In late 1972, there was a fundamental shift happening in American campus life. The nation"s involvement in the Vietnam War, and the draft that accompanied it, was winding down. Political activism at colleges receded and in many late-night dorm conversations was replaced by an interest in pathways to personal fulfillment. Jobs found himself deeply influenced by a variety of books on spirituality and enlightenment, most notably Be Here Now , a guide to meditation and the wonders of psychedelic drugs by Baba Ram Da.s.s, born Richard Alpert. "I t was profound," Jobs said. "I t transformed me and many of my friends."The closest of those friends was another wispy-bearded freshman named Daniel Kottke, who met Jobs a week after they arrived at Reed and shared his interest in Zen, Dylan, and acid. Kottke, from a wealthy New York suburb, was smart but low-octane, with a sweet flower-child demeanor made even mellower by his interest in Buddhism. That spiritual quest had caused him to eschew material possessions, but he was nonetheless impressed by Jobs"s tape deck. "Steve had a TEAC reel-to-reel and ma.s.sive quant.i.ties of Dylan bootlegs," Kottke recalled. "He was both really cool and high-tech."
Jobs started spending much of his time with Kottke and his girlfriend, Elizabeth Holmes, even after he insulted her at their first meeting by grilling her about how much money it would take to get her to have s.e.x with another man. They hitchhiked to the coast together, engaged in the typical dorm raps about the meaning of life, attended the love festivals at the local Hare Krishna temple, and went to the Zen center for free vegetarian meals. "I t was a lot of fun," said Kottke, "but also philosophical, and we took Zen very seriously."
Jobs began sharing with Kottke other books, including Zen Mind, Beginner"s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki, Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda, and Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism by Chogyam Trungpa. They created a meditation room in the attic crawl s.p.a.ce above Elizabeth Holmes"s room and fixed it up with Indian prints, a dhurrie rug, candles, incense, and meditation cushions. "There was a hatch in the ceiling leading to an attic which had a huge amount of s.p.a.ce," Jobs said. "We took psychedelic drugs there sometimes, but mainly we just meditated."
Jobs"s engagement with Eastern spirituality, and especially Zen Buddhism, was not just some pa.s.sing fancy or youthful dabbling. He embraced it with his typical intensity, and it became deeply ingrained in his personality. "Steve is very much Zen," said Kottke. "I t was a deep influence. You see it in his whole approach of stark, minimalist aesthetics, intense focus." Jobs also became deeply influenced by the emphasis that Buddhism places on intuition. "I began to realize that an intuitive understanding and consciousness was more significant than abstract thinking and intellectual logical a.n.a.lysis," he later said. His intensity, however, made it difficult for him to achieve inner peace; his Zen awareness was not accompanied by an excess of calm, peace of mind, or interpersonal mellowness.
He and Kottke enjoyed playing a nineteenth-century German variant of chess called Kriegspiel, in which the players sit back-to-back; each has his own board and pieces and cannot see those of his opponent. A moderator informs them if a move they want to make is legal or illegal, and they have to try to figure out where their opponent"s pieces are. "The wildest game I played with them was during a lashing rainstorm sitting by the fireside," recalled Holmes, who served as moderator. "They were tripping on acid. They were moving so fast I could barely keep up with them."
Another book that deeply influenced Jobs during his freshman year was Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappe, which extolled the personal and planetary benefits of vegetarianism. "That"s when I swore off meat pretty much for good," he recalled. But the book also reinforced his tendency to embrace extreme diets, which included purges, fasts, or eating only one or two foods, such as carrots or apples, for weeks on end.
Jobs and Kottke became serious vegetarians during their freshman year. "Steve got into it even more than I did," said Kottke. "He was living off Roman Meal cereal." They would go shopping at a farmers" co-op, where Jobs would buy a box of cereal, which would last a week, and other bulk health food. "He would buy flats of dates and almonds and lots of carrots, and he got a Champion juicer and we"d make carrot juice and carrot salads. There is a story about Steve turning orange from eating so many carrots, and there is some truth to that." Friends remember him having, at times, a sunset-like orange hue.
