Einstein’s Greatest Discovery

“The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we ever expected them to be.”

 

– Alain de Botton

Albert Einstein is known to many as the crazy haired Nobel Prize winning Theoretical Physicist.

His contribution to mastering the hard sciences took form through developing equations and culminated in discovering the theory of relativity.

I am curiously inclined towards dabbling in the “soft” sciences, more then the “hard” sciences.

It is this curiosity towards developing my mind which led to my reading of Einstein’s letter to his daughter Lieserl.

Upon reading his letter, I found myself profoundly teary, mentally engaged, and deeply reflective. I was inspired to write this article.

In his letter to his daughter, Einstein was so shocked that his new discovery was NOT science, that he made a written request pretty much forbidding the unleashing of his letter to the world for decades!

What on earth did one of the smartest men in the history of the universe discover that was so phenomenal, that he earnestly did not believe the WORLD was ready to UNDERSTAND?

 I have included the entirety of the letter he wrote in this article.

The letter from Albert Einstein to his daughter Lieserl

on

The Universal Force of Love

“When I proposed the theory of relativity, very few understood me, and what I will reveal now to transmit to mankind will also collide with the misunderstanding and prejudice in the world.

I ask you to guard the letters as long as necessary, years, decades, until society is advanced enough to accept what I will explain below.

There is an extremely powerful force that, so far, science has not found a formal explanation to. It is a force that includes and governs all others, and is even behind any phenomenon operating in the universe and has not yet been identified by us.

This universal force is LOVE.

When scientists looked for a unified theory of the universe they forgot the most powerful unseen force. Love is Light, that enlightens those who give and receive it. Love is gravity, because it makes some people feel attracted to others. Love is power, because it multiplies the best we have, and allows humanity not to be extinguished in their blind selfishness. Love unfolds and reveals. For love we live and die. Love is God and God is Love.

This force explains everything and gives meaning to life. This is the variable that we have ignored for too long, maybe because we are afraid of love because it is the only energy in the universe that man has not learned to drive at will.

To give visibility to love, I made a simple substitution in my most famous equation. If instead of E = mc2, we accept that the energy to heal the world can be obtained through love multiplied by the speed of light squared, we arrive at the conclusion that love is the most powerful force there is, because it has no limits.

After the failure of humanity in the use and control of the other forces of the universe that have turned against us, it is urgent that we nourish ourselves with another kind of energy…

If we want our species to survive, if we are to find meaning in life, if we want to save the world and every sentient being that inhabits it, love is the one and only answer.

Perhaps we are not yet ready to make a bomb of love, a device powerful enough to entirely destroy the hate, selfishness and greed that devastate the planet.

However, each individual carries within them a small but powerful generator of love whose energy is waiting to be released.

When we learn to give and receive this universal energy, dear Lieserl, we will have affirmed that love conquers all, is able to transcend everything and anything, because love is the quintessence of life.

I deeply regret not having been able to express what is in my heart, which has quietly beaten for you all my life. Maybe it’s too late to apologize, but as time is relative, I need to tell you that I love you and thanks to you I have reached the ultimate answer!”

Your father,
Albert Einstein

How tender and beautiful is this love letter from a father to his daughter?

How special and rare it is for any of us to find someone who loves us, for we are not the easiest creatures to love.

Love is challenging. We get objectified and crucified by others in our search for it, and when we finally accept it is not for us, it finds us. And the truth is always that love resides somewhere within us to begin with.

We cannot find love without loving ourselves first.

We must love ourselves and trust ourselves to want to do the right thing by ourselves and for others. It is always our choices which inform others about who we are.

The time to do the right thing is always now.

Our now is already the future because the past, present and future exist simultaneously for all of us. The only way we can change anything is if we adapt to reality instead of denying its existence. And in order to adapt, we have to identify what our barriers have been to love and work at removing them.

Love may be blind, deaf, and mute, but we can only hope if we become enmeshed that the other is not going to lead us into a world of pain and suffering. Self-love will come to the rescue which is why it is important to love ourselves.

Einstein identified the difficulty man had in being unable to fathom why love was uncontrollable. It is too great a concept for us to comprehend. How does this intangible thing exist?

