, that there was nothing within him which has defied the grave and transcended the power of death?"

This father's pain is known to all of us. Most people have experienced the terrible finality of the loss of a loved one, and some have faced their own impending deaths.This is what Einstein wrote to the grieving father: "A human being is part of the whole world, called by us 'Universe,' a part of limited time and space." He went on to say that thinking of ourselves as in any way separate from that universe and/or walled off from the other persons and things composing that universe is a "kind of optical delusion" of self-consciousness. He added that "striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion," a message quite the opposite of the religion of the holy self.

Einstein advised the mourning father to try to overcome his view of a separate existence for himself, his son, or any being as "the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind." His use of the word "attainable" hints at the idea that our search for meaning and benefit in loss has its limits. It is not so much the answer we find but the search that is important, and Einstein's advice to consider the view of infinite connection and the self as an illusion can be helpful in that search.