Jobs"s dietary habits became even more obsessive when he read Mucusless Diet Healing System by Arnold Ehret, an early twentieth-century German-born nutrition fanatic. He believed in eating nothing but fruits and starchless vegetables, which he said prevented the body from forming harmful mucus, and he advocated cleansing the body regularly through prolonged fasts. That meant the end of even Roman Meal cereal-or any bread, grains, or milk. Jobs began warning friends of the mucus dangers lurking in their bagels. "I got into it in my typical nutso way," he said. At one point he and Kottke went for an entire week eating only apples, and then Jobs began to try even purer fasts. He started with two-day fasts, and eventually tried to stretch them to a week or more, breaking them carefully with large amounts of water and leafy vegetables. "After a week you start to feel fantastic," he said. "You get a ton of vitality from not having to digest all this food. I was in great shape. I felt I could get up and walk to San Francisco anytime I wanted."
Vegetarianism and Zen Buddhism, meditation and spirituality, acid and rock-Jobs rolled together, in an amped-up way, the multiple impulses that were hallmarks of the enlightenment-seeking campus subculture of the era. And even though he barely indulged it at Reed, there was still an undercurrent of electronic geekiness in his soul that would someday combine surprisingly well with the rest of the mix.
Robert Friedland.
In order to raise some cash one day, Jobs decided to sell his IBM Selectric typewriter. He walked into the room of the student who had offered to buy it only to discover that he was having s.e.x with his girlfriend. Jobs started to leave, but the student invited him to take a seat and wait while they finished. "I thought, "This is kind of far out,"" Jobs later recalled. And thus began his relationship with Robert Friedland, one of the few people in Jobs"s life who were able to mesmerize him. He adopted some of Friedland"s charismatic traits and for a few years treated him almost like a guru -until he began to see him as a charlatan.
Friedland was four years older than Jobs, but still an undergraduate. The son of an Auschwitz survivor who became a prosperous Chicago architect, he had originally gone to Bowdoin, a liberal arts college in Maine. But while a soph.o.m.ore, he was arrested for possession of 24,000 tablets of LSD worth $125,000. The local newspaper pictured him with shoulder-length wavy blond hair smiling at the photographers as he was led away. He was sentenced to two years at a federal prison in Virginia, from which he was paroled in 1972. That fall he headed off to Reed, where he immediately ran for student body president, saying that he needed to clear his name from the "miscarriage of justice" he had suffered. He won.
Friedland had heard Baba Ram Da.s.s, the author of Be Here Now , give a speech in Boston, and like Jobs and Kottke had gotten deeply into Eastern spirituality. During the summer of 1973, he traveled to India to meet Ram Da.s.s"s Hindu guru, Neem Karoli Baba, famously known to his many followers as Maharaj-ji. When he returned that fall, Friedland had taken a spiritual name and walked around in sandals and flowing Indian robes. He had a room off campus, above a garage, and Jobs would go there many afternoons to seek him out. He was entranced by the apparent intensity of Friedland"s conviction that a state of enlightenment truly existed and could be attained. "He turned me on to a different level of consciousness," Jobs said.
Friedland found Jobs fascinating as well. "He was always walking around barefoot," he later told a reporter. "The thing that struck me was his intensity. Whatever he was interested in he would generally carry to an irrational extreme." Jobs had honed his trick of using stares and silences to master other people. "One of his numbers was to stare at the person he was talking to. He would stare into their f.u.c.king eyeb.a.l.l.s, ask some question, and would want a response without the other person averting their eyes."
According to Kottke, some of Jobs"s personality traits-including a few that lasted throughout his career-were borrowed from Friedland.
"Friedland taught Steve the reality distortion field," said Kottke. "He was charismatic and a bit of a con man and could bend situations to his very strong will. He was mercurial, sure of himself, a little dictatorial. Steve admired that, and he became more like that after spending time with Robert."Jobs also absorbed how Friedland made himself the center of attention. "Robert was very much an outgoing, charismatic guy, a real salesman,"
Kottke recalled. "When I first met Steve he was shy and self-effacing, a very private guy. I think Robert taught him a lot about selling, about coming out of his sh.e.l.l, of opening up and taking charge of a situation." Friedland projected a high-wattage aura. "He would walk into a room and you would instantly notice him. Steve was the absolute opposite when he came to Reed. After he spent time with Robert, some of it started to rub off."
