Steve Jobs: the paradoxical Spiritual Materialist Buddhist
November 11, 2011 Natasha Kertesz
Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs has given us some glimpses into the role and inspiration that Buddhism and his spiritual quest played in Jobs’ life. This has unleashed a flood of enquiry and fascination on the subject. The most successful businessman of his generation by far was a deeply complex personality. His inner motivations, and thought processes, are now firmly on the table for studies in leadership and business development, and extremely unorthodox they are too.
Japanese calligraphy - aesthetic zen simplicity Photo By Kanko from Nagasaki, Japan (Flickr)
The sixties counter culture has never had a finer cheerleader than Steve Jobs. It is indeed a sign of the times, and of a true generational shift, that it should be an old hippie who has created what is, or at least has at times been, the biggest company by market capitalization in the world.
A very clear picture emerges of a man of great contrasts. An early quest for enlightenment and a lifelong appreciation for Zen Buddhism on the one hand, and bullying egotistical tendencies on the other.
“I’m about fifty – fifty on believing in God” Jobs tells Isaacson. “I really want to believe that something survives, that maybe your consciousness endures.”
“For most of my life, I’ve felt there must be more to our existence than meets the eye,” Jobs said.
This is from the man whose final enigmatic words (according to his sister) are now being deciphered as having deep existential meaning:
“Oh wow Oh wow. Oh wow.”
But for all the access that Isaacson had to the great inventor, there remains a somewhat incomplete picture of his spirituality and his inner philosophy. What is strikingly clear however is that Jobs’ spirituality was full of paradoxes – which is perhaps quite apt given his enduring interest in Zen Buddhism which is well known for its somewhat enigmatic koans and paradoxes.
Counterculture
“I came of age at a magical time,” said Jobs in the biography. That is certainly an understatement. San Francisco and the Bay Area in the late sixties is certainly the stuff of legend. It was a brief, yet pivotal time, in the evolution of global consciousness.
Jobs was a child of the sixties, and proud of it fully embracing his hippie past. He had no need to feel embarrassed about it in any way, shape or form – and why should he be? Less self-assured people would have tried to reinvent history (“I never inhaled”) and pretend that they had had nothing to do with it.
But not Jobs. He dropped acid, smoked dope, lived in a commune for a time and became a vegan (even at times a fruitarian – now that is pretty way out there). He developed a lifelong love for Bob Dylan and very much took to one of the hippie bibles: Be Here Now by Baba Ram Dass. You can’t get much more of a card carrying hippie that that!
So how did this inform this journey to becoming the man who created a company from his parents’ garage and which in the run up to the raising of the Federal Debt limit had more cash than the US Federal Government’s credit line?
The desire for self-actualisation was a part of that magical time, albeit that it many ways its expression was somewhat naïve.
Drugs are a lazy way to seek this compared to the grueling path of meditation. But a sustained meditation practice can lead to the experience of different realms of consciousness. Both were part of Jobs’ life, and this search is completely embedded within Apple’s culture. It is, you could say, part of Apple’s DNA.
Having the vision to see Apple products as the central hub in connecting different strands of our lives and creating a demand for products we never thought we needed, was in a sense “blowing our minds” – a universal hippie desire back the sixties whether it was in relation to dropping acid, listening to White Rabbit stoned, or reading Jack Kerouac’s On the Road or Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception. A new level of consciousness was there to be experienced, and in that era this was de rigueur.
“Taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he’d done in his life” says the biography. This was something Jobs told John Markoff, the New York Times technology reporter and author of a book entitled What the Dormouse Said which investigates “the psychedelic roots of the computer revolution”.
“People who had never taken acid would never fully understand me” Jobs is quoted as having said.
India
Well if you can’t understand Jobs if you’ve never taken acid, then you probably won’t be able to understand him if you have never been on a spiritual quest to India either, and felt compelled at some point in your life to read Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda. Jobs read this book again and again throughout his life.
In 1974 aged 19, following in the footsteps of the Beatles, and George Harrison in particular, Jobs hit the road in India shortly after dropping out of college. Like countless other westerners of that time, he was searching for meaning. Wandering around northern India for seven months was a pivotal experience for him.
He even had his head shaved by a sadhu (holy man) in an ashram in the Himalayan foothills.
One amusing anecdote is how he got into a shouting match with a village woman who was mixing water in the milk she was selling. This will be a familiar tale to any Westerner who has travelled for an extended period of time in India. We have all had that shouting match – not with the same woman or for the same reason, but we have all experienced the craziness of India and at one time or another lost our cool with someone who has had to take the brunt of our pent up frustrations. It is quite simply a universal archetypal experience for western travelers there. Westerners need to learn to let go in order just to survive there.
India in the 1970s was another planet. A remarkable and incredible country, it was the source of inspiration for many young westerners yearning to understand life through another perspective.
