Saga Balancing the Force is not the same as creating a "Gray" Jedi Order

Hey everyone!

Too long, didn't watch version:

We should be careful to separate the action of balancing the Force itself from whatever Order(s) may or may not exist at the end of the ST.

Video:

 

My impression of balance was benevolent peace. Meaning when the Sith come along they wreck everything. There was peace in the time before Palpatine. Killing off the Sith brings peace. Some folks seem to think balance means equal Jedi and Sith, or some middle road of good an evil. No. It means the bad guys are put away and not in control.

 

I don't think bringing balance to the Force means evil is vanquished like we see in TFA. People still have free will of making bad decisions in their life for example. The Force is still in balance but according to LST you need Jedi to maintain this balance. Who knows what TLJ and episode IX will establish.

 

IMO, think larger.

You're still thinking in political/religious terms. The Force is bigger than that. What is it? By virtue of what it actually is, what does balance then mean?

 

Balance means what Lucas said, that there is a push pull tension between the light and dark. The dark does not dominate the light, which the light keeps the dark in check. Balance.

 

Random people have little impact on the force though. It's not a generic being doing something bad that impacts the force, it's someone who heavily uses the force.

A Jedi doesn't impact the balance of the force, because he lets the force flow through him. A Sith - or a darksider in general - tries to twist the force to do his own bidding. That's what brought the force out of balance. Palpatine was just so immensely powerful, and heavily trying to "muddy the waters" so to speak, that he had a big impact on the force itself.

Technically you don't need anyone to maintain the balance, provided there is no one who is trying to twist the force. You only need Jedi because they are the only ones strong enough to stop a darksider from doing his deeds.

The handling of the balance of the force is the one thing I'm not so sure about on this new trilogy. Please don't ruin this stuff with some sort of light+dark balance. If that was supposed to be what balance was about, the chosen one wouldn't have appeared when he did. The Jedi were the dominating force in the galaxy for ages, yet no chosen one appeared. Then the Sith gained more and more power, equalling or even surpassing the Jedi, and the chosen one appears and removes the Sith. If light and dark needed to be in balance, the chosen one wouldn't have come right when Sith and Jedi were closer to each other again, nor would he have destroyed the Sith.

 

I always understood balance as in balance in oneself as in you acknowledge the existence of your inner darkside as part of yourself but you don't let it control you which is basically what we see Yoda going through in season 6 of TCW.
"As evil begins to take over, it pushes the Force out of balance."

--George Lucas, AOTC DVD Commentary.

"The dark side is always there. It is experienced daily by people. It is like a huge cancer, alive, festering—both a reminder of a moral state and, at the same time, symptom and symbol of a very sick society."

--George Lucas, “The Mythology of Star Wars,” Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth DVD, 2001


"One of the themes throughout the films is that the Sith Lords, when they started out thousands of years ago, embraced the Dark Side. They were greedy and self-centered and they all wanted to take over, so they killed each other. Eventually there was only one left, and that one took on an apprentice. And for thousands of years, the master would teach the apprentice, the master would die, the apprentice would then teach another apprentice, the master, and so on. But there could never be any more than two of them, because if there were, they would try to get rid of the leader, which is exactly what Vader was trying to do, and that's exactly what the Emperor was trying to do. The Emperor was trying to get rid of Vader, and Vader was trying to get rid of the Emperor. And that is the antithesis of a symbiotic relationship, in which if you do that, you become cancer, and you eventually kill the host, and everything dies."

--George Lucas, Bill Moyers Time Magazine Interview; 1999.


"I wanted to have this mythological footing because I was basing the films on the idea that the Force has two sides, the good side, the evil side, and they both need to be there. Most religions are built on that, whether it's called yin and yang, God and the devil—everything is built on the push-pull tension created by two sides of the equation. Right from the very beginning, that was the key issue in Star Wars."

--George Lucas, “The Mythology of Star Wars,” Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth DVD, 2001


"There is a hint in the movie that there was a Sith lord who had the power to create life. But it's left unsaid: Is Anakin a product of a super-Sith who influenced the Midichlorians to create him, or is he simply created by the Midichlorians to bring forth a prophecy, or was he created by the Force through the Midichlorians? It's left up to the audience to decide. How he was born ultimately has no relationship to how he dies, because in the end, the prophecy is true: Balance comes back to the Force."

--George Lucas, Rolling Stone Magazine, 2005.



