Was Steve Jobs a Shaman?

Watching the movie 'Jobs' on my iPod, iRonically enough

I was in my motel room in Tamworth on Saturday night watching the movie 'Jobs' on my iPad when I noticed it needed charging, so I switched to watching it on my iPod.
The penny dropped that I was watching a movie about the man who was the visionary behind the machine that I was watching this movie about him on.

Not only that, but when I paused the movie to go for a bathroom break, I put the iPod down on my bedside table on top of the book I was reading and noticed the eye of Job's/Kutcher's looked very similar to the owl eye on the book cover I was reading.

My motel room in Tamworth

Jobs was quoted as saying that taking LSD was one of the most life changing things he ever did.

It has also been pointed out one of Job's favourite books was Ram Dass's 'Be Here Now' and had a big influence on him going to India in his college days.

Be Here Now ... Again
Be Here Now was also a big influence on my teenage life and I have bought this book three times now in my life with the last copy still on my bookshelf.

Watching 'Jobs' on my iPod where Steve talks about the iPod 

But watching this movie on my iPod really brought home to me what one man of vision can do to change the world.

I thought it was also ironic that Steve Jobs didn't like The Beatles, but named his company Apple, just like The Beatles named their record company.

Jobs was a big Bob Dylan fan.

Co-founder Steve Wozniak was a Beatles fan though.

Apple was founded by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne on April 1, 1976, to develop and sell personal computers.

That's April FOOL's day, by the way. 
I also think it is ironic that Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has been talking of moving to "The Apple Isle", Tasmania recently.

And that brings up the old saying about no man being an island, because while Jobs was a visionary, he was influenced from all directions and by lots of people.

Steve was like a conductor (and I don't mean lightning rod;-) wanting the tune played the way he heard it in his own head.

On the subject of lightning and pop culture, it wasn't lost on me that Steve Jobs was born in 1955, either.

Lightning played a big part in getting back to the year 1955 in the BTTF movies and lightning is usually associated with shamanism as well.
Shamanism
"Shamanism (/ˈʃɑːmən/ SHAH-mən or /ˈʃeɪmən/ SHAY-mən) is a practice that involves a practitioner reaching altered states of consciousness in order to perceive and interact with a spirit world and channel these transcendental energies into this world."
So, in my book people like Steve Jobs and John Lennon are modern day shamans because they went into altered states and brought back ideas that changed the world and caused untold ripple effects throughout our society.

It became quite clear while watching the Jobs movie that Steve was walking the way of the shaman, even if he didn't consciously realize it himself.
Sure, Steve was a bit of an arsehole and had some personal issues, but on a societal level his vision for the modern world was a godsend ... literally, I think.

I just spent 10 days on the road traveling around my home country of Australia on what seemed to me a very spiritually guided trip and it wasn't lost on me that birds were prominent companions on my trip in very seemingly magical ways.
And no, I didn't do any drugs on this trip apart from a few beers and a bottle of red wine.

A bird print on my wall in Tamworth

The night I finished watching the Jobs movie in my motel room in Tamworth was near the end of my road trip, so to see the pictures on my motel room wall of two black birds, a mountain peak and Venetian waterways was rather personally amusing to me, as black birds/owls/mountains and Venetian copied waterways in Canberra were prominent things on my almost completed road trip (which I will be writing about in upcoming posts).

A mountain peak print on my wall in Tamworth

I had just climbed (walked more like it) Australia's highest peak accompanied by crows all the way to the top, and spent a lot of time around Canberra's Kingston foreshore on Lake Burley Griffin, which has Venetian type waterways in the new developments around the lake foreshore areas that my son told me was modeled off Venice in Italy. 

The Venetian waterways print on my wall in Tamworth

Kingston Foreshore suburb 

along the canal to the lake

It wasn't lost on me either that Matthew Modine who played Kubrick's Pvt. Joker in Full Metal Jacket and Folely in The Dark Knight Rises also plays John Sculley in the Jobs movie.

Especially after the passing of the Purple one earlier in the week.

Purple Reign?

The shaman and the Trickster often show life for the cosmic joke that it is.
Life is much stranger than fiction, if you pay attention to it.