Last night I read something Steve wrote in his 20's after he returned to the U.S. from a spiritual quest in India.
Coming back to American was, for me, much more of a cultural shock than going to India. The people in the Indian country-side 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 that intellect, in my opnion. 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...
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.I know this is common wisdom in many spiritual practices. But I also find it fascinating that one of the men who is most responsible for our recent technological advances wrote something like this not too long before he founded Apple, Inc.
It reminds me of one of my very favorite quotes:
It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much, doing nothing, really doing nothing.
― Gertrude Stein
Nothin' like one of yer posts to distract me from work.
ReplyDeleteNot at all surprising that Jobs wrote this right before founding Apple. What he describes is entirely accurate in my experience. First thing you learn when you start to work to calm mind is that you're out-of-your-gourd nuts with wandering thoughts. But over time, mind really does settle. And then what one becomes aware of is how entirely dynamic real stasis is. The goal such as it is can't be to "increase creativity" or "get could ideas" or worse yet to "achieve enlightenment." At the same time, if one's mind is calm, the most radical awarenesses appear, because that's what they do. Connections don't form so much as reveal. No surprise Jobs tapped into something right after this kind of practice.
My internal motor tends to run in slow motion pretty naturally. I don't know if that is genetic or what I learned from living in a very high octane family and playing the role of observer.
DeleteWhat I could really tap into in terms of what Jobs said is that the process of stepping back and being quiet allows your intuition to blossom. I have always thought of intuition as being a melding of thinking, feeling and experience. That's what makes it true wisdom. You have to tap into your true self to get a taste of that.
There are times that I feel out of touch with other people when I go there. And sometimes its hard to explain what I'm seeing because the picture is so big and complex. I can relate to Jobs' abrasiveness because of that. But its a fascinating journey.
What I think first I experienced as a stepping back from I now experience as a stepping into. I certainly feel distanced from other people at times, probably less so nowadays than ever before (i.e., not getting loaded, etc.). What's true for sure is that at times when I settle down I experience being a part of things, and not separate from them.
DeleteNow, I have a lot of work to do on this, for sure. But I do feel like I've had enough experientially to know that I have something to work with. Really, life is very beautiful, and I often know and feel it.
I believe Bhudda calls it "no mind." I really don't know what to call intuition. I think Emerson knew something about it as well. Personally I can't make it happen and I can't teach it. It just comes when I need it.
ReplyDeleteVic78