I’ve long pondered what Steve meant by those words; he had said them so sincerely. With the passage of time, I came to believe that Steve understood the possibilities of a life beyond corporate performance and product development, that beneath the corporate warrior was a sense that there were inner depths to plumb, and that—consciously or unconsciously—for him one had yielded to the other.
Steve explored some possibilities with me for staying on at Pixar, including becoming president. As flattering as that was, I felt it would not change much. Steve, Ed, and I would still work the same way. Nor would it help me figure what kind of deli I wanted. In the end, we agreed that I would join Pixar’s board of directors, and I told him I would be around anytime to help if the company needed it.
“We’ll miss you,” Steve said, “more than you think. But I understand.”
I felt very grateful for his support.
It was hard to clean out my office and say goodbye to Pixar. I wrote an e-mail to the entire company expressing how much I would miss everyone, how amazing everyone was, and how happy I was to be joining Pixar’s board of directors. I ended the message with these words:
I could not imagine a better working relationship than the one forged among Steve, Ed, and myself. I have learned so much from each of them and I have grown to love and respect them as partners, as leaders, and as humans.
For those of you who take yoga, you know that at the end of each class it is common to place the hands together and utter the Indian greeting “Namaste.” It means: “I honor the place in you of love, of truth, of peace. When you are in that place in you and I am in that place in me, we are one.” Namaste.
The outpouring I received from this e-mail was extraordinary. From every corner of the company, from individuals I knew well, and even from individuals I didn’t, came messages of gratitude, warmth, inspiration, and support. As I prepared to leave, Ed and John gave me a gift. It was a beautifully framed, hand-drawn picture of the characters in Toy Story and A Bug’s Life. Above the image was a large THANKS LAWRENCE! and surrounding it were touching handwritten notes of thanks and support from many of my colleagues. I had never realized this was how people felt. For a person who had all but gone out of his way to keep his personal and business lives separate, I had utterly failed.
26
A Hundred Years
My enthusiastic leap into a new world turned out to be more like a series of stumbles. It takes time to learn one’s way in new terrain, and it is hard, maybe impossible, to do so without taking wrong turns and hitting dead ends. I was plunging into a world of Eastern philosophy and meditation I knew very little about.
I was drawn to Joseph Campbell’s observation that “one of our problems today is that we are not well acquainted with the literature of the spirit.”15 The literature of the spirit. That seemed like a very good place to begin.
I assembled a collection of books, including a healthy dose of Western literature, mythology, philosophy, and contemporary physics and biology; books on Western religion and its mystical counterparts, Kabbala and Christian mysticism; as well as works by Hindu yogis, Sufi mystics, and Buddhist masters. Before long, I had many favorites.
Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe was a tour de force in modern physics. David Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order brilliantly drew from physics to demonstrate important philosophical ideas. There was Herbert Guenther’s Ecstatic Spontaneity, a tribute to the Buddhist sage Saraha, in which Guenther wrote, “We humans are fragmented and divided beings, at odds with ourselves and our surrounding world. We suffer from our ongoing fragmentation and yearn for wholeness.”16 This contrast of fragmentation and wholeness seemed to come up often.
I read T.R.V. Murti and Jay Garfield, two brilliant scholars whose expositions on Buddhist Middle Way philosophy were unprecedented in the English language; Aldous Huxley’s groundbreaking The Perennial Philosophy; Kabloona, a riveting memoir of Gontran de Poncins’s journey to live with the Inuit; Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s seminal On Death and Dying, which sparked an entire movement to humanize death; and Brenda Ueland’s classic If You Want to Write, a monument to self-expression, written or otherwise. I read Nietzsche and Kafka, Camus and Wolfe, Pirsig and Didion, Heinlein and Clarke. I immersed myself in these and other works, excitedly following the threads from their footnotes and citations, making notes of the passages that most moved me, and generally giving myself the kind of education that I had never had time for earlier in my life.
One idea that strongly appealed to me was the Middle Way, an ancient Buddhist philosophy that has inspired and guided meditation masters for centuries. It is based on the insight that the mind cannot comprehend the full complexity of reality. Instead, in order to function, we rely on approximations of reality, usually in the form of images, templates, concepts, and stories that we hold in our minds. These approximations give us enough structure to get things done—functional reality, the Middle Way thinkers called it.
But because the approximations we use to function fall short of the way things truly are, we often suffer when reality conflicts with our perceptions. The Middle Way is about finding harmony between the structure that helps us function and the fluidity that opens us to experience more ease, richness, and connection in our lives.
One way to illustrate the ideas of the Middle Way is to imagine that there are two people inside of us. One is a bureaucrat; the other, an artist or free spirit. The job of the bureaucrat is to get things done: wake up on time, pay the bills, earn good grades. The bureaucrat likes stability, rules, and values efficiency and performance. The artist or free spirit within us cares about joy, love, adventure, spontaneity, creativity, and feeling deeply connected and alive. The free spirit wants to break through the sea of convention and expectation in which we often find ourselves swimming.