On Sunday evenings Jobs and Friedland would go to the Hare Krishna temple on the western edge of Portland, often with Kottke and Holmes in tow. They would dance and sing songs at the top of their lungs. "We would work ourselves into an ecstatic frenzy," Holmes recalled. "Robert would go insane and dance like crazy. Steve was more subdued, as if he was embarra.s.sed to let loose." Then they would be treated to paper plates piled high with vegetarian food.
Friedland had stewardship of a 220-acre apple farm, about forty miles southwest of Portland, that was owned by an eccentric millionaire uncle from Switzerland named Marcel Muller. After Friedland became involved with Eastern spirituality, he turned it into a commune called the All One Farm, and Jobs would spend weekends there with Kottke, Holmes, and like-minded seekers of enlightenment. The farm had a main house, a large barn, and a garden shed, where Kottke and Holmes slept. Jobs took on the task of pruning the Gravenstein apple trees. "Steve ran the apple orchard," said Friedland. "We were in the organic cider business. Steve"s job was to lead a crew of freaks to prune the orchard and whip it back into shape."
Monks and disciples from the Hare Krishna temple would come and prepare vegetarian feasts redolent of c.u.min, coriander, and turmeric. "Steve would be starving when he arrived, and he would stuff himself," Holmes recalled. "Then he would go and purge. For years I thought he was bulimic. I t was very upsetting, because we had gone to all that trouble of creating these feasts, and he couldn"t hold it down."
Jobs was also beginning to have a little trouble stomaching Friedland"s cult leader style. "Perhaps he saw a little bit too much of Robert in himself," said Kottke. Although the commune was supposed to be a refuge from materialism, Friedland began operating it more as a business; his followers were told to chop and sell firewood, make apple presses and wood stoves, and engage in other commercial endeavors for which they were not paid. One night Jobs slept under the table in the kitchen and was amused to notice that people kept coming in and stealing each other"s food from the refrigerator. Communal economics were not for him. "I t started to get very materialistic," Jobs recalled. "Everybody got the idea they were working very hard for Robert"s farm, and one by one they started to leave. I got pretty sick of it."
Many years later, after Friedland had become a billionaire copper and gold mining executive-working out of Vancouver, Singapore, and Mongolia-I met him for drinks in New York. That evening I emailed Jobs and mentioned my encounter. He telephoned me from California within an hour and warned me against listening to Friedland. He said that when Friedland was in trouble because of environmental abuses committed by some of his mines, he had tried to contact Jobs to intervene with Bill Clinton, but Jobs had not responded. "Robert always portrayed himself as a spiritual person, but he crossed the line from being charismatic to being a con man," Jobs said. "I t was a strange thing to have one of the spiritual people in your young life turn out to be, symbolically and in reality, a gold miner."
... Drop Out.
Jobs quickly became bored with college. He liked being at Reed, just not taking the required cla.s.ses. In fact he was surprised when he found out that, for all of its hippie aura, there were strict course requirements. When Wozniak came to visit, Jobs waved his schedule at him and complained, "They are making me take all these courses." Woz replied, "Yes, that"s what they do in college." Jobs refused to go to the cla.s.ses he was a.s.signed and instead went to the ones he wanted, such as a dance cla.s.s where he could enjoy both the creativity and the chance to meet girls. "I would never have refused to take the courses you were supposed to, that"s a difference in our personality," Wozniak marveled.
Jobs also began to feel guilty, he later said, about spending so much of his parents" money on an education that did not seem worthwhile. "All of my working-cla.s.s parents" savings were being spent on my college tuition," he recounted in a famous commencement address at Stanford. "I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out okay."
He didn"t actually want to leave Reed; he just wanted to quit paying tuition and taking cla.s.ses 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 cla.s.ses and stay with friends in the dorms even after he stopped paying tuition.
"The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required cla.s.ses that didn"t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting," he said. Among them was a calligraphy cla.s.s that appealed to him after he saw posters on campus that were beautifully drawn. "I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of s.p.a.ce between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. I t was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can"t capture, and I found it fascinating."
I t was yet another example of Jobs consciously positioning himself at the intersection of the arts and technology. In all of his products, technology would be married to great design, elegance, human touches, and even romance. He would be in the fore of pushing friendly graphical user interfaces. The calligraphy course would become iconic in that regard. "I f I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally s.p.a.ced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it"s likely that no personal computer would have them."
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.
