Lit Stepping Into A Larger World: A Metaphysical and Philosophical Discussion of the Force

Just a quick aside, in regards to the Force as "mystical" as opposed to "physical" energy. The Jedi are said to possess "telekinetic" abilities, right? (In the EU, at least)

My emphasis.

I may be overlooking something here, but seems to me that if we want to say that the Jedi have TK (as the EU does), we need to accept that the Force can't be a "physical" energy field.

And, it's quite a late response but:

The above (and other similar comments made later by others) seems like more of an observation than an explanation (though, in fairness, I don't think it can be explained beyond: "they've found a way to do it"[

 

That's fine. That's fundamentally no different from what any true Jedi would experience.

 

I really don't feel like retyping everything I wrote in another thread, so I'm going to just C&P what I wrote here if that's alright:

The Dark Empire thread reminded me of a statement on the Dark Side's nature in the DES, where the book stated that the Dark Side of the Force was Chaos and Destruction contrasted against the Light Side of the Force's Civilization, Knowledge, and Order.

Also, that the Dark Side was not evil but people who used it were inclined to be so.

Then we have Luke Skywalker in the Unifying Force stating the Dark Side is just a euphemism for evil and it's all the Darkness in the human soul that exists in the Force as a physical entity.

We also have Vergere's view.

So what's the correct one? Which do you prefer?

Personally, I'm inclined with the view that Dark Empire Sourcebook presents.

I would go further and suggest though that the Dark Side is perhaps something akin to Uranium in some respects. Drawing on the Entropic Side of the Force will give you the power to destroy and dominate life (Palpatine's writings are expanded on in the DESB and basically go on to state that they're surprisingly crude and animalistic. Palpatine's entire philosophy being nothing more than summarized as "if you can destroy a thing, then you can control it.") but it's something that is fundamentally unhealthy.

If you drink deeply of the Well of Chaos and Destruction then your body will undoubtedly be corroded by it and it's quite possible that you will slowly go insane for the experience. Even if the Force itself is not trying to corrupt you, you're just exposing yourself to things that the human brain and body is not meant to handle. As opposed to the Jedi who are drawing from Life and Order.

 

Eh, it's pretty radically different if you understand the process of spiritual transformation that's going on there. Most Jedi are granted only what knowledge the Force allows them to glipse, true, but that's always been limited to the physical realm they are currently inhabiting because... unfortunately... most of them limit their own sentiment to the material realm. It's not really much different from religious people who believe in God and try to live according to their religion's holy book, but don't strive towards a deeper spiritual awakening than their own belief. Now, it's a little bit deeper for the average Jedi than for the average religious person on earth... but the principle is the same and the difference between Mace Windu, and fully realized gnostic Yoda or Ben Kenobi is HUGE. I mean, huge. Yoda realizes the huge difference between himself as of ROTS and fully realized discorporeal Qui-Gon Jinn... hence apprenticing himself to him in a grand tradition of mystical transmission that in Sufism is called Uwaysi transmission. Qui-Gon, Yoda, Obi-Wan, Anakin and later Luke all have this deep abiding experience and knowledge of the metaphysical reality of the cosmos that Mace Windu, Plo Koon, Saesee Tiin, Aayla Secura and all the other Jedi that perished in the Purge don't have.

It's the difference between the person that devotes himself to doing religious rituals and abiding by the exoteric teachings, and the person that devotes himself to the exoteric teachings AND the esoteric... and furthermore, penetrates the esoteric to its highest level and attains to spiritual union. There are degrees of union, and the Jedi that glimpses union in the midst of parrying blaster bolts or the like is experiencing a temporary state. It's like the temporary ecstatic state you but glimpse for a few seconds in the throes of sexual union. There's a reason that the experience of sexual ecstasy has been used as metaphor in mystical poetry. Hard to fathom that in the context of experiencing the Divine, let alone that being an experience that never ends for you. Yes?

