From the blog, War in Context:
We live in a society where drug-taking — either recreationally or by prescription — has never been more commonplace. So the idea that psychedelics induce particular sensations, suggests that they are yet another tool for modulating feelings and that those feelings merely happen to be located at a rarely engaged point on the feeling spectrum.
Most striking however — and this would tend to apply to those psychedelic experiences occurring in a tranquil and natural setting — is the sense that this is not a drug-induced experience. In other words, although the drug throws open a previously invisible door which will close after just a few hours, while that door remains open the intrinsic capabilities of the human mind appear to have been unlocked revealing the indivisibility of perceiver, perception, and perceived. The gap between “in here” and “out there” has dissolved.
The drug, rather than producing some form of intoxication, seems instead to peel away those perceptual filters that in everyday awareness largely shut out the world. For those rare individuals in whom those filters have already fallen away, the drug has no effect. Neem Karoli Baba, who Jobs had hoped to meet in India, had already demonstrated such an immunity to the effects of psychedelics. But the conclusion of Jobs own brief spiritual adventure was that individuals such as that particular Indian sage had much less to offer the world than the likes of Thomas Edison.
How did Jobs interpret his own LSD experience? I can only speculate, but given his role in helping create a society where our electronic connections often seem stronger than our physical relationships, I’m inclined to think that either he couldn’t retrieve much from the depths afterwards or didn’t penetrate any more deeply than the level of aesthetics. Later, when invited to support scientific research into therapeutic applications for psychedelics, Jobs declined.
The response to Jobs’ death has become a kind of instant beatification. He has become America’s greatest inventor — even though he didn’t invent anything. He is the visionary who shaped the world we live in — but is successfully developing products that cater to manufactured needs really a vision? What’s hard to dispute is that he was one of the greatest salesmen who ever lived.
This was a man who when asked whether he was glad that he had kids, said, “It’s 10,000 times better than anything I’ve ever done,” yet it seems he never found enough time to get to know them. “I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did,” said Jobs when explaining why he consented to having his biography written.
And therein lies the paradox of the age of global connectivity: it allows us to be part of ever expanding information and social networks which are formed by tying together bubbles of increasing isolation.