Looking at the Lives of the Masters: Einstein & Da Vinci
(This is an excerpt from a University Of Metaphysical Sciences course at www.umsonline.org, please feel free to visit the school website)
Homer, Aristotle,
Confucius, Dane, Newton, Milton…most of them did not speak of their
own creating as a subject of special interest. Of course, there were exceptions.
Da Vinci, for example kept detailed notes and observations about his own
creative process and the creative process in general. For the most part,
it is not until the early nineteenth century, with the romantics, that we
begin to get hints of self-awareness in the creative process. It is not
until the twentieth century that an awareness of the creative process becomes
a defined self-concern. This can be tied to the general twentieth century
discovery of the unconscious mind and the kind of attention that went into
the process of creativity, along with every other kind of mental activity.
Because we lack a definitive
way of categorizing and quantifying any type of mental activity, let alone
that of inspiration and the creative process, it seems prudent to look at
two specific and exceptional creatives in detail and as much through their
own eyes and words as possible.
Einstein
In his book, How to Think Like Einstein, Scott Thorpe analyzes the creative process through his particular attention on Einstein’s life, words and works. Einstein qualifies as a remarkable, creative individual for several reasons. He was best known for his Theory of Relativity, a formula for which can be recognized by almost 100% of the educated public. We will also look at a bit of his work that is from the very earliest part of his life, pre World War II, when he was still a young man. However, it is his life afterward that is indelibly printed in our memory: the ruffled white hair and thick moustache on a kindly grandfather face. His major contribution already accomplished, he became and remained an icon. Why? Because he was present. His creative outlook was not confined to a field of physics. His was actually a creative outlook on the problems affecting our sense of God and the Universe, specializing solving mathematical problems. This kept him busily engaged by think tanks, universities, presidents and prime ministers who continually sought his view on a wide range of universal problems.
A second reason
for Einstein’s continued public focus is that he exhibited almost
all of the characteristics of a true creative type: he was compassionate,
impassioned, caring, generous, reclusive, full of humor, etc… In
short, he was a true individual, a thinker independent of political correctness
and convention, an original. An original is always interesting and unpredictable,
especially in times of fear experienced through the advent of wars, McCarthyism
and so forth.
One of Einstein’s first motifs is that if you can’t solve a
problem, it’s probably because you are stuck in the rules. Though
he may not have ever stated this, he practiced it. He assiduously avoided
“rule-ruts.” Remember the ruts in the road that led to modern
track gages for trains? Rules are not always bad, but they’re like
railroad tracks. Sometimes, in order to get where we want to go, we need
to get off the tracks. The trains just don’t run there.
As an example, we can look at Einstein’s famous theory and its discovery.
At the time, Einstein was a kid just out of college. He claimed that most
people thought about time and space and learned about it as children, but
that his development had been retarded and he hadn’t started thinking
about time and space until he was an adult…and by that time he had
the tools (the mathematical knowledge) to play with his ideas. Children
may ask “why” a certain thing has to be a certain way, or why
a certain thing acts a certain way, but they do not have the tools (in this
case, mathematical skills) to satisfy their own curiosity. They rely on
the verbal assurance of an adult, who may or may not have considered the
problem themselves and is most likely just repeating conventional wisdom.
At this point, Einstein was a postal patent officer and did physics in his
spare time for fun. E=mc2 is a solution for, or at least a way of looking
at, what is actually a very old problem: why light always seems to travel
at the same speed relative to any position. (If this doesn’t seem
such a big deal, think about cars on a highway. The closer they are to you,
the faster they seem to travel). Newton, in discovering and explaining his
own ideas hundreds of years earlier, had declared that time was absolute.
It did not run faster or slower. It made perfect sense, and it certainly
helped his equations to work out. For hundreds of years, this “truth”
was accepted. Einstein simply imagined that time could run faster
or slower, and that started the whole process.
Through this imagining of a possibility other than what everyone else took
for granted, Einstein demonstrated another of his particular flairs and
a general characteristic for unlocking creativity: Breaking the Rules. “Rules”
can be, as discussed earlier, anything from convention to actual rules governing
a particular set of thinking as in, say, economics or marketing. The story
of the Gordian Knot is one that appealed to Einstein. During the time of
Alexander the Great (before he was, “The Great”) there was a
certain legend or prophecy around the Gordian Knot, which was a very complex
weave of ropes…sort of like a Rubik’s Cube of rope. It was
said that, “He who unties the Gordian Knot shall rule the world.”
Many great minds and leaders amused themselves in the attempt, much like
the Arthurian legend of the Sword in the Stone, in which every passerby
attempted to pull the sword free. When Alexander learned of the Knot, he
traveled to the city and studied its complexities for sometime. Then he
drew his sword and sliced the ropes, proclaiming himself destined to rule
the world. Alexander, like Einstein and other creatives, simply refused
to follow a particular set of rules.
