Buddhist Meditation Music the Benefit – Relaxation

The Steve Jobs movie is now in theaters! Besides being a legendary innovator and entrepreneur, Steve Jobs is one of the few American CEOs known for his interest in spiritual growth and meditation.

In his early twenties, he went to India on a spiritual pilgrimage of sorts. The Beatles had made their famous trip in 1968 to be with Maharishi, the founder of Transcendental Meditation – putting meditation and spirituality on the map in a whole new way – and Ram Das had written Be Here Now, published in 1971, in which he chronicles some of his experiences with his amazing teacher, Neem Karoli Baba, also known as Majara-ji.

In 1974, Steve Jobs and Daniel Kottke went looking for Majara-ji, only to find that the famous teacher had passed away the previous fall, his ashram deserted. They spent seven months in India, going to Hariakan Baba’s ashram and traveling around.

The written biographies don’t seem to say much more about it.  They are, however,  quick to note that upon his return to California, Steve had shaved his head and taken to wearing Indian clothing (actually, at the time, it was unheard of).  They also don’t go into detail about his next explorations, his experimentation with psychedelics, namely LSD, which, he later said, was “one of the two or three most important things he’d done in his life”.

In any case, eventually he started meditating with the Zen community and became a lifelong practitioner. There are a few different Zen traditions and he meditated with the Soto Zen group. They have a lovely monastery in the San Francisco area, the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, and there are perhaps seven or eight Soto Zen centers around the United States. Soto Zen originates in Japan and the San Francisco Center is sort of the US mother ship.

Steve credited meditation with helping him think intuitively, and if you meditate, you may have a sense of what that might mean, that ideas and solutions sometimes just come to you in meditation, and that intuition, once you’ve learned to trust it, can be  a pretty magical thing.

The written biographies touch on this spiritual-seeking aspect of Steve Job’s life very superficially but happily, it looks like the movie will be much more satisfying in this regard. The filmmakers actually went to the trouble of doing extensive filming at multiple sites in India –  which besides being pretty impressive,  suggests that they did some research and gave it some real thought.   If you’d like to know more about that whole period, what it was like to be young and traveling in India in the 70s, if for no other reason, the Steve Jobs movie should be interesting.  You can see the trailer at the official website  

Now, if only Ashton Kutcher would grant me an interview about how he learned to meditate, my summer would be complete!