"It was a virgin birth in an ecosystem of symbiotic relationships. It means that between the Force, which is sort of a life force, and reality, the connectors between these two things are what we call Midichlorians. They're kind of based on mitochondria, which are a completely different animal, that live inside every single cell and allow it to live, allow it to reproduce, allow life to exist. They also, in their own way, communicate with the Force itself. The more you have, the more your cells are able to speak intuitively to the Force itself and use the powers of the Force. Ultimately, I would say the Force itself created Anakin. I don't want to get into specific terms of labeling things to make it one religion or another, but basically that's one of the foundations of the hero's journey."

--George Lucas, Feburary 2005 issue of Vanity Fair, page 117.


"The Midichlorians have brought Anakin into being as “the chosen one” who will balance the universe. The mystery around that theory is that we don’t know yet whether the chosen one is a good or a bad person. He is to bring balance to the Force; but at this point, we don’t know what side of the Force needs to be balanced out."

--George Lucas, Star Wars: The Making of Episode I, 1999


"It's not that they can't see the Dark Side coming, it's just that the Dark Side begins to envelop everything. It's like walking into a fog. The Jedi's ability to see lessens as the Dark Side grows."

--George Lucas.


"The sad thing is Padme says there is still good in him and Luke says in ROTJ there is good in you. Its recurring. There is good in him. And that will bring balance to the force. He needs to get rid of the Sith and bring balance to the Force."

--George Lucas, ROTS DVD Commentary.

"The film is ultimately about the dark side and the light side, and those sides are designed around compassion and greed. The issue of greed, of getting things and owning things and having things and not being able to let go of things, is the opposite of compassion—of not thinking of yourself all the time. These are the two sides—the good force and the bad force. They're the simplest parts of a complex cosmic construction."

--George Lucas.

"If good and evil are mixed things become blurred - there is nothing between good and evil, everything is gray. In each of us we to have balance these emotions, and in the Star Wars saga the most important point is balance, balance between everything. It is dangerous to lose this. In The Phantom Menace one of the Jedi Council already knows the balance of The Force is starting to slip, and will slip further. It is obvious to this person that The Sith are going to destroy this balance. On the other hand a prediction which is referred to states someone will replace the balance in the future. At the right time a balance may again be created, but presently it is being eroded by dark forces"

--George Lucas, Time Magazine article, 2002

 

There's no such thing as 'gray Jedi' and the Force has nothing to do with organizations.

I believe you meant the light does not dominate the dark.

 

There was "peace" in a really superficial way. There wasn't any large scale galactic war, yeah, but there was clearly enough discontentment with the Republic for the Separatists to exist. Sure Palpatine helped give them a nudge, but its like he manufactured the clear-cut issues the Republic was best with; those were there and had been festering for some time. The Republic basically existed for one purpose: to provide stability for the wealthiest worlds while mining (literally and figuratively) less wealthy worlds of their valuable resources. And if a planet wasn't valuable, or if it existed too far away from the core? Tough luck. I mean, look at the presence of slavery on Tatooine despite it being illegal. It's not that it Tatooine a part of the Republic, but more that the Republic's influence didn't extent to it; it wasn't worth the effort to enforce the law on a backwater world too far away from Coruscant to matter.

The Republic was undeniably corrupt, and even though there wasn't war, I wouldn't say there was true peace, either, any more so than I would say there was peace under the Empire prior to the Galactic Civil war. And the Jedi, as servants of the Republic, were helping to maintain that corrupt status quo. Keep in mind that Anakin did eventually fulfill his prophesied destiny, but only after destroying both the Jedi and the Sith. If the end result of the prophecy was the will of the Force... then perhaps the means were, as well. The Jedi ended up being wiped out in a nearly identical manner mere decades later, so maybe they're really not meant to be around any more than the Sith are. Also, killing the Sith didn't bring about a true peace, because the ramifications of the Galactic Civil War are still being felt in active warfare three decades after the last Sith blew up.

I don't think it's about an equal amount of both, or even a middle ground between good and evil, because I don't think that the Light and Dark Sides are necessarily 1:1 equivalent with good and evil. The Jedi, in their way, were perverting the Force just as the Sith were, even though they staunchly adhered to the light side. Think of how they recruit members to their ranks: they take Force-sensitive children from their parents and raise them as Jedi nearly from infancy. They force their ideals onto others before they're able to accept them for themselves, and they force children into their order before they're able to make the choice on their own. That, from every point of view, is wrong. They also reject any emotions that correspond with the Dark Side, while also thinking of Light Side emotions in pragmatic rather than human terms. "Peace, serenity, acceptance." All of these are taught on the basis of strengthening one's connection to the Light Side, rather than encouraging emotional control or expression for the sake of allowing Jedi to grow into emotionally healthy individuals. This isn't to trash them or anything: they're inherently benevolent in their selflessness, but that doesn't mean that they're right, or without serious flaws. Those flaws are simply more subtle than those of the Sith, who exist only to further their own selfish desires. But, much as the Jedi, the Sith suffer from lack of balance, as they actively reject the light in favor of the strength of the dark.