The intensely private Steve Jobs collaborated with Walter Isaacson on his warts-and-all biography, partly he said so that his children would one day come to understand him better. I was much taken with this explanation, as interestingly I have two dear friends both of whom went to India in their formative years to pursue their spiritual searches and became greatly inspired by Eastern Mysticism. They have both written their own autobiographies for the exact same reason. Neither will ever become famous.
I have read both autobiographies and have been profoundly moved by their journeys which are in many ways every bit as heroic as Jobs’ journey, even if they have not impacted the world in quite the same way. Nevertheless their story is part of the cultural backdrop in which Steve Jobs’ formative life was lived out.
One of the lessons Jobs brought back from India according to the book, was the notion that the intuition of Indians “is far more developed” and that “intuition is more powerful than intellect”. That learning would serve him well.
Buddhism
So what exactly was it in Buddhism that gave him this inner nourishment? For Buddhism was not just a trendy badge he wore, but obviously something of deep importance and significance to him. After he returned from India, he became a diligent student and practitioner of Zen Buddhism and spent days on end in long meditation retreats at Tassajara, a Zen monastery above Carmel in California, under the guidance of his teacher Kobun Chino Otogaw.
“I ended up spending as much time with him as I could,” Jobs told Isaacson. “Zen has been a deep influence in my life ever since.”
He had even considered the possibility of moving to a Zen monastery. His teacher reassured him that following a life in the business world was not incompatible with the desire to lead a spiritual life – perhaps this one piece of advice ensured that the world received the benefit of Jobs’ visionary products.
Why did Jobs observe his mind in this way? Why did he sit zazen on a cushion in an austere room “facing the wall”?
Observing the mind is a fundamental practice of many varieties of Buddhism. It is extraordinarily difficult to “tame the mind” – the mind is often described in Buddhist teachings as being rather like a wild monkey.
Watching the mind, seeing the mind as a process of thinking, and detaching from the content of the thought, labeling the activity as mere “thought”…… It sounds easy, but anyone who has tried to sit still knows just how intensely difficult this is.
Thought bubbles ……..arising and falling. To settle back and experience thought in this way is to become an observer, and to watch the observer merge with the observed.
Creating the space within to awaken to the fact that this endless succession of thought does not represent a stable sense of an identity – a “self”. For basic Buddhist teaching is that the notion of the “self” is an illusion that causes suffering in the face of change, disease, old age, and death.
Meditation
It is within a cultivation of mindfulness that this unfolding knowledge takes place. Watching the breath endlessly – in, out, in, out, in, out. Losing track, and starting afresh, again and again and again. It is both utterly boring and yet acutely fascinating at the same time. The entire universe can be found there.
The meditation practice of cultivating mindfulness is not for the faint hearted. That is to say, it is about developing a moment-to-moment awareness in everything that you do, so it is not just about being able to be aware just when you are sitting cross legged on a zafu cushion, but also whilst walking, eating, doing the washing up or whatever else you might find yourself doing.
For anyone who has attended a 10 day vipassana meditation retreat will know just how hard it is to watch the endless in out, in out, in out, in out, in out, rising falling, rising falling, rising falling. The bell rings after 45 minutes and you realize that you’ve been completely un-present. You may have been wrapped up in fantasy or anger or memory for the entire time bar about 5 or 6 breaths if you are lucky. You would most likely have been absolutely anywhere except present in the moment which is what you were striving to achieve in the first place.
Out of this space unfolds deep realizations about our lives and how we live. This knowledge must be experienced to be truly understood. Reading about it in a book may be inspiring, but it will not have the same impact. It is one thing to talk about how succulent a mango tastes, and to write about it, but it is not the real deal unless you actually eat one.
There is something that sets people who have undertaken intense meditation practice apart. The experience is quite unlike any other.
How can you describe meditator’s knee pain to someone who has never meditated? A pain in your knees that may arise after you have been sitting cross legged on a cushion without moving for over half an hour. You are trying to watch it, to observe it without any judgment. You have been told that the pain is an example of impermanence (anicca) and that it will pass. So you watch it but it just gets worse. You are trying to observe it without any aversion or grasping, just to observe it, but damn it won’t go away. OK knee pain I’ll watch you just as long as you go away. But trying to cut a deal with it just doesn’t work and you get wrapped up in suffering. Damn just go away knee pain. That’s about the best that most people get most of the time in trying to watch the wretched pain without any judgment – just lots and lots of aversion.
It is an intense experience and almost certainly the previous paragraph will make absolutely no sense whatsoever to anyone who has not meditated. Steve Jobs would have understood it.
Undoubtedly if Jobs felt that no one who hadn’t taken acid could ever understand him, then so too it would be impossible to understand Jobs if you have never meditated.
