Afterlife in Star Wars

The Beatific Vision, in other words, only without God, and with a Pantheistic Divine Force instead.

You've almost just described the traditional Christian afterlife, where the soul of the individual is united with God in perfect communion and joined with the rest of creation in an eternal chorus of praise. But of course, you've given it a pantheistic, eastern twist with the stuff about "realizing that you've never been apart, never died, since everything is the Force"; that stuff is very reminiscent of the Baghavad Gita and Krishna's admonishments to Arjuna concerning Brahman and his comrades (i.e. "The Eternal Embodied Self is not born, nor does it die...", etc), and of course inimicable to Christianity, with its doctrines of creation, distinction, and personality. In Christianity, the idea of perfect union combined with perfect distinction is core to the religion, and core especially to the Christian idea of God; i.e. the Trinity is three persons who are perfectly united, lacking nothing and acting as one, yet also perfectly distinct as persons, such that to say "The Father is the Son" or "The Son is the Holy Spirit" is heresy. This idea stretches to the idea of the afterlife, where the same principle applies to the relation between the individual human soul and God; in the afterlife, the human soul will be perfectly united with God and with the rest of creation, and yet also perfectly distinct from God and from the rest of creation. This primary role of distinction and unity rests on the twin ideas, key to the Christian conception of God, of Creativity and Love; that God is creative, abounding in life so that he creates distinct things to express his perfect simplicity and infinity, and that God is Love, that Love in its highest form is the core of the divine essence. And Love, of course, almost requires distinction.

But how this could be applied to the Star Wars afterlife is unclear. Given this idea, you could simply say that the souls of most of the departed are simply in "Force Heaven," one with the Force and yet distinct from it; and that the special "merit-ees" who appear as Force Ghosts are simply the only ones who are able to act as themselves within the realm of the mortals, the only ones whose station within the Force is such that they are able to intercede directly within the realm of mortals, while most people are unable to do so (or perhaps are only able to do so indirectly). In other words, while when they are "within the Force" as the others are, they are at least in some sense individuals, for them to manifest themselves as individuals within the mortal realm, they need a special grace of the Force; or one could even say that normal souls can act as part of the force within the mortal realm, but not as individuals. In other words, somewhat close to the idea of a Christian saint, only more so. And yeah, I too see the process as more of a merit-based thing than a lucky-Force-Sensitive-who-learned-secret-gnosis-type thing; that the ones able to manifest themselves as Force Ghosts are those who have merited it by whatever means.

Because the Force as presented in the films is simply not pantheistic in the traditional sense; it is emphatically NOT Brahman. Saying that the Force is generated by life and used by it implies some level of distinction between the life generating it and the Force which is generated, even if the eventual spiritual goal is to eliminate that distinction altogether; because no one would say that Brahman was generated by the illusions made up of it. So an overtly pantheistic solution to this issue strikes me as problematic.

But it does seem to me that the current understanding of the Force and the relationship of the individual to it in many ways approximates certain forms of Islamic mysticism, especially Sufism, in the idea that the individual and the ego must be destroyed in order to truly participate in the divine essence, after which the individual is totally identified with the divine, with little in the way of distinction remaining. It's clear that Force-Ghos

 

Thanks, Dawud. I got the image of the Lakota concept of wakan. Wakan means life, spirit (the spirit is divided into four parts: nagi, nagila, ni, and shichun), and basically anything metaphysical. Many translate wakan or wakan tanka to mean "God" (Mormons are especially fond of placing monotheistic concepts in indigenous culture.), but it is nothing so simple.

 

So I've read. I'm not so sure I'd say "God" is so simple, as traditional theology really takes "God" way beyond what most people think of when they think or hear "God."

 

Religious metaphysics tend to be a bit weird (I mean, most are by definition talking about things humans could never hope to understand).

With that in mind, it occurs to me that the Star Wars afterlife could be very metaphysically strange as well. Maybe it is less you lose your identity to the force so much as you become everybody, and the trick is to remember who you were originally.

 

I would definitely file becoming everybody under "losing your identity".

 

Most Christians haven't even read the Bible; that's why we get memes like the Rapture showing up.

 

My view is that all sentients retain their personalities when they die and become one with the Force. When that happens, though, they are cut off from the physical realm and cannot manifest in or interact with it. To do so requires knowledge on how to traverse the different dimensional planes, and that knowledge is something that has to be learned.

 

Its said that Anakin is the tragedy. He's not. He gets to see his children again and be reunited with his friends despite the crap he pulled.

Padme gives her entire life in service to her people and her galaxy. She marries the man she loves and her idea of a perfect life is starting a family with him. Her oldest advisor is manipulating her husband behind her back throughout. She gets pregnant and just as she finally gets to live for herself, at the age of 27, she sees everything she worked for fall apart, her husband become an evil tyrant and she dies giving birth to her children who she can never raise. Padme loses everything and she doesn't get a glowy ghost to make it better. Our only comfort is the knowledge her children will carry on her ideals in her absence even if they don't know who she is. However, the bitter idea that the force used her to fulfill its prophecy and spat her out when it was done with her lingers.

 

That's what I had had thought before I started this discussion. Some articles on Wookiepedia also tend to describe the SW afterlife in that way. But now I've got to know some EU sources summarized in this discussion and even Lucas' comments that clearly contradict this theory. In those sources, it's clearly said that people who become one with the Force lose their identity. Some of those sources have even been posted in this discussion. In the novel for AotC, f.e., Yoda hears Qui-Gon's voice and is puzzled because he knew that Qui-Gon was dead and that no one can maintain his self and identity in that state. The question is: how does Yoda know? How does anyone know? Lucas and the EU authors, however, know and their vision of a Star Wars afterlife surely doesn't include maintaining your identity.

But some comments in this discussion fortunately give quite a few good points of view making this version of an afterlife not as bad as I used to think.

A very interesting and good point. Especially the fact that Padmé's children don't even know her, as you've mentioned, makes her fate even worse. She died a horrible death seeing her beloved husband turning to the dark side and murdering innocent people. And then, she simply is... Gone. This is a tragedy.

 

I know of at least four different EU characters that managed to retain their identies after dying even though they weren't shown to have any training or even any real Force-sensitivity.

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Denin

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Vila

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Lak_Sivrak

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Dice_Ibegon

Of course, IMO, seeing as the entire SW Universe is an internally-inconsistent mess written by several different writers with different points of view, any hope of reaching a foolproof conclusion as to what the nature of the Star Wars afterlife is is next to impossible.

 

I've just watched the three Mortis episodes and I find something strange. When Anakin sees his mother, his natural and first reaction was that she's dead and therefore cannot be in his room. When he sees Qui-Gon, however, he doesn't doubt for a second that he's really his deceased master. Why? Even more interesting is the Son's reply to Anakin's doubts: nothing in the universe really dies. How did he mean that? Was it a necessary lie to convince Anakin that Son actually was his mother? And why does Father disappear after his death whereas Daughter and Son don't?

I really do hope that the events of these episodes will be mentioned another time -- and that the questions that arose will be answered.

(And that Obi-Wan seems to be very surprised in RotS when he gets to know that Yoda communicates with Qui-Gon although he has known Qui-Gon still exists and can talk to living people since his stay on Mortis is also quite weird.)