Einstein the Hindus and I

by Ruth Salles

It seems to me that most people imagine God as a kind of a different being, but as if he were half human. When I was very young, the idea of God as something spherical came to me, because the sphere is the most perfect shape there is. So I contemplated this idea statically and it seemed to me that the sphere was a point, a focus of light in the center of space, and that, out of a desire to expand (and to expand is to love) emitted the universe, which remained as if on the periphery. of a great sphere, as a reflected image of this focus of light, of this Primordial Force. Well, years later, when I read a little book for laymen called “The Universe and Doctor Einstein”, I found there this idea of a universe as on the periphery of a kind of sphere, and that this universe is expanding and then there will be a retraction. Reading then about the Hindus, I learned that in the god Brahma, the universe is his breath. He breathes it out, then breathes it in, and then there is a stop called pralaya. I found this similarity between the Hindus and Einstein strange. I liked this idea so much that I felt like a reflected speck of the expansion of the primordial Force, the universe being like a mirror of that Force. Years ago, telling this to some grandchildren, a 14-year-old granddaughter said, “Grandma, I like your idea of a round God.”