Focusing the mind in meditation is profoundly difficult. But the practice most certainly helped Jobs in his business career.
Clear total focus is a hallmark of Jobs’ creations. It is as though the best Apple products suddenly appeared from nowhere, from emptiness (Sunyata). A computer suddenly emerges like no other before it. Ditto a phone.
According to the biography, Jobs believed that Zen meditation taught him to concentrate and ignore distractions, and to trust intuition and curiosity over analysis and preconceptions. This helped Jobs in being able to say “no” to many things so as to concentrate instead on just a few. “In order to make the iPod really easy to use, we needed to limit what the device itself would do” said Jobs in the biography.
“Innovation is saying ‘no’ to 1,000 things,” Jobs told Businessweek in 2004.
Zen
Trusting the intuition and curiosity is known in Zen terminology as “beginner’s mind”. This concept is well set out in the book Zen Mind Beginner’s Mindby Shunryu Suzuki-roshi (who was the founding teacher of the San Francisco Zen Center) which Isaacson reveals to have been a formative influence on Jobs. It is commonly viewed as something of a spiritual classic – a guide to the essence of Zen and which advocates the slow and steady idea of mindfulness practice rather than the traditional zen concept of life-changing flashes of satori – enlightenment.
He stopped practicing Buddhism at the Haiku Zen Center after about a year in 1976 as Apple began to consume more and more of his time. But even if he no longer practiced intense meditation, or even meditated at all, the fact is that intense meditation leaves intense memories. If Jobs had had glimpses of emptiness, or of no-self then these would have remained with him even if he was not able to live from that space at all times (and let’s face it there are very few people who can).
He said that he practiced the meditation “only occasionally” in recent years.
Jobs we are told was delighted when meditation classes were offered at Apple some 12 years ago. He was particularly keen for Apple’s engineers to learn meditation as he felt that they would become more creative.
It is a very long way away from when I started working in the City of London in the 1980s and was embarrassed to reveal that I was a vegetarian at the time, let alone let on what I was doing for my holidays. When in fact I would be attending a meditation retreat, I would merely say that I was going to spend some time in the country with some friends – which was true insofar as the explanation went. I was convinced that revealing my true self at work would have finished my career before it had started. But nowadays, with examples like Steve Jobs, there would be absolutely no need to feel isolated from the mainstream in wanting to explore this path.
Kobun even officiated at Jobs’ wedding to Laurene Powell in a Zen Buddhist ceremony many years later in 1991 as the two had remained close.
Jobs would often give friends recordings of Kobun’s lectures. The paradox of Jobs spiritually trying to follow a path of non-grasping for material possessions, whilst following a business life of trying to instill this desire into others was not lost on him, though it seems to have been an awkward distinction. Life can indeed be full of paradoxes.
“Steve is very much Zen . . .You see it in his whole approach of stark, minimalist aesthetics, intense focus,” said Jobs’s longtime friend Daniel Kottke in the biography.
It is very obvious that the sense of Zen aesthetics runs through the Apple range of products. The culture that gave us the beauty of the Japanese tea ceremony has been infused into the Apple designs.
The beauty of calligraphy is a subject that Jobs alluded to in his Stanford commencement speech – an inspiring address which would do any meditation teacher giving a dharma talk proud.
Yes the book is at the same time filled with examples of Jobs’ mean, manipulative and even at times abusive behaviour.
“Unfortunately his Zen training never quite produced in him a Zen-like calm of inner serenity, and that, too, is part of his legacy” writes Isaacson.
The compassion and deep reverence for life that lies at the core of Buddhist teaching seems to have passed Jobs by at times, though not always. He was far from perfect – who is? Seeking inner purity after all does not always result in outer saintliness.
To set up a company like Apple, and infuse it with the brilliant vision of one person, and make it as successful as it is, probably requires a fairly massive dose of egocentric behaviour. It is difficult to imagine a meditation practitioner who had largely got rid of his ego (in the Buddhist sense, though not in the psycho-therapeutic sense) creating that kind of a company.
Zen is full of paradoxes
The concept of Right Livelihood is a well established Buddhist notion being part of the Noble Eightfold Path. It is the idea that one should earn one’s living with righteous work. One this level there is indeed much to be critical about. It seems that Jobs did not concern himself about workers conditions in Chinese factories where the Apple products were assembled. Some have argued that he is in part responsible for a spate of worker suicides last year at a factory called Foxconn that produces parts for iPhones.
The biography is full of examples of Jobs’ tendency to act in a dictatorial fashion, and to be mean and insulting. His put downs and tantrums were legendary. So he is no saint by any means. But he expected the same obsessive perfection from others as he demanded of himself.