As an experiment, gage your reactions to the breaking the rules. There is
probably a mixture of “You can’t do that,” to “That’s
cheating” or “That’s not fair.” The truth is, in
order to creatively succeed, you will need to break rules. In everyday life,
we have to: Identify the Rules. We all have them and live by them. See which
of those are yours and which you’ve merely adopted or accepted. Then
you must see if they’re valid. In Einstein’s case, he decided
that Newton’s established rules weren’t valid for him. He began
with an assumption, and that assumption was itself a violation of one of
Newton’s very constants of physics, the idea that time is linear and
unchanging.
The peculiar, admirable and exemplary thing about Einstein that makes him
such an example of creativity is that he rarely accepted any rules without
testing them. He applied this perspective to almost everything in his life.
As he said, “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent
one.” He was equally persistent in not accepting “reality”
as an established fact.
Once one has determined and examined the rules there are other possibilities.
One can violate the rules. In this case, look to the American rebels during
Revolutionary war. They violated the established rules of battle. They refused
to march on parade or to bring units face to face with the enemy on an open
battlefield. Instead, having learned from the Native Americans, they hid
behind trees and rocks, dressed in camouflage colors instead of bright uniforms
and other equally abhorrent violations of the existing code of ethics. To
us today, their behavior makes perfect sense, as it usually does with Einstein
and others when the strategy is successful. It seems laughable and ludicrous
that anyone would stand still to be shot at during a military campaign.
It is, in fact, a complete violation of the primal instinct of self-preservation,
which only illustrates further how entrenched and destructive a set of rules
can become to a social mindset. The British and other modern powers of the
day were outraged over the behavior of the colonists, especially the lack
of war manners and etiquette.
Another possibility is to circumvent the rule. That is, go around the rule
but change the consequences. If you jump out of an airplane, carry a parachute.
When you’re having financial problems, negotiate with the utility
company, or find aid that is not necessarily monetary to shore up other
needs and free cash flow. Successful entrepreneurs are extremely adept at
this, but most people do not consider alternatives (like negotiating) simply
because it’s not part of their own rulebook, so to speak.
An interesting note is that Einstein’s theory was almost proven wrong.
An eclipse was due to occur and testing was going to be done which would
have invalidated Einstein’s theory. The problem wasn’t so much
his theory as it was that the (then) current technical abilities would not
have been able to prove him correct. However, WWI delayed the experiment
several years, which gave him the opportunity to amend a few minor but significant
things in the theory. When an eclipse next happened and technology advanced,
which set the conditions to test his theory, it was then proven to be correct.
In the first instance, the others would have demonstrated only what they
were expecting to see, relying on Newton’s “constant”
in the very conditions of their experiment. They did not yet have the proper
perspective even to be able to “see” the possibility that Einstein
had presented.
Along the way, we should simply ignore inconvenient facts. As Thomas Edison
said, “Hell, there are no rules—we’re trying to accomplish
everything.” One example of this is of Miranda Stuart, who became
a doctor when women were barred from studying medicine. She wanted to study
medicine, so she simply enrolled as though she were a male. She checked
the “M” box, so to speak. She didn’t disguise herself
or attempt to mask the fact. She just ignored the rule that said women couldn’t
study medicine, and circumvented the rule by marking that she was a man.
When she arrived in class everyone just assumed that she should be there
because she was there, and when it was investigated, the “Rule”
for why women could not study medicine had already been disproved by the
fact that she already was studying medicine.
“It’s not that I’m smart, it’s just that I stay
with the problems longer,” said Einstein. One of Einstein’s
major focuses in his work and his thinking about the world was that we have
to find the right problem. Unless we can correctly identify the
problem, we are incapable of asking the right questions that will lead us
to a solution. In regards to his own work, Einstein noted that they [Science]
had always asked, “How can nature appear to act that way when we know
that it can’t?” His question was, “What would nature be
like if it did act the way we are observing it to act.” In a way,
we all tend to look at an anomaly and try to pull it into line with our
other thinking, when in fact, it is the anomaly itself that illustrates
something wrong with the sum of our previous thinking. Just as Columbus
could see an anomaly in the water current charts and maps and assumed that
some piece was missing out of the puzzle, so too should we ask the question
from that standpoint. The problem isn’t the anomaly. The anomaly exists.
The problem is the rest of the thinking that cannot account for the anomaly.
“Impossible only means you haven’t found the solution
yet.” At one point everyone knew that the world was flat;
that thunder and lighting were the gods at play or battle; that the sun
moved around the earth; that time was constant. It comes down to a mindset
of opening yourself to any and all possibilities and looking at obstacles
as an adventure instead of a problem. This may seem simplistic, and easier
said then done, especially when one is confronting a whole potato patch
full of problems in life. However, as a creative thinker, we can live an
adventure and adopt, as Einstein did, a “James Bond 007” solution
to problem solving. Einstein was willing to make very big mistakes, and
he did quite often. Ego will defeat you if you can’t take the defeat
as learning, and learn from it. “In order to be an immaculate member
of a flock of sheep, one must above all be a sheep oneself.” (Einstein)