"I came of age at a magical time," he reflected later. "Our consciousness was raised by Zen, and also by LSD." Even later in life he would credit psychedelic drugs for making him more enlightened. "T aking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there"s another side to the coin, and you can"t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. I t 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."
CHAPTER FOUR.
ATARI AND INDIA.
Zen and the Art of Game Design.
Atari.
In February 1974, after eighteen months of hanging around Reed, Jobs decided to move back to his parents" home in Los Altos and look for a job.
I t was not a difficult search. At peak times during the 1970s, the cla.s.sified section of the San Jose Mercury carried up to sixty pages of technology help-wanted ads. One of those caught Jobs"s eye. "Have fun, make money," it said. That day Jobs walked into the lobby of the video game manufacturer Atari and told the personnel director, who was startled by his unkempt hair and attire, that he wouldn"t leave until they gave him a job.
Atari"s founder was a burly entrepreneur named Nolan Bushnell, who was a charismatic visionary with a nice touch of showmanship in him-in other words, another role model waiting to be emulated. After he became famous, he liked driving around in a Rolls, smoking dope, and holding staff meetings in a hot tub. As Friedland had done and as Jobs would learn to do, he was able to turn charm into a cunning force, to cajole and intimidate and distort reality with the power of his personality. His chief engineer was Al Alcorn, beefy and jovial and a bit more grounded, the house grown-up trying to implement the vision and curb the enthusiasms of Bushnell. Their big hit thus far was a video game called Pong, in which two players tried to volley a blip on a screen with two movable lines that acted as paddles. (I f you"re under thirty, ask your parents.) When Jobs arrived in the Atari lobby wearing sandals and demanding a job, Alcorn was the one who was summoned. "I was told, "We"ve got a hippie kid in the lobby. He says he"s not going to leave until we hire him. Should we call the cops or let him in?" I said bring him on in!"
Jobs thus became one of the first fifty employees at Atari, working as a technician for $5 an hour. "In retrospect, it was weird to hire a dropout from Reed," Alcorn recalled. "But I saw something in him. He was very intelligent, enthusiastic, excited about tech." Alcorn a.s.signed him to work with a straitlaced engineer named Don Lang. The next day Lang complained, "This guy"s a G.o.dd.a.m.n hippie with b.o. Why did you do this to me?
And he"s impossible to deal with." Jobs clung to the belief that his fruit-heavy vegetarian diet would prevent not just mucus but also body odor, even if he didn"t use deodorant or shower regularly. I t was a flawed theory.
Lang and others wanted to let Jobs go, but Bushnell worked out a solution. "The smell and behavior wasn"t an issue with me," he said. "Steve was p.r.i.c.kly, but I kind of liked him. So I asked him to go on the night shift. I t was a way to save him." Jobs would come in after Lang and others had left and work through most of the night. Even thus isolated, he became known for his brashness. On those occasions when he happened to interact with others, he was p.r.o.ne to informing them that they were "dumb s.h.i.ts." In retrospect, he stands by that judgment. "The only reason I shone was that everyone else was so bad," Jobs recalled.
Despite his arrogance (or perhaps because of it) he was able to charm Atari"s boss. "He was more philosophical than the other people I worked with," Bushnell recalled. "We used to discuss free will versus determinism. I tended to believe that things were much more determined, that we were programmed. I f we had perfect information, we could predict people"s actions. Steve felt the opposite." That outlook accorded with his faith in the power of the will to bend reality.
Jobs helped improve some of the games by pushing the chips to produce fun designs, and Bushnell"s inspiring willingness to play by his own rules rubbed off on him. In addition, he intuitively appreciated the simplicity of Atari"s games. They came with no manual and needed to be uncomplicated enough that a stoned freshman could figure them out. The only instructions for Atari"s Star Trek game were "1. Insert quarter. 2.
Avoid Klingons."
Not all of his coworkers shunned Jobs. He became friends with Ron Wayne, a draftsman at Atari, who had earlier started a company that built slot machines. I t subsequently failed, but Jobs became fascinated with the idea that it was possible to start your own company. "Ron was an amazing guy," said Jobs. "He started companies. I had never met anybody like that." He proposed to Wayne that they go into business together; Jobs said he could borrow $50,000, and they could design and market a slot machine. But Wayne had already been burned in business, so he declined. "I said that was the quickest way to lose $50,000," Wayne recalled, "but I admired the fact that he had a burning drive to start his own business."
