A human being is part of the whole, called by us “Universe”, a part limited in space and time. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself of this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish the delusion but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.

I love this quote, a letter addressed by Albert Einstein to a Dr Marcus of the World Jewish Congress in 1950. I am grateful to this post, Einstein Sleuthing for drawing it to my attention and even more grateful for the sleuthing work she did in order to track down the original source. Because I think that is important.

I recently posted a quote out on Twitter that seems to have recently become attributed to Paulo Coelho or is simply quoted and misquoted as “Unknown”

A life without a cause is a life without effect

Now a simple piece of research showed the original to come from the 1968 film Barbarella, yet this seems to be wrongly attributed in many places.

Take the following

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond imagination. It is our light more than our darkness which scares us. We ask ourselves – who are we to be brilliant, beautiful, talented, and fabulous. But honestly, who are you to not be so?

so often attributed to Nelson Mandela and misquoted in the process, yet originally from Marianne Williamson in her book Return to Love.

It seems that quotations, particularly those seen as having religious or spiritual significance, are readily communicated via the internet without any sense of the need for verification of source or accuracy. While the sentiment may be “cool” and the poster may gain some kudos for saying “cool” things, I do think that this necessarily does the original source of the quotation a disservice. The Einstein quote I refer to above was used in one of those books so popular recently that attempts to link New Age philosophy with quantum speculation, but was misquoted as

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty

Now, this is utterly different to the original as sourced through primary sources (see blow). The wording is significantly changed to support the idea behind the book and to create an emphasis on Buddhist thought that simply didn’t exist in Einstein’s statement.

There appears to be some sort of metaphor here for the distortion of our original involvement in reality. That by a process of wish fulfillment and carelessness we create a perception of the world that becomes increasingly other than it really is. Not because the original is unbearable or povertised in anyway, but simply because we try to make it in the experience of out own image. Einstein was right… the striving to free oneself of this delusion is the one issue of true religion.

Einstein's letter

These are stories, a story being an aggragate of formal relations scattered in time… It has a certain sort of minuet or formal dance to it. It gets more complicated, because this is where we live. And the funny thing about living there is that we care about it intensely. And when the metaphors get jangled by unfortunate events… we get very upset. You see, the idea that there is any mental process going on that isn’t metaphoric is a very late, school-marmish idea. What they were killing each other over in the 14th Century was metaphor. Is the bread and wine the body and blood of Christ. The Catholics said yes. The Protestants said no; it stands for body and blood. And they felt that this was worth burning for. No one would ever think that now.

The set of mental processes – aesthetics, feeling, poetry perhaps – is precisely where dream is made… And the Protestant view of the sacrament was a policy decision to exclude from the church that part of the mind which is concerned with poetry, feeling, fantasy, metaphor, stories

Gregory Bateson, quoted on http://www.trismegistos.com/ as being from an audio tape