During this summer break, I went through the acclaimed biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. I was very fascinated when I encountered the sentences that talked about Steve’s curiosity and passion for spirituality and exploring the inner dimension of life.
Here are the texts I highlighted from the book that may inspire you to set out on your spiritual quest:
- He didn’t actually want to leave Reed; he just wanted to quit paying tuition and taking classes that didn’t interest him. Remarkably, Reed tolerated that. “He had a very inquiring mind that was enormously attractive,” said the dean of students, Jack Dudman. “He refused to accept automatically received truths, and he wanted to examine everything himself.” Dudman allowed Jobs to audit classes and stay with friends in the dorms even after he stopped paying tuition.
- In the meantime Jobs eked out a bohemian existence on the fringes of Reed. He went barefoot most of the time, wearing sandals when it snowed. Elizabeth Holmes made meals for him, trying to keep up with his obsessive diets. He returned soda bottles for spare change, continued his treks to the free Sunday dinners at the Hare Krishna temple, and wore a down jacket in the heatless garage apartment he rented for $20 a month. When he needed money, he found work at the psychology department lab maintaining the electronic equipment that was used for animal behavior experiments. Occasionally Chrisann Brennan would come to visit. Their relationship sputtered along erratically. But mostly he tended to the stirrings of his own soul and personal quest for enlightenment.
- It reinforced my sense of what was important — creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.
- That outlook accorded with his faith in the power of the will to bend reality.
- “For me it was a serious search,” he said. “I’d been turned on to the idea of enlightenment and trying to figure out who I was and how I fit into things.”
- “He comes in and stares at me and declares, ‘I’m going to find my guru,’
- They took him back home, where he continued trying to find himself. It was a pursuit with many paths toward enlightenment. In the mornings and evenings he would meditate and study Zen, and in between he would drop in to audit physics or engineering courses at Stanford.
- Jobs’s interest in Eastern spirituality, Hinduism, Zen Buddhism, and the search for enlightenment was not merely the passing phase of a nineteen-year-old. Throughout his life he would seek to follow many of the basic precepts of Eastern religions, such as the emphasis on experiential prajna, wisdom or cognitive understanding that is intuitively experienced through concentration of the mind
- Western rational thought is not an innate human characteristic; it is learned and is the great achievement of Western civilization. In the villages of India, they never learned it. They learned something else, which is in some ways just as valuable but in other ways is not. That’s the power of intuition and experiential wisdom.
- Coming back after seven months in Indian villages, I saw the craziness of the Western world as well as its capacity for rational thought. If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there’s room to hear more subtle things — that’s when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before. It’s a discipline; you have to practice it.
- Zen has been a deep influence in my life ever since. At one point I was thinking about going to Japan and trying to get into the Eiheiji monastery, but my spiritual advisor urged me to stay here. He said there is nothing over there that isn’t here, and he was correct. I learned the truth of the Zen saying that if you are willing to travel around the world to meet a teacher, one will appear next door
- “We would go to Kobun’s meditations, sit on zafu cushions, and he would sit on a dais,” she said. “We learned how to tune out distractions. It was a magical thing. One evening we were meditating with Kobun when it was raining, and he taught us how to use ambient sounds to bring us back to focus on our meditation.”
- They sometimes discussed whether Jobs should devote himself fully to spiritual pursuits, but Kobun counseled otherwise. He assured Jobs that he could keep in touch with his spiritual side while working in a business. The relationship turned out to be lasting and deep; seventeen years later Kobun would perform Jobs’s wedding ceremony.
- Jobs came to believe that he could impart that feeling of confidence to others and thus push them to do things they hadn’t thought possible.
- He had the attitude that he could do anything, and therefore so can you. He put his life in my hands. So that made me do something I didn’t think I could do.” It was the brighter side of what would become known as his reality distortion field. “If you trust him, you can do things,” Holmes said. “If he’s decided that something should happen, then he’s just going to make it happen.”
- Bushnell agreed. “There is something indefinable in an entrepreneur, and I saw that in Steve,” he said. “He was interested not just in engineering, but also the business aspects. I taught him that if you act like you can do something, then it will work. I told him, ‘Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are.’”
(Taken from Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson)
I’ll leave you with a few verses from Sufi poetry (in the Persian language) that are famous among the lovers of Allah, may He be exalted, and the Leader of all Prophets Beloved Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him):
ہیچ چیزے خود بخود چیزے نہ شد
ہیچ آہن خود بخود تیغے نہ شد
مولوی ہرگز نہ شد مولاےُ روم
تا غلام شمس تبریزی نہ شد
Translation:
A thing doesn’t become something else by itself,
Iron doesn’t become a sword by itself,
The maulvi would not have become the Master of Rome (referring to the famous sufi and poet Molana Jalaluddin Rumi),
Had he not become a slave of Shams Tabrez (the spiritual guide of Molana Jalaluddin Rumi)