One weekend Jobs was visiting Wayne at his apartment, engaging as they often did in philosophical discussions, when Wayne said that there was something he needed to tell him. "Yeah, I think I know what it is," Jobs replied. "I think you like men." Wayne said yes. "I t was my first encounter with someone who I knew was gay," Jobs recalled. "He planted the right perspective of it for me." Jobs grilled him: "When you see a beautiful woman, what do you feel?" Wayne replied, "I t"s like when you look at a beautiful horse. You can appreciate it, but you don"t want to sleep with it. You appreciate beauty for what it is." Wayne said that it is a testament to Jobs that he felt like revealing this to him. "n.o.body at Atari knew, and I could count on my toes and fingers the number of people I told in my whole life. But I guess it just felt right to tell him, that he would understand, and it didn"t have any effect on our relationship."
India.
One reason Jobs was eager to make some money in early 1974 was that Robert Friedland, who had gone to India the summer before, was urging him to take his own spiritual journey there. Friedland had studied in India with Neem Karoli Baba (Maharaj-ji), who had been the guru to much of the sixties hippie movement. Jobs decided he should do the same, and he recruited Daniel Kottke to go with him. Jobs was not motivated by mere adventure. "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." Kottke adds that Jobs"s quest seemed driven partly by not knowing his birth parents. "There was a hole in him, and he was trying to fill it."
When Jobs told the folks at Atari that he was quitting to go search for a guru in India, the jovial Alcorn was amused. "He comes in and stares at me and declares, "I "m going to find my guru," and I say, "No s.h.i.t, that"s super. Write me!" And he says he wants me to help pay, and I tell him, "Bulls.h.i.t!"" Then Alcorn had an idea. Atari was making kits and shipping them to Munich, where they were built into finished machines and distributed by a wholesaler in Turin. But there was a problem: Because the games were designed for the American rate of sixty frames per second, there were frustrating interference problems in Europe, where the rate was fifty frames per second. Alcorn sketched out a fix with Jobs and thenoffered to pay for him to go to Europe to implement it. "I t"s got to be cheaper to get to India from there," he said. Jobs agreed. So Alcorn sent him on his way with the exhortation, "Say hi to your guru for me."
Jobs spent a few days in Munich, where he solved the interference problem, but in the process he flummoxed the dark-suited German managers.
They complained to Alcorn that he dressed and smelled like a b.u.m and behaved rudely. "I said, "Did he solve the problem?" And they said, "Yeah." I said, "I f you got any more problems, you just call me, I got more guys just like him!" They said, "No, no we"ll take care of it next time."" For his part, Jobs was upset that the Germans kept trying to feed him meat and potatoes. "They don"t even have a word for vegetarian," he complained (incorrectly) in a phone call to Alcorn.
He had a better time when he took the train to see the distributor in Turin, where the I talian pastas and his host"s camaraderie were more simpatico. "I had a wonderful couple of weeks in Turin, which is this charged-up industrial town," he recalled. "The distributor took me every night to dinner at this place where there were only eight tables and no menu. You"d just tell them what you wanted, and they made it. One of the tables was on reserve for the chairman of Fiat. I t was really super." He next went to Lugano, Switzerland, where he stayed with Friedland"s uncle, and from there took a flight to India.
When he got off the plane in New Delhi, he felt waves of heat rising from the tarmac, even though it was only April. He had been given the name of a hotel, but it was full, so he went to one his taxi driver insisted was good. "I "m sure he was getting some baksheesh, because he took me to this complete dive." Jobs asked the owner whether the water was filtered and foolishly believed the answer. "I got dysentery pretty fast. I was sick, really sick, a really high fever. I dropped from 160 pounds to 120 in about a week."
Once he got healthy enough to move, he decided that he needed to get out of Delhi. So he headed to the town of Haridwar, in western India near the source of the Ganges, which was having a festival known as the k.u.mbh Mela. More than ten million people poured into a town that usually contained fewer than 100,000 residents. "There were holy men all around. T ents with this teacher and that teacher. There were people riding elephants, you name it. I was there for a few days, but I decided that I needed to get out of there too."
