“If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is,” Jobs told his biographer, Walter Isaacson. “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 practise it.”
-Steve Jobs CEO of Apple. |
| Steve Jobs in his Zen apartment |
Jobs was a practitioner of Zen Buddhism. He took it up seriously, not just as a passing fad. Buddhism is part of the philosophical tradition of non-duality, and this may have influenced Jobs to converge different technologies and media into a single simple device. Being half-Syrian probably gave him a sense of being the convergence of two worlds.
The Zen aesthetic is certainly there in the design of Apple products.
4 comments:
I appreciate your insight on this! I am amazed by the technology connection you make here. It makes total sense to me. Or non-sense, in a good way!
That's very Zen!
Had no idea he was into Zen Buddhism, thanks for sharing! Off to look further into that now, really thought that would've been mentioned more too, bizarre.
Hi Rob. You're right, it is strange that it wasn't talked about more, especially with regard to the Apple design philosophy.
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