Many have berated Jobs’ memory due to this lack of public charitable giving. He refused to join Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in their giving pledges – but so what? Whilst I hugely admire Gates and Buffett for this very reason, nobody should be forced into doing this for PR purposes. If someone is to give, then they should do so out of a purity of a desire to help. Maybe Jobs had this and kept it confidential. Maybe he did not. I do not know but I for one, will not stand in judgment on how he used his wealth, however much I would like to discover that he was quite philanthropic in his ways.
For the nature of human beings and human ethics collide here. On the one hand we expect someone who is ostensibly walking the path of the dharma (a divinely created natural order of things) to have completely eradicated all bad behaviour and be ostensibly righteous all of the time.
The other view, of course, is that we all retain human foibles, even Zen Masters.
When your teacher is revealed as imperfect and beset by the same trials and tribulations as the rest of us ordinary mortals it can be very tough to accept. When my first meditation teacher who inspired me greatly, became embroiled in personal problems, I was aghast. But just because someone is less than perfect does not necessarily prevent them from articulately and passionately pointing the way to truth.
There is perhaps no better example of this in the Buddhist world than Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche whose book, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, by common consent a spiritual classic, is revealed by Isaacson to have been another book which influenced the spiritual seeker within Steve Jobs.
Trungpa was a brilliant and very charismatic Tibetan lama who fled Tibet in the 1950s. Abandoning his robes he ended up in Boulder, Colorado where he set up the very influential Naropa Institute and became an influential figure in the counter-culture there. He became a teacher and sounding board to the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Ken Wilber. His writing is very direct and cuts easily through to the core of Buddhist teachings. It is a very accessible style.
Often credited as being the Tibetan teacher who most understood the western mind, Trungpa was a wild man, a womanizer who partied hard and led a fairly debauched life. He often drank to excess. But as a teacher he was quite brilliant.
The book is highly recommend for anyone that is seriously interested in spiritual pursuits, whether they are Buddhist or Christian or anything else. It highlights the trap which Trungpa calls spiritual materialism which is the impulse to refine the ego, when the ego itself is essentially empty. The ego can easily trick us into believing that we are being “spiritual”. Spiritual freedom lies in a true letting go of ourselves.
A very insightful blog post by Steve Siberman, makes the very pertinent point that Trungpa had a “profound respect for artists, poets, and musicians, whom he saw as fellow warriors against delusion (which he called “neurosis,” adopting the lexicon of Western psychology.)”
Siberman goes on to quote a passage of Trungpa’s, from an essay on “dharma art,” which could he said, have been “a blueprint for Jobs’ uncompromising vision for Apple”:
“Our attitude and integrity as artists are very important. We need to encourage and nourish the notion that we are not going to yield to the neurotic world. Inch by inch, step-by-step, our effort should wake people up through the world of art rather than please everyone and go along with the current. It might be painful for your clients or your audience to take the splinter out of their system, so to speak. It probably will be quite painful for them to accommodate such pressure coming from the artist’s vision. However, that should be done, and it is necessary. Otherwise, the world will go downhill, and the artist will go downhill also.”
Buddhism and the interconnectedness of phenomena
Buddhism teaches that all life is interrelated. Nothing exists in isolation and all things exist in a myriad of interconnections – this is known as the law of Dependent Origination. Steve Jobs did not invent the motherboard or the personal computer or the internet or the mobile phone, but what he did see was how these could be interconnected and related in a unique and fun way so as to unlock people’s innate creativity.
Jobs foresaw how the personal computer could become the ‘digital hub’ that manages our music, pictures, text and video. From here it was a natural progression to iTunes, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad.
But of course the interconnectedness of phenomena runs deep, and certainly extends to factories in China.
Ethical and dharma legacy
Steve Jobs was truly a one off. The next time I go to India I will be able to carry all of the teachings of any Buddhist I care to read, as well as some great novels too, in one single e-reader, or even read them on my phone. I will also be able to carry a massive music collection with me too in the tiniest of spaces. It will make travelling light a whole lot easier.
Steve Jobs wore the label “Buddhist” though he did not speak much about this in his lifetime, and his passion for the teaching seemed to be subsumed to the all demanding career at Apple. He was certainly a practitioner of Buddhism, and like many of us, he fell by the wayside for long periods in terms of his commitment. That is just one of those things, but Isaacson’s book shows clearly that the curiosity remained until the end.
I for one am truly inspired by the dharma and re-invigorated to know that it was such an influence on such an exceptional high achiever. The connection between Buddhist practice and the business world is a topic worthy of greater exploration.
But however much Jobs may have struggled with the compassion element of the teaching, I will leave the last word to his sister, Mona Simpson, who said:
“He was never embarrassed about working hard, even if the results were failures. If someone as smart as Steve wasn’t ashamed to admit trying, maybe I didn’t have to be. He always, always tried and always with love at the core”.
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