Steve Jobs

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 assistant, 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 Tassajara 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. It 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 assured 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. It 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. To Jobs, this seemed preferable to talk therapy because it involved intuitive feeling and emotional action rather than just rational analyzing. “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. It 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.