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SECTION 7 - EVERYTHING ELSE:
JEDI AND BUDDHISM:
- The Jedi are explicitly Buddhist monks:
“The Jedi are good, but they’re not fantastic. They were never designed to be a superhero or anything like that. They were designed to be a Buddhist monk, who happened to be a very good warrior. And they became the peacekeepers of the human world.” –George Lucas, The Star Wars Archives 1999–2005 - “Attachment says: I love you, therefore I want you to make me happy. And genuine love says: I love you, therefore I want you to be happy. If that includes me, great, if it doesn’t include me, I just want your happiness.” - Tenzin Palmo Jetsunma
is an echo of
“He turns into Darth Vader because he gets attached to things. He can’t let go of his mother; he can’t let go of his girlfriend. He can’t let go of things. It makes you greedy. And when you are greedy, you are on the path to the Dark Side, because you fear you’re going to lose things, that you’re not going to have the power you need.” - George Lucas, Time Magazine, 2002
and
"You got the dark side, the light side, one is selfless, one is selfish, and you wanna keep them in balance. What happens when you go to the dark side is it goes out of balance and you get really selfish and you forget about everybody … because when you get selfish you get stuff, or you want stuff, and when you want stuff and you get stuff then you are afraid somebody is going to take it away from you, whether it’s a person or a thing or a particular pleasure or experience. Once you become afraid that somebody’s going to take it away from you or you’re gonna lose it, then you start to become angry, especially if you’re losing it, and that anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering. Mostly on the part of the person who’s selfish, because you spend all your time being afraid of losing everything you’ve got instead of actually living.” - George Lucas, 2010
and
“The core of Anakin’s problem is that Jedi are raised from birth so they learn to let go of everything. They’re trained more than anything else to understand the transitional nature of life, that things are constantly changing and you can’t hold on to anything. You can love things but you can’t be attached to them. You must be willing to let the flow of life and the flow of the Force move through your life, move through you. So that you can be compassionate and loving and caring, but not possessive and grabbing and holding on to things and trying to keep things the way they are. Letting go is a central theme of the film.” - George Lucas, Prequels Archives
and
“[Jedi Knights] do not grow attachments, because attachment is a path to the dark side. You can love people, but you can’t want to possess them. They’re not yours. Accept that they have a fate. Even those you love most are going to die. You can’t do anything about that. Protect them with your lightsaber, but if they die they were going to die. there’s nothing you can do. All you can do is accept that fact.
“In mythology, if you go to Hades to get them back you’re not doing it for them, you’re doing it for yourself. You’re doing it because you don’t want to give them up. You’re afraid to be without them. The key to the dark side is fear. You must be clean of fear, and fear of loss is the greatest fear. If you’re set up for fear of loss, you will do anything to keep that loss from happening, and you’re going to end up in the dark side. That’s the basic premise of Star Wars and the Jedi, and how it works.
“That’s why they’re taken at a young age to be trained. They cannot get themselves killed trying to save their best buddy when it’s a hopeless exercise.”
— George Lucas, Prequels Archives - “I thought, Okay, I’ve got this character who is kind of like a little Dalai Lama, so I came up with an Eastern-sounding name. Then I felt his dialogue and cadence should be unique. […] I had to come up with something that’s not a foreign language, not an accent, but somewhere in between those two things. That’s how I started Yoda’s backward style.” - George LucasThe Making of Episode V - Empire Strikes Back, by J.W. Rinzler
- “The essence of our experience is change. Change is incessant…Perpetual fluctuation is the essence of the perceptual universe.” -- Mindfulness In Plain English by Bhante Gunaratan
is an echo of
“The fact that everything must change and that things come and go through [Anakin’s] life and that he can’t hold onto things, which is a basic Jedi philosophy that he isn’t willing to accept emotionally.” –George Lucas, Attack of the Clones commentary
JEDI AND REAL WORLD ANALYSIS:
- The Jedi are often said to be a cult, but when compared to what specialists define as a cult (not to mention that the Jedi are basically just literally Buddhist monks with psychic powers, saying they’re a cult is a little maybe not great), they really don’t fit the bill, as questioning leaders is considered natural and often encouraged, they speak well of Jedi who leave, they’re given trials that specifically get them to think critically and individually, they are very often seen wearing individual clothes, including non-Jedi religious practices, and do not show any of the signs of being a cult.
- Pleasure vs joy is a psychological topic that has echoes in real world commentary and is echoed in Star Wars’ themes:
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“Happiness is pleasure and happiness is joy. It can be either one, you add them up and it can be the uber category of happiness.
