Last week, the world became a little bit dimmer as the news of Steve Jobs’ death began to circulate across the globe. On a personal level, I was surprised by the weight of the sadness that Steve’s death created within me. I did not know Steve Jobs, I had no personal relationship with him at all, but nonetheless I could feel a palpable loss in my life. The timing of the news was especially painful: I was literally right in the middle of sending out our weekly Integral Life update, which featured a discussion about the intersection of mortality and technology, when I received the first notice of his death—in iChat on my MacBook Pro, no less—leaving a darkly poetic ache in my heart.

I think I felt his death as deeply as I did simply because no one else has influenced my own lower-right quadrant more than Steve Jobs. Every piece of content I’ve produced in recent years, every piece of copy I’ve written, every image that I’ve designed for IntegralLife.com has been created on an Apple computer. The technologies Steve helped bring to life have been some of the most powerful platforms for my own creative process that I’ve ever known. There is something about the elegant balance between form and function that exists in Apple products—a marvelous integration of aesthetics, simplicity, connectivity, and sheer computational power—that continues to catalyze my creativity in astonishing ways.

Steve Jobs was a true “spiral wizard”, meaning he was able to display a mastery over the various stages of consciousness that are available to us: Read the rest of this entry