Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [44]
Jobs and Kottke suggested books to one another and gradually read their way through the standard works of the time: Autobiography of a Yogi, Cosmic Consciousness, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, Meditation in Action. The most influential, however, was Zen Mind,Beginner’s Mind. Jobs took to spending time in the college library reading Buddhist literature and became attracted by Zen Buddhism. “It placed value on experience versus intellectual understanding. I saw a lot of people contemplating things but it didn’t seem to lead too many places. I got very interested in people who had discovered something more significant than an intellectual, abstract understanding.” He also started to believe that intuition formed a higher state of intellect and meditated in a crawl space above Kottke’s bedroom, which was furnished with incense and a dhurrie rug.
The pair also hitchhiked to the Hare Krishna temple in Portland for free Sunday night vegetable-curry dinners. On one occasion Kottke and Jobs decided to stay overnight at the Krishna house and were awakened in the early morning and sent out into a suburban Portland neighborhood to pick flowers from private gardens to decorate the shrine of Lord Krishna.
After moving out of the dorms at the end of his first year, Jobs rented an upgraded coachhouse for twenty-five dollars a month in a well-upholstered Portland suburb that rubbed up against Reed. He was secretive about aspects of his life, and even his closest college friends had no idea that Wozniak, who made occasional visits, sold blue boxes to a couple of Reed students who were caught using the device in a telephone booth.
Strapped for cash, Jobs borrowed some money from a fund the college kept for just such contingencies and found a job maintaining electronic equipment used by the psychology department for animal-behavior experiments. Ron Fial, an assistant professor who looked after the lab and tinkered with electronics, was impressed by Jobs and the knowledge he brought from California. “He was very good. He often didn’t want to just fix something. He often ended up bringing in something that was completely redesigned.”
Though he fixed fish tanks and helped design better mousetraps, Jobs was still pressed for money. His rented room was unheated and when he sat there throwing I Ching he was always dressed in a thick down jacket. For several weeks he lived on a thrice-daily diet of a porridge made from Roman Meal cereal and milk that he lifted from the college cafeteria. Jobs reckoned that one box of the cereal would sustain him for a week. “After three months of Roman Meal I was just going out of my gourd.”
To keep some flesh on his friend, Kottke and his girl friend provided Jobs with his only substantial meals. The trio jointly labeled cafeteria food Meat by Monsanto and became vegetarians. They paraded through the infinite varieties of brown rice, banana bread, and oatmeal bread suggested by vegetarian and macrobiotic cookbooks. Through a combination of circumstance and curiosity, Jobs and his friends linked their intellectual wandering and interests in mysticism with physical experiments. They were interested in stimulating fresh areas of the mind and rejuvenating the body and experimented with different drugs and diets. Drugs were used more for metaphysical reasons than for recreational purposes and they linked diets with other aspects of life.
Jobs became interested in the writings of Arnold Ehret, a nineteenth-century Prussian who attached his name to such books as The Mucusless Diet Healing System and Rational Fasting. Jobs was intrigued by Ehret’s assertion that diet was the cornerstone of physical, mental, and spiritual rejuvenation and that an accumulation of mucus and other body wastes were sure to be ruinous. Ehret asserted, with all the confidence of an Archimedes, that V = P - O, which in layman’s language meant vitality equals power minus obstruction. He taught that mental illness was caused by “gas pressure on the brain,” which could be cured by fasting, and that