Steve Jobs - Spiritual Master

A Master has passed away. Listen to his own words spoken at the 2005 Stanford graduation:

"Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."


Here are excerpts from a posting today by Andrew Sullivan at the Daily Beast titled Why Steve Jobs Matters:


"The reason he strikes such a huge chord with an entire generation lies, it seems to me, beyond his immense technical and business and design skills. It was because he became the bridge between the 1960s and the 1980s, the counter-culture and the counter-counter-culture. He was the hippie capitalist. He was the fusion of two great American forces - personal actualization and a free market. Listening to his Stanford Commencement speech above is a revelation, isn't it? He was a baby turned over for adoption by his biological parents. He dropped out of school. He was fired at the age of 30 by the very company he had founded. And in the face of early humbling, he focused on his own vision and his own passion - an individualist creed forged in the crucible of a sure knowledge of his own mortality, of his own death...


"These are the words of a man with great spiritual insight, and the courage to live it (because true spirituality requires extreme courage). His worldview was forged by an eery prescience of his own mortality. He got there long before his cancer diagnosis, which, perhaps, was why he transcended it with six of the most spectacularly creative and successful years of his life. And this fusion of counter-cultural courage with capitalist genius is what defines our time - as well as the fear-ridden reaction against it."


Sullivan is endlessly unafraid to engage terrain others will shun. He doesn't call Jobs a Spiritual Master, but he is calling us to see that Jobs' power must be sourced from a different and deeper dimension than business acumen, even genius. Jobs had embraced death and was no longer afraid. Each day mattered. Absolutely. AND it did not matter at all. He - Steve Jobs - was solely responsible for what he did with his days. This paradoxical combining of radical self-responsibility; acting, moment to moment, as if the right-here-right-now present mattered absolutely; and knowing simultaneously that it did not matter at all, that you could live with total abandon, fearlessly, as long as you never needed to "get it right" - this is the stance and the capacity of a Spiritual Master.

The West does not yet understand this. Over time, we in the West will come to some of the same realizations that have long been present in the East: there are stages of consciousness that lead to Mastery, Spiritual Mastery. They are not genetic aberrations or gifts. They are available to all. The path to Mastery is open to all. Jesus told us to "enter by the narrow gate", that "many are called, but few are chosen", that the "road to life is rocky and steep, and few find it".

The Path to Consciousness is difficult, endless. Most don't consider it, unless life has beaten them down big time. That's what happened to Steve. Over and over. And he chose the difficult and rocky path. And he attained Mastery. This could not guarantee Steve or Apple business success. But it can surely help.