Was Einstein an Initiate?

This is something I've been wondering about since David Ovason's The Secret Zodiacs of Washington DC, where it's revealed what a prominent place a statue of Einstein occupies in the plan for that city - built according to the principles of Freemasonic astrology.

I asked a friend who is a Freemason, who told me there is no record of Einstein having belonged to any of the lodges in the places you might expect.

Then just the other day I came across this account of a dinner conversation in Berlin with a Lady Drummond-Hay, published in 1930:

'How do I work? I grope.' Expressively he spread his hands as if to seize the invisible. 'I have built my theories out of nothing, for there is nothing to guide me, no precedent. I experimented with every idea, no matter how ridiculous. I adventured passionately for years in trackless realms of imagination and possibility.. I asked Professor Einstein what role inspiration and spiritual revelation play in his scientific discoveries: 'Inspiration comes like a lightning flash at the end of the search. Years of work, experiment, disappointment, groping in the darkness, are suddenly illumined by one second of dazzling revelation. Success is a baptism of light.'

He explained to me that his famous theory is in three parts. 'Like three degrees of initiation, like the ancients,' he commented.

As I point in my book, if we discard commonly accepted, materialistic notions and are instead attentive to the realities of our mental processes, we will admit that we are not inventors of 'our own ideas'. They come to us. Sometimes they are very faint at first, difficult to discern and it's like trying to catch a butterfly or a shadow. At other times they come powering through our mental space and it's all we can do to ride them. 

Comments

[Al]

So where do these thoughts originate?

[jonathan black]

well ultimately they emanate from the great cosmic mind.

they are thought-beings, conscious though of course not in exaclty the same way we are conscious.

so on this model, it's not so much a matter of people thinking, as of thoughts peopling. We are their vehicle.

[Al]

Interesting.
Before I got into the chapter in The Secret Histories concerning how a full moon has its influence on people, I was aware of certain thoughts and feelings I kept gravitating to when I was out jogging one evening during a full moon. It felt like the thoughts were coming from somewhere external and not feelings or ideas buried within me, and now I know they most likely were external, but I chose not to be it's vehicle.