Actualize Yourself

Mark Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, received a brown box at the funeral of Steve Jobs. In the brown box was the last gift of Steve Jobs. It was a copy of Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi.

Mark Benioff had gone to Steve Jobs for advice when he was having major problems in his company. He knew that Steve first read Autobiography of a Yogi when he was a teenager and later he had traveled to India seeking spiritual enlightenment. Benioff said,

“[About the brown box]…and it was a copy of Yogananda’s book… so Yogananda was a Hindu guru who had this kind of  book on self-realization and that was the message. The message was to actualize yourself. That was Yogananda’s message.”

Benioff goes on to tell us that in India, Steve Jobs had this incredible insight that his intuition was his greatest gift and that he needed to look at the world from the inside out. He goes on to say,

I look it with extreme gratitude and the level of generosity back and and I remember his thought was that we need to all be working on actualizing our self. That book, which is called Autobiography of a Yogi, if you haven’t read it, and if you want to understand Steve Jobs, it’s a good idea to look into that because I think that it gives a tremendous insight into who he was, but also why he was successful, which is he was not afraid to take that key journey.

Steve Jobs certainly was a man who changed technology in wonderful ways. He was known as a Zen Buddhist and took his practice into Apple Computer. I think he gave this book as his last gift because the book had opened his mind to the spiritual dimension and he wants you to actualize yourself.

Have you read Autobiography of a Yogi? What did you think? I loved it.

Last Gift Of Steve Jobs 🙂Give yourself or someone you love this wonderful gift!