Day 26 – One Teaching – Guru Steve Jobs

Along the path to personal mastery, I have made many friends whom I also consider to be great mentors.  One of those special guides is my friend Dr. Mardoche Sidor, a Harvard trained psychiatrist.  Academically and scientifically, Dr. Sidor is brilliant.  Yet it is his deep spirituality, which has developed out of both his academics and life experience, which draws me in.  Mardoche and I share a love for reading and he recently suggested that I check out the Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda, a Hindu guru that lived in the early 1900s.  My friend has mentioned this book to me on several occasions and noted that it was the favorite book of Steve Jobs, founder of Apple.

I started reading Yogananda a few days ago and I’ve only finished a few pages, but I can already tell it is another game changing hero’s journey.  The author is a brilliant story-teller and his experiences are nothing short of divinely inspired.  This morning I read a passage that directly connected to this blog and the topics we’ve discussed over the last few days; separation, duality and ego to name a few.  It could have been easily missed as it was only a footnote at the bottom of page 38, defining the term ahamkara:

The ego-principle, ahamkara (lit. “I do”) is the root cause of dualism or the seeming separation between man and his Creator.  Ahamkara brings human beings under the sway of maya (cosmic delusion), by which the subject (ego) falsely appears as object; the creatures imagine themselves to be creators.

There is so much packed into this excerpt that ties back to the concepts that we’ve covered already in this blog.  I think it is worth connecting a few of these dots together in summary.  We’ve discussed the illusion of duality, which is division of parts into a whole.  Separation has been introduced and we noted that A Course in Miracles calls it a “detour into fear.”  We’ve also discussed ego from a few perspectives, including that of the founder of Objectivism, Ayn Rand.  Yesterday, we looked at David Hawkins’ Map of Consciousness, which provides one way to escape ego through courage.  I love the Sanskrit term Ahamkara and the related “cosmic delusion.”  The passage concludes by referencing the subject (egoic, conscious experience) confusing itself as the object (a separate self).  The “One Teaching” blog started out on days one and two with a discussion of Carl Jung’s work on consciousness and the unconscious, which bring together both our subjective and the objective experience.  I see why Steve Jobs was a fan.

I learned just this morning how deeply spiritual a man Steve Jobs was.  It turns out that he planned out every aspect of his funeral in advance.  Everyone in attendance left with a copy of Autobiography of a Yogi.  Steve Benioff, the founder of Salesforce, was in attendance at Job’s funeral and he recounted in an interview that, [Steve’s] “last message to us was that here is Yogananda’s book…..Actualize yourself.”  We’ve heard that before in this blog when we discussed the top level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Steve Jobs is clearly an admired entrepreneur who has left a tremendous mark.  I don’t know his full story yet, but I do know that Jobs did not create products that people said they wanted.  Rather, he anticipated what the world needed before they even knew they needed it.  Today, we wouldn’t know what to do without our iPhones!  Thank you, Steve Jobs and thank you, Yogananda for the inspiration you provided to him.

As someone who has dedicated most of my outward adult life to building a business, but with much of my private time spent reflecting inward, I can say that Steve Jobs is a true inspiration.  He demonstrates, through his last act of sharing Autobiography of a Yogi, that spirituality is not something that we need to keep as a private or separate part of our lives.  We are not separate and that is the whole point.  As Steve Benioff recounts, “Actualize yourself!”

Here is the interview of Steve Benioff recounting the story at a TechCrunch Disrupt conference in 2013:

Photo by AB on Unsplash