A healthy individual is able to accept who they are without succumbing to their weaker impulses, and that goes for both "light" and "dark" vices. Helping other people constantly, to the detriment of yourself, is unhealthy. Helping only yourself, to the detriment of others, is also unhealthy. It's good to be selfless sometimes. It's okay to be selfish sometimes. It's never good to be only one or the other all the time. And I think this is what any future order needs to accept, as well as any future central governing body (although I don't know if we'll necessarily see one post-Episode IX), because the Republic made the same fatal flaw as the Jedi. They ignored things like slavery on Tatooine, or the conditions that would make leaving the Republic seem not just appealing, but necessary to a Separatist world. They ignored their own ineffectiveness. They focused solely on the splendor of the most well off worlds, while rejecting the darkness of those worlds that were not. Ignoring the darkness doesn't make it go away, it just allows it to grow unchecked. That's not peace; it's negligence and willful ignorance.

EDIT: I don't know if Lucas' thoughts on this are relevant. I know that sounds arrogant to suggest, considering he's the guy who thought this all up, but it's for two reasons: (1) He changes his mind quite frequently about different aspects of the series, in terms of both plot elements as well aspects of the world and how/why things function as they do, even thematically. His thinking on this now may be different than it was while making the prequels. (2) He's not involved with the series anymore, so "balance" as defined in the films by future filmmakers (I feel Rian Johnson is going to have more to say about this than anyone) may very well deviate from Lucas' professed thoughts. And that doesn't necessarily make it unfaithful, it simply marks a different interpretation of a philosophical concept. Regardless, I think it's best to stick to the content of the films themselves when debating this topic.

 

I have to agree, one cannot exist without the other.

 

From the films, it seems the lightside is balance while the darkside is imbalance, so the light must keep the dark in check to preserve balance.

 

I disagree, it certainly could happen.

 

That doesn't work within the context of "Star Wars". Evil will always exist because humanity will always be driven towards evil. You'd have to strip free will in order to abolish evil and that in itself is evil. Just as there will always be people who are not evil, because they are not inclined to go that route. Hence there must always be a balance.

 

Yes this explanation is perfect for the internal psychological balance of the characters, but what of balancing THE FORCE itself? It's still an action that needs to be done at large.

 

Thanks, this is a good collection of quotes.

 

The winning answer. You can't abolish evil without becoming evil!

Anakin himself wanted to "make things" the way he wanted them to be. Can't do that unless you force people to live your way.

 

Agreed. Star Wars isn't an Ivory Tower discussion on whether or not one can have the Light side without the Dark. The Dark Side will always be a threat, because the feelings that the Dark Side is associated with will always exist.

YODA
Run! Yes. A Jedi's strength
flows from the Force. But beware
of the dark side. Anger... fear...
aggression. The dark side of
the Force are they.

It was decided that learning the ways of the Force had to be a constant struggle for Luke and the he would always have to prove himself. In regard to the Dark Side of the Force, the story meeting transcripts suggest that although can't see it, it should be the real villain of the story. - Annotated Screenplays

 

It was. Anakin kills Palpatine and dies himself, thus restoring balance to the Force. The Sith are destroyed and with the Sith gone, there is no more imbalance. That doesn't mean that dark side adepts won't ever come back, but so long as there is a Jedi to oppose them, then the Force will remain in balance. That is what Lor San Tekka tells Poe at the start of TFA.

