“Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better”
Photo by Midjourney copyright N. B. Hankes
Albert Einstein once wrote, “Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.” But what did he mean by this? We can only begin to make sense of his words by considering them through his unique perspective as a scientist and philosopher. Along the way, we’ll learn about Taoism—an ancient Chinese philosophy built on the lessons found in nature.
Three Human Truths Albert Einstein Learned From Nature
Albert Einstein dedicated his life to understanding the nature of reality. Or rather, understanding nature at its most fundamental. So it makes sense why he would recommend others look into nature as a way of understanding deeper truths.
While Einstein looked deep into these fundamental laws of nature and discovered things like space-time, photons, and relativity, the writings he left behind indicate he also found solace and moral lessons in these very same laws of nature. Taoist philosophers extracted many life lessons from nature. The way water effortlessly flows around obstacles in its path, for example, offers a powerful life lesson for humanity. “Be like water” the famous martial artist and actor Bruce Lee once said—shapeless, formless and therefore able to respond exactly as the present moment demands.
Nature operates by a set of rules
We’ve all heard about the laws of nature. These are the rules that dictate how matter and energy interact. Gravity. Heat. Attraction. These laws control everything we experience, from the feeling of the sun on our skin to the way the molecules in our food provide us nourishment. We all know Einstein’s name because he discovered more than one of these laws.
These laws, both Einstein and Taoists believe, also control human nature. Humans complicate and convolute these things with all our words, emotions, and clever rationalizations. But behind all our explanations we are nothing more than energy and matter—and all these are acted on by the same laws of nature as everything else around us.
We can catch a glimpse of this perspective in Einstein’s musings on human nature: “Everything that the human race has done and thought is concerned with the satisfaction of deeply felt needs and the assuagement of pain.“(1) Like his scientific pursuits, Einstein looked toward the underlying causes rather than getting lost in the details. He couldn’t help but apply this way of thinking to human nature.
Humans are insignificant—on a cosmic scale
It’s hard to keep things in perspective. A flat tire can ruin a day. Money troubles can keep us up at night. And if we think of only ourselves, that’s understandable. It’s all we have to think about. All our energy is concentrated inward. However, when we step back and view our life from a difference perspective, we can take some of that inward energy and point it outward.
Einstein spent his days pondering the Universe. That’s a cosmic perspective. And he sounds like a love drunk poet when he wrote about this perspective: “The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought. Individual existence impresses him as a sort of prison and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole.”(1)
Taoists point toward the Tao as the creative principle of the Universe. Everything arises from the Tao. Both the good and the bad. It’s this perspective that offers Taoists peace.
Embrace the mystery of life to find your joy
There are mysteries in the Universe. This can cause us existential dread and doubt. Or, with a shift in our perspective, this uncertainty can bring us delight. There are still truths to discover, still natural laws to explore. This is how Einstein felt. And it drive his research. Einstein wrote: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.” (2)
But not all truths can be understood by the human mind. Privately, Albert Einstein’s letters show that he worried his quest to unify electromagnetism and gravity was ultimately impossible for the limited mind of man. He never did solve it, even after half a lifetime of work. Taoist philosophy admits as much: “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal Name. The unnamable is the eternally real.“(3) This may sound cryptic if this is your first time reading a line from the Tao te Ching, but it’s perfectly intelligible: This line highlights that the ultimate reality, the Tao, transcends human understanding and language itself.
Like Einstein believed, this should encourage openness to mystery rather than a need for definitions and certainty.
Sources
Einstein, Albert. “Religion and Science.” New York Times Magazine, November 9, 1930 pp 1-4.
Fadiman, Clifton. “Living Philosophies.” Doubleday, 1990.
Tzu, Lao. “Tao Te Ching: A New English Version.” Translated by Stephen Mitchell. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006.