The insight of the Middle Way is that becoming stuck in either of these states inevitably leads to frustration. If we are too focused on function, accumulation, and performance, we may wind up wondering if we have truly lived. If, on the other hand, we are so focused on living free and engaging our passions, we may become frustrated by lack of momentum or grounding. The Middle Way holds that the best outcomes arise from harmonizing these two sides—from harvesting our positive nature, spirit, and humanity without ignoring practicality. This invariably calls for finding the courage to look beyond the conventions that drive how we presently function.
Here was a philosophy—together with a system of meditation for realizing it—that I really wanted to study more. To do so, I would need a teacher, someone to help me navigate the terrain.
Although I met Western scholars and Tibetan lamas who understood this field, I felt a chasm between us. The Tibetan lamas had access to ideas I wanted to explore, but their monastic, Tibetan paradigms created an obstacle. I had a hard time connecting with their rituals, such as bowing to the ground and reciting in Tibetan. Instead of embracing the rituals, I kept asking myself, “Why do I have to do this?” I had too much resistance. On the other hand, the Western scholars were very learned, but I found myself too caught up in academic nuances rather than the pragmatic methods I had hoped to find.
All this made me quite skeptical about finding a teacher I could trust, and I searched for many months to find one. Then, one day in 2000, a scholar of Indian philosophy whom I had befriended introduced Hillary and me to his teacher, a Brazilian-born Tibetan Buddhist master named Segyu Choepel Rinpoche. He went by the honorary title Rinpoche.
We were invited to meet Rinpoche at his home in the rolling hills of Sebastopol, California, about an hour and a half north of San Francisco. Home would not be quite the way to describe it actually. It was a temple, a traditional Tibetan Buddhist meditation temple, full of ornate images and iconography—beautiful and authentic, but the kind I typically had a difficult time relating to. Meditation cushions lined the walls, and the smell of incense filled the air. When we arrived, Rinpoche was sitting comfortably on some cushions on one side of the room. Ar
ound fifty years old, he was of medium height, stocky, with a shaved head and a warm, magnetic smile. He spoke with a Portuguese accent, and he wore the dark red robes of a Tibetan Buddhist monk.
“Come in, come in,” he said warmly. “Would you like some tea?”
With that, we sat down and described how we came to be there. Rinpoche listened attentively and shared a few details of his own story—his upbringing in Rio, his path through computer engineering, Brazilian healing, and Tibetan Buddhism. We were fascinated. He showed us around his simple but immaculately kept home. We enjoyed some tea. It could not have been more unassuming. Rinpoche seemed as well versed in Western news, culture, and technology as he was in Buddhist philosophy and meditation, and the conversation was warm and comfortable from the outset.
“There was such a positive feeling in there,” Hillary noted on the drive home.
“It was very comfortable,” I said. “I felt really at ease.”
“I’d like to come back,” Hillary added. “I think I can learn a lot from him.”
I felt the same way. The ease and pleasantness of the conversation had made me drop my guard.
Over the next year, Hillary and I drove back and forth to Sebastopol to attend Rinpoche’s classes and retreats. He brought a remarkable depth and vigor to meditation practices and their underlying philosophy. During this time, a friendship also began to blossom. Rinpoche had an infectious zest for life. He was a connoisseur with a taste for good coffee, artisan chocolate, and fine foods, and he loved to travel and ski. To Rinpoche there is a world of difference between insatiable craving and joyful indulgence.
Working with Rinpoche also helped me drop my skepticism about studying with a spiritual teacher. It helped that Rinpoche himself displayed enormous reverence for his own teachers. They were a source of deep connection for him, a feeling of being part of a profound lineage of insight. At the same time, he was as passionate about modern thought, science, and technology as he was about ancient meditation practices. I was inspired by this combination of respect for tradition and eagerness to embrace modern thought.
In late 2002, Hillary made an observation.
“He wants to change the way we engage with these practices, you know,” she said. “He wants to make them more accessible for contemporary practitioners.”
“Are you sure?” I replied. “His practices are quite traditional.”
“They are traditional only because Rinpoche is using the tools available to him,” Hillary said. “He wants us to help. He wants you to help him develop a strategy.”
I understood that Rinpoche aspired to do more for Westerners. I was moved by that idea myself. I was just very skeptical about it. The Eastern traditions were designed for monastics in the Himalayas, not the tech-savvy go-getters of the cosmopolitan West. But Hillary would have none of it, and so one day I suggested to Rinpoche that we at least assess the challenge of what it would take to make the meditation tradition we were studying truly accessible in modern life.
Rinpoche was eager to do this assessment too, and so, beginning in January 2003, five of us gathered in the living room of a small house in Palo Alto, California, placed whiteboards all along the walls, and dove into the challenge. There was Rinpoche, Hillary, myself, and two other students of Rinpoche: Pam Moriarty and Christina Juskiewicz. Pam was a longtime meditator, grief counselor, and a wonderfully kind, gentle, and compassionate person. Christina was a Buddhist nun and Rinpoche’s assistant. She was brimming with an unshakable, steadfast dedication to apply all she had learned to help others.