The greatest documented example in the EU of this flash of union I'm speaking about is in The Unifying Force by Jacen Solo. That experience was, for him, a one time deal and limited at first by his own need to reach it... thus he was even able to contemplate in the midst of the experience that he'd never feel it again but always be searching for it... and later by his own hubris and utlimately his evil. Although, one could actually suggest that Luke Skywalker tasted of Union way back in HTTE while using a training remote and he lost track of time to the point that he totally blanked on the exercise and when he came out of his ecstatic state an hour or two had passed. At that point Luke wasn't even there to observe and contemplate the state... he just was, versus Jacen's experience in TUF where he was observing and contemplating rather than just being.

 

Here is my take on the nature of Sith spirits from the other thread:

 

I'm not sure that's actually all that bad of an analogy. If we view the human mind as a conflict between the Superego (The Light Side of the Force) and the Id (The Dark Side of the Force) then the Force having an internal conflict represented by the minds inside of it (Souls for lack of a better term) then it makes perfect sense. It also represents the internal struggle that humans have with one another is reflected in the Force as a whole.

The Rebel Alliance and the Empire are not apart from the conflict of the Light vs. the Dark in this model. The Imperials, by surrendering to their darker urges, are reflecting the Force's movement to darkness and encouraging it. The Rebel Alliance, by serving the cause of selflessness in their hearts, weakens the Force's movement out of balance.

 

According to GL's other statements the Force ( the Living Force ) is split into light and dark. There's no contradiction. And there wouldn't be, given that Living/Unifying is a distinction introduced in the PT era, while the PT itself ( the AOTC script specifically ) indicates the dark side is still part of the Force. Living/Unifying does not replace Light/Dark but rather gives us more information... kind of like the situation with the midichlorians.

What do we really know about their sentiment?

I was talking about the Force using the Jedi to fulfill its will, as opposed to the Jedi being indistinguishable from the Force. The Force using the Jedi to fulfill its will is nothing new.

"The Force remains a code only partially deciphered."

 

If the Force is split into "light and dark", I remain perplexed by the refusal to refer to the "light side" in the films themselves. The closest thing we get is a still wet-behind-the-ears Luke talking about a "good side". Insofar as the movies are concerned, it appears that there is only the Force and its dark side. (Unifying/Living distinctions notwithstanding)

At present, I tend to just assume that the term "light side" was discarded by the Jedi as outdated and inaccurate at some point post-Ruusan. To speak of the "light and dark sides of the Force" is to imply that they are, to some extent, on the "same level" as one another... I don't think that's the case. The dark side is a perversion of the Force and/or its unfortunate "down side", not the yin to the "light side's" yang.

 

Question about Sith Ghosts: is there any evidence they have the same sort of far-reaching knowledge that Jedi Spirits do? Or are they kind of just trapped in their surroundings, little better off than if they were still in their old bodies?

And on the Dark Side/Light Side as Force-Schizophrenia: I'm not the only one who read the DNT as an extended metaphor for the Force, am I?

 

Ben too, and he ain't no spring chicken.

 

When/where?

 

ROTJ script.

 

If it's not in the film... then it's not in the film.

 

Yeah, right. Is this the Film Purist forum?

Who cares? The point is that an experienced Jedi Master is talking about the good side, and Lucas wrote it, so the "poor confused wet-behind-the-ears-Luke" excuse goes out the window.

 

Uh, when I specifically stated that I'm perplexed as to why "light side" never appears in any of the films? I'm fully aware that the term appears in sources outside of the films. The question is: why only outside the films? It's curious.

The "point" is that Lucas wrote it... then cut it.

 

If I understand the canon system(), final script material not contradicted by the films could be considered canon. But the same nomenclature comes from Lucas quotes, IIRC.

We didn't say "light side" for years because "dark side" sounds a lot cooler than "light side", which sounds like it came from a commercial for low fat chips.

There's also the much-ignored fact that Yoda doesn't contradict Luke, an odd failure to seize the opportunity to correct Luke's supposedly erroneous views on the Force. If Luke is in fact characterizing the Force incorrectly, what purpose is served by failing to contradict him and validating his inaccurate view?

 

I think that is a bit overreading into it.

We don't honestly get much insight into the whole thing. But when Luke says "How do I know the Good Side from the Bad?"

Yoda doesn't say "The Force is Good, The Dark Side is Bad."

He just goes with Luke's terminology.