He went by train and bus to a village near Nainital in the foothills of the Himalayas. That was where Neem Karoli Baba lived, or had lived. By the time Jobs got there, he was no longer alive, at least in the same incarnation. Jobs rented a room with a mattress on the floor from a family who helped him recuperate by feeding him vegetarian meals. "There was a copy there of Autobiography of a Yogi in English that a previous traveler had left, and I read it several times because there was not a lot to do, and I walked around from village to village and recovered from my dysentery."
Among those who were part of the community there was Larry Brilliant, an epidemiologist who was working to eradicate smallpox and who later ran Google"s philanthropic arm and the Skoll Foundation. He became Jobs"s lifelong friend.
At one point Jobs was told of a young Hindu holy man who was holding a gathering of his followers at the Himalayan estate of a wealthy businessman. "I t was a chance to meet a spiritual being and hang out with his followers, but it was also a chance to have a good meal. I could smell the food as we got near, and I was very hungry." As Jobs was eating, the holy man-who was not much older than Jobs-picked him out of the crowd, pointed at him, and began laughing maniacally. "He came running over and grabbed me and made a tooting sound and said, "You are just like a baby,"" recalled Jobs. "I was not relishing this attention." T aking Jobs by the hand, he led him out of the worshipful crowd and walked him up to a hill, where there was a well and a small pond. "We sit down and he pulls out this straight razor. I "m thinking he"s a nutcase and begin to worry.
Then he pulls out a bar of soap-I had long hair at the time-and he lathered up my hair and shaved my head. He told me that he was saving my health."
Daniel Kottke arrived in India at the beginning of the summer, and Jobs went back to New Delhi to meet him. They wandered, mainly by bus, rather aimlessly. By this point Jobs was no longer trying to find a guru who could impart wisdom, but instead was seeking enlightenment through ascetic experience, deprivation, and simplicity. He was not able to achieve inner calm. Kottke remembers him getting into a furious shouting match with a Hindu woman in a village marketplace who, Jobs alleged, had been watering down the milk she was selling them.
Yet Jobs could also be generous. When they got to the town of Ma.n.a.li, Kottke"s sleeping bag was stolen with his traveler"s checks in it. "Steve covered my food expenses and bus ticket back to Delhi," Kottke recalled. He also gave Kottke the rest of his own money, $100, to tide him over.
During his seven months in India, he had written to his parents only sporadically, getting mail at the American Express office in New Delhi when he pa.s.sed through, and so they were somewhat surprised when they got a call from the Oakland airport asking them to pick him up. They immediately drove up from Los Altos. "My head had been shaved, I was wearing Indian cotton robes, and my skin had turned a deep, chocolate brown-red from the sun," he recalled. "So I "m sitting there and my parents walked past me about five times and finally my mother came up and said "Steve?" and I said "Hi!""
They took him back home, where he continued trying to find himself. I t 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.
The Search.
Jobs"s interest in Eastern spirituality, Hinduism, Zen Buddhism, and the search for enlightenment was not merely the pa.s.sing 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. Years later, sitting in his Palo Alto garden, he reflected on the lasting influence of his trip to India: Coming back to America was, for me, much more of a cultural shock than going to India. The people in the Indian countryside don"t use their intellect like we do, they use their intuition instead, and their intuition is far more developed than in the rest of the world. Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That"s had a big impact on my work.
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. I f you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. I f 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. I t"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 j.a.pan and trying to get into the Eihei-ji 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.
Jobs did in fact find a teacher right in his own neighborhood. Shunryu Suzuki, who wrote Zen Mind, Beginner"s Mind and ran the San Francisco Zen Center, used to come to Los Altos every Wednesday evening to lecture and meditate with a small group of followers. After a while he asked his a.s.sistant, Kobun Chino Otogawa, to open a full-time center there. Jobs became a faithful follower, along with his occasional girlfriend, Chrisann Brennan, and Daniel Kottke and Elizabeth Holmes. He also began to go by himself on retreats to the T a.s.sajara Zen Center, a monastery near Carmel where Kobun also taught.
Kottke found Kobun amusing. "His English was atrocious," he recalled. "He would speak in a kind of haiku, with poetic, suggestive phrases. We would sit and listen to him, and half the time we had no idea what he was going on about. I took the whole thing as a kind of lighthearted interlude."