Such an insane and irrational thing love is, and yet, we extend ourselves in ways which challenge our ideas of comfort.

Einstein was flooded with a tsunami of blissful feelings. It was the awareness of love inside his heart which first alerted him to its existence. This feeling in his heart expanded to encompass his entire being, and from inside, it grew outside himself.

Love must happen inside us first before we can love anyone else. It really is true that self-love is the beginning and end of all kinds of love.

Without self-love, we would be trusting an abuser to stop abusing us. Without self-love, we would allow ourselves to be neglected and emotionally abandoned. We have to understand and learn how to love ourselves so we can protect ourselves when others cannot. 

And this is important to think about too because people must be in touch with their own intuition, and be willing to open their hearts to us voluntarily.

Love is a willingness to care about others and give them the kindness and tenderness they seek from being in a relationship. It is many things; compromises for the greater good, sacrifices for the other, and clarity in respect to how people treat each other.

We can’t make anyone feel something they don’t feel or do what they don’t want to do.

Love and trust are concepts which are both intangible and tangible. 

We have to believe in love more than doubt love and that is really all any of us can do.

As a writer, I experience what I experience, and I reflect to share my awareness to let others know that they are not alone. I write the way I do as a woman because I don’t think I can write like a man – unless I write as a very flamboyant gay man. *That is another topic and has nothing to do with the deep and meaningful things I have tried to extract from Einstein’s letter.

Why was Einstein concerned people wouldn’t understand his profound discovery of the universal greatness of the energetic power of love?

People hurt people when they don’t reflect enough, and hurt people hurt people who didn’t even cut them.

Past a certain age, everyone has been damaged by someone who claimed to love them. Sometimes our immaturity or choosing immature people caused someone pain. Is it I or they? Is it we or you? Is it me?

We have to answer these kind of questions for ourselves. 

And sometimes the answers become clearer to us when we can say, THIS IS ALL THAT I AM!! Fearless and Fearful, Trusting and Distrusting, Calm and Chaotic, Forgiving and Unforgiving, Energetic and Tired, Strong and Vulnerable, Cruel and Kind, Sensitive and Insensitive, Honest and Dishonest, Proud and Humble, Grateful and Ungrateful, Angry and Good Natured, Happy and Unhappy, Confident and Insecure, Controlling and Compliant…the list is endless really.

The truth is, for every good quality we have in us, we also have corresponding traits which are our “darkness” or, our wounds.

Perfection is impossible to find in ourselves and in others.

 

It is through knowing who we are and expressing our vulnerabilities and weaknesses to another, where the intangible nature of love becomes tangible.

We need to keep expressing our truth and vulnerabilities, more than once, because it is through repetition that our love is able to develop, grow, multiply and mature.

“Love is power, because it multiplies the best we have, and allows humanity not to be extinguished in their blind selfishness. Love unfolds and reveals. For love we live and die. Love is God and God is Love.”

The absence or promise of love is sometimes used by people to punish or control others. Sometimes love requires us to extend the olive branch and this is not always “equal”. When we start to calculate and measure actions of love, we can invite negativity instead of positivity.

An absence of negativity is not an indicator love is “real” because real things are not always pleasant, they are REAL.

We can listen without prejudice to understand another person’s perspective. 

Love isn’t meant to be something which is manipulated, hidden, or something to be ashamed about, but expressed. It isn’t feminine or masculine, it just IS.

We do things for others out of love because it is what we want to do, to see our loved ones happy. It isn’t in the spirit of love to punish people or control people, and the balance between individual interests and shared interests is something which has to approached diplomatically. Easier said, written, and read then done. 

“This force explains everything and gives meaning to life. This is the variable that we have ignored for too long, maybe because we are afraid of love because it is the only energy in the universe that man has not learned to drive at will.”

In closing my article I wanted to end on a tear jerker. Love requires a softness, a tenderness and a kind of vulnerability not so easily expressed. And yet, for the sentimental among us, despite the tragedy of our past, we find ourselves removing the stitches covering our damaged hearts, and letting our inner light shine.

“The softer your heart is the less that your past is forming your present and your future. When there is openness and softness of heart, what forms the present and the future is not your past but the reality of your own being.”

— John de Ruiter

Thanks for reading,

Natasha Stone