 

The script used is the only one that's canon, as far as I know.

Was this a line from another scene entirely with Luke and Obi-Wan, or a line cut from the conversation Luke and Obi-Wan have on Dagobah?

Still, the fact remains that the term isn't used in any of the films - not even the more recent ones, which I would have expected. Luceno seems to stick to the plain old "the Force vs the dark side" terminology in Dark Lord, too, which leads me to my "the Jedi abandoned the term sometime after Ruusan" conclusions.

 

I was going by the "latest" version of the script I could find. And, it's from Dagobah.

 

Ajunta Pall, at least, seemed confused as all hell. He could barely remember anything about *his own* past, much less having the slightest clue who you were (or who Darth Revan was) or anything about the Academy on Korriban or the Jedi Civil War.

Marka Ragnos, in his video game cameo, hardly seemed up to speed on current events either; he was just mainly mad at everyone and wanted to pound them.

 

They also never referenced the Unifying Force in the movies, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

 

I don't actually think that the Jedi Ghosts seem to be that omnipotent actually. Ben Kenobi, for example, was quite wrong when he told Luke that he should be ready to destroy Darth Vader. I'm fairly sure that Jedi spirits are just....Jedi Spirits.

I didn't see anything to that effect, actually. I thought the Dark Nest was a fairly silly plot idea honestly.

 

Omnipotence is the wrong word, but they do seem fairly aware of things and capable of things that they would not be, as mere mortals. That is, a Jedi Spirit is at harmony with and existing in the Force, while a Sith spirit is not really on any "spiritual plane," so to speak. They have transcended nothing, and have settled for merely...remaining.

Whether it was good or not, I think the intention of the author was to juxtapose the story of the Killiks - in discussing the Dark Nest and its corrupting effects and its place within the formerly fairly pure Killik Shared Mind, corrupting effects caused by the imposition of sentient wills upon this shared mind - with the other story he tells, of the Jedi coming back around to the right way of thinking.

 

Ben is still clearly not *perfectly* enlightened, just more enlightened than he was, on a higher level of development than he was as a mortal human (and more than most mortal Jedi could hope to be). He does, after all, still have somewhere else to "move up to" after he's done helping Luke.

That said, I didn't say truly "omnipotent" or "omniscient" -- Ben doesn't know the future and arguably he can't read minds, but he *can* watch what's going on in the world seemingly at will as opposed to, say, being trapped in a tiny box and unable to leave it the way Ajunta Pall's spirit is.

 

The dark side isn't apart from the Force, in fact... nothing truly is. The Force is omnipresent.

That said, the dark side can easily be a perversion of the purity of the Force existing in the metaphysically "lower" realm of the Living Force. Which I find to be the only plausible conception of it given GL's cancer analogy. The silence of the films' Jedi Masters in speaking about the "good side" or "light side" should be of interest and shouldn't be dismissed to maintain a possibly mistaken assumption of a Manichean split in reality. The very nature of the Force is to unite all things in an ontological oneness... including the self-destructive tendancies of beings... thus it embraces that dark side that is the result of those tendancies, however... the "light side" being the manifestation of symbiosis in this metaphysical order is actually the manifestation of the Force in it's highest holistic reality on the dualistic plane. And again, Obi-Wan says as much to Vader in the ANH novelization.

It should be noted that in the Annotated Screenplays Ben does not talk about the "good side" in the ROTJ screenplay.

Point is, the Jedi obviously believe that the "light side" as concieved in the EU represents the Force in its whole, while the dark side does not and infact they speak of it as a sort of perversion in the Force. Sith lightning is termed an abomination of the Force in the ROTJ novelization. So if, as has apparently be canonized in the Power of the Jedi sourcebook, the Jedi view of the Force is the metaphysically correct view... talking of the "light side" is irrelevant because what is experienced as the "light side" is in fact the Force as it should be. I think it is then also of interest that early on, before there were problems with dark Jedi, the early Jedi referred to the Force simply as the Ashla and only later upon the discovery of some malevolent energies in the Force did they identify the Bogan. Something to ponder, but I recall that being the Essential Guide to the Force. If I could only dig that out of my box pile...