Essay

In late 1973, Jobs took a job as a technician at Atari, Inc. in Los Gatos, California. Atari'sco-founder Nolan Busnell described him as "difficult but valuable", pointing out that "he was very often the smartest guy in the room, and he would let people know that." Jobs travelled to India in mid-1974 to visit Neem Karoli Baba at his Kainchi Ashram with a Reed College friend (and, later, an early Apple employee), Daniel Kottke, in search of spiritual enlightenment. When they got to the Neem Karoli ashram, it was almost deserted as Neem Karoli Baba had died in September 1973. Then they made a long trek up a dry riverbed to an ashram of Hariakhan Baba. In India, they spent a lot of time on bus rides from Delhi to Uttar Pradesh and back, then up to Himachal Pradesh and back.

After staying for seven months, Jobs left India and returned to the US ahead of Daniel Kottke. Jobs had changed his appearance; his head was shaved and he wore traditional Indian clothing. During this time, Jobs experimented with psychedelics, later calling his LSD experiences "one of the two or three most important things [he had] done in [his] life". He also became a serious practitioner of Zen Buddhism, engaged in lengthy meditation retreats at theTassajara Zen Mountain Center, the oldest Sōtō Zen monastery in the US.He considered taking up monastic residence at Eihei-ji in Japan, and maintained a lifelong appreciation for Zen.Jobs would later say that people around him who did not share his countercultural roots could not fully relate to his thinking.