There are many quotes attributed to Albert Einstein circulating the Internet which he never said. The title of this article, “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one,” is one example. It appears to be adapted from this actual quote of Einstein in a letter written after the death of one of his friends to his widow:
Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
– Albert Einstein, Letter to Besso’s family (March 1955) following the death of Michele Besso, as quoted in Disturbing the Universe (1979) by Freeman Dyson Ch. 17 “A Distant Mirror”, p. 193
From <https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein#%22Autobiographical_Notes%22_(1949)>
Einstein’s theory of relativity stated that time is always relative to the observer. Time is only one of the four dimensions of space-time. It is a variable in a set of mathematical equations that can be manipulated along with distance and position. Therefore time and space are dependent on math, which exists as an idea in the realm beyond the material, where information and physical laws originate, which we call Mind. It is Mind that provides the persistence on the Universe.
If you step back, outside of space-time, then every moment exists simultaneously as frames in a three-dimensional movie. But each observer exists only in a single point of space-time. Everything we experience comes through our senses, but sensation is a mental experience.
We can hook a camera and microphones to a computer so that it will receive visual and auditory data in numeric form, but it will not have the sensation of seeing and hearing that we conscious entities have. Even if that computer runs AI software to perform image recognition or speech to text conversion, it is not seeing and hearing like we are, it is just performing math and calculating a result, no different that adding up a column of numbers in a spreadsheet. And you can put on a virtual reality (VR) headset and have a computer-generated experience that feels to us like reality. So it is not the material world that creates reality, it is our minds that provide our experience of reality.
But what are our minds? Mind is not the same as our brains. Our brains are complex biological computers comprised of neurons wired together to represent the material world. But you can’t feel your neurons firing, you have an overarching conscious experience which is more than just chemical reactions happening between synapses. You are having an immersive four dimensional experience of reality.
If we accept the premise that there is a mental realm where numbers and forms and math and ideas and truth exist separate from the material world and our individual minds are part of this realm, then it is Mind which is the true source of reality. And Mind is beyond the physical world and therefore has no limits. Is there a limit to imagination? No. So Mind is like an infinite computer that can use unlimited amounts of data to generate the experience of reality for an unlimited number of individuals, each with their own viewpoint, but connected to a common reality.
So Reality is an illusion in that it is not what we think it is, the material world, it is beyond the material and made persistent and consistent through the infinite Mind.