When I started writing I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein, my plan was to trace how Eastern religious and philosophical traditions had shaped Albert Einstein’s spirituality. I’d been deeply immersed in Eastern spirituality all my adult life, and just by looking at some of Einstein’s quotes, it was obvious that the East had influenced his thinking. As I began conducting research for the book, I discovered plenty of direct evidence for this.
Einstein had admired Mahatma Gandhi above any other living human being and studied his writings in detail. He’d also met repeatedly with the Nobel Prize–winning mystical poet Rabindranath Tagore, who told Einstein about the nondualistic pantheism of the Upanishads, some of the oldest and most sacred scriptures of India. And Einstein owned not one but five different editions of the ancient Chinese Taoist text Tao Te Ching—one of which he highlighted more heavily than any other book in his large personal library, which totaled some 2,400 volumes.
