The Cultural Weight of Einstein's Left Brain

How Einstein re-modelled Reality in a Left Brain Hall of Mirrors

Contrary to popular modern myths, the physicist Albert Einstein was not “bad at math” and needed help for the calculations that he had intuitions and intimations for, he was instead extraordinarily gifted from a young age and reached a University Level of Math with integrals and differential calculus by the age of 14. At the age of 16 he passed the “Maturity Exam” in Switzerland with top grades 6 in both math and physics.

At the same time, there also seems to be a clear strain of left hemisphere preferences for Einstein in other areas of knowledge like philosophy and spiritual philosophy as well. His favorite philosopher was Immanuel Kant, perhaps one of the most left brained categorical philosophers in the modern tradition, and Einstein’s spirituality was closely aligned with that of Spinoza, which has traces of characteristic left brain attributes of control and lack of humility for boundaries and the mysteries beyond our understanding.

If we combine these aspects with an overall aspiration to capture the fabric of cosmos and reality in mathematical equations as in the Special and General Theory of Relativity, the tint of a left brained and somewhat unbalanced cosmology quickly starts to emerge.

The problem with the nature of this body of work is two-fold, one is the lack of internal domain awareness when Einstein starts to mistake the models for reality, and the second, and perhaps at times much more serious, is when the foundations of this work is adopted by science and the culture as a form of deeper truth, instead of models and approximations - as this subsequently will “tilt” the collective brain into the larger Hall of Mirrors and Illusions of the Left Brain. The culture then gradually erodes its ability to stay in contact with, or even understand reality, and will increasingly prefer the artificial structures and models of its own “world” instead.

And then - the Myth of Phaethon is played out once more.

A new balance could return with adopting a moderate humility and acknowledgement that Science is models, and there are still things we don’t understand, in the big Mystery of Life, and the Universe.