Holmes was more into the scene. "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. I t 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."
As for Jobs, his devotion was intense. "He became really serious and self-important and just generally unbearable," according to Kottke. He began meeting with Kobun almost daily, and every few months they went on retreats together to meditate. "I ended up spending as much time as I could with him," Jobs recalled. "He had a wife who was a nurse at Stanford and two kids. She worked the night shift, so I would go over and hang out with him in the evenings. She would get home about midnight and shoo me away." They sometimes discussed whether Jobs should devote himself fully to spiritual pursuits, but Kobun counseled otherwise. He a.s.sured 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"s compulsive search for self-awareness also led him to undergo primal scream therapy, which had recently been developed and popularized by a Los Angeles psychotherapist named Arthur Janov. I t was based on the Freudian theory that psychological problems are caused by the repressed pains of childhood; Janov argued that they could be resolved by re-suffering these primal moments while fully expressing the pain -sometimes in screams. T o Jobs, this seemed preferable to talk therapy because it involved intuitive feeling and emotional action rather than just rational a.n.a.lyzing. "This was not something to think about," he later said. "This was something to do: to close your eyes, hold your breath, jump in, and come out the other end more insightful."
A group of Janov"s adherents ran a program called the Oregon Feeling Center in an old hotel in Eugene that was managed by Jobs"s Reed College guru Robert Friedland, whose All One Farm commune was nearby. In late 1974, Jobs signed up for a twelve-week course of therapy there costing $1,000. "Steve and I were both into personal growth, so I wanted to go with him," Kottke recounted, "but I couldn"t afford it."
Jobs confided to close friends that he was driven by the pain he was feeling about being put up for adoption and not knowing about his birth parents. "Steve had a very profound desire to know his physical parents so he could better know himself," Friedland later said. He had learned from Paul and Clara Jobs that his birth parents had both been graduate students at a university and that his father might be Syrian. He had even thought about hiring a private investigator, but he decided not to do so for the time being. "I didn"t want to hurt my parents," he recalled, referring to Paul and Clara.
"He was struggling with the fact that he had been adopted," according to Elizabeth Holmes. "He felt that it was an issue that he needed to get hold of emotionally." Jobs admitted as much to her. "This is something that is bothering me, and I need to focus on it," he said. He was even more open with Greg Calhoun. "He was doing a lot of soul-searching about being adopted, and he talked about it with me a lot," Calhoun recalled. "The primal scream and the mucusless diets, he was trying to cleanse himself and get deeper into his frustration about his birth. He told me he was deeply angry about the fact that he had been given up."
John Lennon had undergone the same primal scream therapy in 1970, and in December of that year he released the song "Mother" with the Plastic Ono Band. I t dealt with Lennon"s own feelings about a father who had abandoned him and a mother who had been killed when he was a teenager. The refrain includes the haunting chant "Mama don"t go, Daddy come home." Jobs used to play the song often.
Jobs later said that Janov"s teachings did not prove very useful. "He offered a ready-made, b.u.t.toned-down answer which turned out to be far too oversimplistic. I t became obvious that it was not going to yield any great insight." But Holmes contended that it made him more confident: "After he did it, he was in a different place. He had a very abrasive personality, but there was a peace about him for a while. His confidence improved and his feelings of inadequacy were reduced."
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.
Holmes had broken up with Kottke and joined a religious cult in San Francisco that expected her to sever ties with all past friends. But Jobs rejected that injunction. He arrived at the cult house in his Ford Ranchero one day and announced that he was driving up to Friedland"s apple farm and she was to come. Even more brazenly, he said she would have to drive part of the way, even though she didn"t know how to use the stick shift.
"Once we got on the open road, he made me get behind the wheel, and he shifted the car until we got up to 55 miles per hour," she recalled. "Then he puts on a tape of Dylan"s Blood on the Tracks, lays his head in my lap, and goes to sleep. He had the att.i.tude 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."
I t was the brighter side of what would become known as his reality distortion field. "I f you trust him, you can do things," Holmes said. "I f he"s decided that something should happen, then he"s just going to make it happen."
Breakout.
One day in early 1975 Al Alcorn was sitting in his office at Atari when Ron Wayne burst in. "Hey, Stevie is back!" he shouted.
"Wow, bring him on in," Alcorn replied.