 

The Gray Jedi never existed as such In Legends there never existed the Gray Jedi
The Gray Jedi were Jedi who were not happy with the corrupt rules of the Jedi Council so they Jedi abandoned the Order but they continued to practice The Light Side of the Force

Never existed a code of the Gray Jedi or a balance in the force

 

Some Legends sources did suggest that Gray Jedi weren't just "those who continued to practice The Light Side but rejected the Council's authority" - it also encompassing those who dabbled in both the Dark Side and the Light Side:

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

Some objected to several of the new strictures, such as those that barred the training of any Jedi hopeful over the age of four, that prevented Jedi from having families,[6]and that restricted the use of Force abilities associated with the dark side.[5]



Gray Jedi called on the dark side of the Force, but were not corrupted by it and did not embrace it entirely.[3][5] In fact, some Gray Jedi opposed those who embraced the dark side; Bindo fought against the Sith Empire during the Great Sith War and again during the Jedi Civil War.[1] While Gray Jedi displayed a lack of adherence to the light side of the Force, they were free of dark side corruption;[4] beings who were corrupted by the dark side were not considered to be Gray Jedi—nor were Jedi who fell to the dark side and were later redeemed. Still, some Jedi thought that Gray Jedi carried the dark side's influence within them, even if the Gray Jedi did not always realize it.[5] The term did not refer to Force-users who believed there was no dark side of the Force, as such individuals were instead followers of the Potentium.[21]

All Gray Jedi displayed the use of both light and dark side Force abilities and demonstrated skill with techniques common to Jedi and Sith, such as the ability to construct and wield a lightsaber, as well as some unique Force talents.[5] Bindo acquitted himself for being talented with Jedi mind tricks and was capable of using dark side techniques such as Force lightning.[1]

The precursor to both the Jedi and the Sith, the "Je'daii"

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Je'daii_Order

had a Code and teachings that idealised "balance" and disapproved of excessive devotion to one side or another.

 

They were not Gray Jedi but they are Ancient Jedi (the first jedi in the galaxy) They were just learning from the force because they did not know the dark side, so they focused on balance

in those times the force was something mystical and unknown to many for what it required to study it
Years later the Je'daii knew that the dark side was a corruptible power so they were limit to practice The Light Side of the force

Although I was referring to the fact that there were never Gray Jedi in the Old Republic as in the Age of the Prequels in Legends continuity

As a far i know there was never a rival faction of the Jedi and the Sith or a faction who practiced the balance of the force in (Imperial Knights are not Gray Jedi)

Never existed the term of Gray Jedi

 

While Gray Jedi splinter groups are much less numerous than "standard Jedi" and generally aren't trying to "rival" anybody - they were still around. The Gray Paladins, the Altisian Jedi, and so forth.

Not so much "rival factions" as "small group of independents".

In the context of the newcanon, the Bendu at least presents himself in a way akin to the Legends Je'daii: "Jedi and Sith use light and dark - I'm the one in the middle" and when he loses his temper, he boasts "I am the light - I am the dark - I am the Bendu"


In TCW, The Father, on Mortis, warns "Too much light or dark would be the undoing of life as you know it"

So - if a Jedi found out about the Father and what he's said - they might seek to prevent either side of the Force from "gaining dominance" - Such a Jedi would be akin to a Je'daii - and the "gray" term might work pretty well in this case.

 

Well the term Jedi Gray never existed in the novels or in the comics of Legends In the comics they never mention a Gray Jedi

I think the term Gray Jedi was something that the fandom invented but that eventually became popular

 

The comics very occasionally mention it - but it is rare - usually more in the context of "defies Council rules" than "dabbles in the Dark".

The comic that first used the term, as far as I know, was 2001's The Stark Hyperspace War - Master Tyvokka of the Jedi Council, talking about Qui-Gon:

"Jinn always does things his own way, always sure he is right, always incredulous if we do not see it his way. Some think he is a gray Jedi."

Computer games like the Jedi Academy games and the Knights of the Old Republic games, showed us more of "Gray Jedi with both dark and light powers." (Kyle Katarn, Jaden Korr, Jolee Bindo, etc)

They saw both the light and the dark as "corruptible powers" so they encouraged the careful use of both, discouraged those who insisted on using mostly only one - and exiled those "corrupted by the light" and "corrupted by the dark" to the moons, to mediate and overcome their corruptions.
Then there was the Force Wars, where both "light-corrupted" (from the perspective of the mainstream Je'daii) and "dark-corrupted" ones rose to prominence, didn't go to the moons, but waged war on each other - with the dark ones losing, and the light ones winning, renaming themselves the Jedi, and pledging themselves to serving others.

 

Heaven can exist. I'm not talking about the current state of things. Just that it's possible for there to be good without evil, both in reality and in Star Wars.

There's no law of physics saying good can only exist if there is evil, is what I'm saying. You don't require evil in order for there to be good. You may require knowledge of evil in order to know and recognize that you have good (though recognizing that it's good wouldn't matter, you'd be in heaven-like bliss, you don't need to know something is good in order to be happy and enjoy life), you can have good without evil. Evil isn't some necessary ingredient in good.