Every day for a month, we talked about how this brilliant method for refining human experience had become imprisoned in a cultural wrapper that made it hard to access. We examined the differences between ancient Eastern culture and the modern West, the impact of modern knowledge on spiritual traditions, and how Buddhist ideas for contentment and peace of mind had historically spread to different parts of the world.
At the end of thirty days, we had a plan, though perhaps dream was a better word. It called for making a long tradition of meditation practices accessible in our time, aligning those practices with modern discovery, and conforming them to contemporary social norms. It also acknowledged the importance of training individuals to be able to perpetuate that tradition.
As I looked at the plan, I was moved by the immensity of the challenge we were considering. It seemed beyond our capacity to take this on, certainly beyond my capacity. The fast pace, the pressures to perform, the onslaught of media and information that characterized contemporary life made it hard to slow down, hard to value the profundity of a deep tradition. Many seemed more interested in quick fixes to gain peace of mind—a book, a class, a weekend away—when it often takes much more to undo the habits that keep us stressed. Our task would not be an easy one.
“This will take five hundred years to achieve,” I protested. “We’re talking about the wholesale restatement of a two-thousand-year-old tradition.”
“No,” Rinpoche replied. “Just a hundred years.”
“A hundred years!” I exclaimed. “Isn’t that a little beyond our scope?”
“It’s a big task,” Rinpoche said calmly. “What else are you doing?”
Hillary, Pam, Christina, and I looked at each other. Was he serious? Who in their right mind takes on a hundred-year project? Four years or bust was my Silicon Valley mindset.
“How do we do it?” I asked Rinpoche. “Except for you, none of us has any qualifications.”
“Think of me like a miner who has retrieved the gold in those Tibetan mountains,” he said. “Each of you is in the New World. We have to build a bridge that links one to the other. Together we can do it.”
“But where do we even begin?” I asked, still half in disbelief.
“Simple,” he said. “We each put one foot in front of the other, then the other foot goes in front of the first one.”
I looked at Pam, at Christina, at Hillary. I could tell on their faces. They were in.
And there it was. That same sparkle I’d felt when I’d first met Steve, Ed, and John. Once again, I felt that I was part of a group that was crazy enough to take on the near impossible. Only this time I probably wouldn’t be around for the IPO.
So began a new chapter in my life. We named our organization Juniper, after the hearty tree that grows anywhere, including thirteen thousand feet high up in the Himalayas where many meditation masters long ago lived. Under Rinpoche’s guidance, the five of us spent the next several years dissecting the works of those masters, carefully excising the essential practices from the cultural artifacts, engaging those practices, and putting them in a form suitable for contemporary meditators. We opened Juniper to the public in 2009 and established our first public meditation center in San Francisco in 2015.
We are off to a good start, but to fully realize this vision will take time. It is an investment in the idea that humanity has tremendous untapped potential, if only we can release it. This is the kind of change that occurs over generations. As such, it is a work in progress and will require many others to bring to fruition.
Juniper did not spell the end of my experience with Pixar, however. I would later realize that these endeavors were more connected than I thought, although it would take a highly unusual occurrence for me to see it.
27
The Middle Way
I heard an enormous explosion, as though a meteor had crashed into my car.
In an instant, I was no longer driving through the intersection. Everything was in slow motion as my mind tried to catch up with what was happening. In what seemed like minutes but could only have been seconds, I realized that I was in a major traffic accident. My car was spinning out of control.
The accident occurred one Tuesday evening in April 2014. Hillary and I were returning from a meditation and discussion at Rinpoche’s house, now in Redwood City, about fifteen minutes from our home. By some small miracle, that night we had arrived there in separate cars, so Hillary was not in the
car with me. She was a little ahead of me as I drove through the major intersection near our house where the accident occurred.
“If I can get out I’ll be okay,” I thought to myself as my car finally came to a stop. I opened the door and stumbled to the nearest street corner, where I sat down on the ground and looked back to see my utterly totaled car in the intersection. The rear door and wheel on the driver’s side were completely smashed, and large pieces of the undercarriage were on the road. Two inches further up and the driver’s door would have taken a direct hit.
I checked myself for physical damage. I had pain in my upper back and neck, and I was shaking uncontrollably, but everything seemed to be in the right place. I thought that if I could find one moment of calm amid this chaos, somehow it would help, so I shut my eyes and took one long, deep breath.
My next thought was about Hillary. I had to tell her what happened. I hadn’t realized that the accident had been so loud that she had instinctively pulled her car over to see if anyone needed help, not thinking that I was involved. By now, she was walking back to the intersection and saw my car in the middle of it. After a horrifying moment of dread, she saw me sitting on the sidewalk, with some people around me checking if I was okay.
Thankfully, I was. I had been hit by a drunk driver in a Dodge Ram truck, driving with a suspended license due to a prior drunk driving conviction. He fled the scene and was later arrested. For the next few days I lay around with a neck and back so stiff I could hardly move.
Several weeks and much physical therapy later, Hillary and I went away for a few days to rest and recover. On one rainy day, we were sitting on a beach under an umbrella. Hillary was reading. I was just sitting there, mesmerized by the waves, wind, and rain, reflecting on what had happened. All of a sudden, I was struck by an insight.
To Pixar and Beyond Page 24