“Pleasure is short lived. It lasts an hour, it lasts a minute, it lasts a month. It peaks and then it goes down–it peaks very high, but the next time you want to get that same peak you have to do it twice as much. It’s like drugs, you have to keep doing it because it insulates itself. No matter what it is, whether you’re shopping or you’re engaged in any other kind of pleasure. It all has the same quality about it.
“On the other hand is joy and joy is the thing that doesn’t go as high as pleasure, in terms of your emotional reaction. But it stays with you. Joy is something you can recall, pleasure you can’t. So the secret is that, even though it’s not as intense as pleasure, the joy will last you a lot longer.
“People who get the pleasure they keep saying, ‘Well, if I can just get richer and get more cars–!’ You’ll never relive the moment you got your first car, that’s it, that’s the highest peak. Yes, you could get three Ferraris and a new gulf stream jet and maybe you’ll get close. But you have to keep going and eventually you’ll run out. You just can’t do it, it doesn’t work.
“If you’re trying to sustain that level of peak pleasure, you’re doomed. It’s a very American idea, but it just can’t happen. You just let it go. Peak. Break. Pleasure is fun it’s great, but you can’t keep it going forever.
“Just accept the fact that it’s here and it’s gone, and maybe again it’ll come back and you’ll get to do it again. Joy lasts forever. Pleasure is purely self-centered. It’s all about your pleasure, it’s about you. It’s a selfish self-centered emotion, that’s created by self-centered motive of greed.
“Joy is compassion, joy is giving yourself to somebody else or something else. And it’s the kind of thing that is in it’s subtlty and lowness more powerful than pleasure. If you get hung up on pleasure you’re doomed. If you pursue joy you will find everlasting happiness.” –George Lucas, Academy of Achievement Speech from 2013
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You can see how this influences the foundations of the light side and the dark side, which at its core is about selflessness vs selfishness, about compassion vs greed, in that it’s about the pursuit of joy rather than pleasure. It’s not that you can never experience pleasure, but you can’t get hung up on it, because pleasure is not sustainable long-term, only joy is.
“The core of the Force–I mean, you got the dark side, the light side, one is selfless, one is selfish, and you wanna keep them in balance. What happens when you go to the dark side is it goes out of balance and you get really selfish and you forget about everybody … because when you get selfish you get stuff, or you want stuff, and when you want stuff and you get stuff then you are afraid somebody is going to take it away from you, whether it’s a person or a thing or a particular pleasure or experience.
“Once you become afraid that somebody’s going to take it away from you or you’re gonna lose it, then you start to become angry, especially if you’re losing it, and that anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering. Mostly on the part of the person who’s selfish, because you spend all your time being afraid of losing everything you’ve got instead of actually living.
“Where joy, by giving to other people you can’t think about yourself, and therefore there’s no pain. But the pleasure factor of greed and of selfishness is a short-lived experience, therefore you’re constantly trying to replenish it, but of course the more you replenish it, the harder it is to, so you have to keep upping the ante. You’re actually afraid of the pain of not having the joy.
“So that is ultimately the core of the whole dark side/light side of the Force. And everything flows from that. Obviously the Sith are always unhappy because they never get enough of anything they want. Mostly, their selfishness centers around power and control. And the struggle is always to be able to let go of all that stuff.
“And of course that’s the problem with Anakin ultimately. You’re allowed to love people, but you’re not allowed to possess them. And what he did is he fell in love and married her and then became jealous. Then he saw in his visions that she was going to die, and he couldn’t stand losing her. So in order to not lose her, he made a pact with the devil to be able to become all-powerful. When he did that, she didn’t want to have anything to do with him anymore, so he lost her.
“Once you are powerful, being able to bring her back from the dead, if I can do that, I can become emperor of the universe. I can get rid of the Emperor. I can make everything the way I want it. Once you do that, you’ll never be satiated. You’re always going to be consumed by this driving desire to have more stuff and be afraid that others are going to take it away from you. And they are. Every time you get two Sith together, you have the master, the apprentice, and the apprentice is always trying to recruit another apprentice to join with him to kill the master. The master knows that basically everybody below him wants his job.
“Only way to overcome the dark side is through discipline. The dark side is pleasure, biological and temporary and easy to achieve. The light side is joy, everlasting and difficult to achieve. A great challenge. Must overcome laziness, give up quick pleasures, and overcome fear which leads to hate.” --George Lucas, The Clone Wars writers meeting 2010
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GEORGE LUCAS: “I try to be a good person. But, of course, that’s a very complicated question. It’s something you have to ponder because you’re doing it every day. You’re saying, 'Should I do this or shouldn’t I do this?’ Through mythology and things we’re taught certain things that are good and certain things that are bad, but a thinking person questions all that. Says, 'Is this REALLY good? Am I really doing the right thing here? Am I really being a kind, compassionate person?'
"Because, to me, it’s really about a compassionate person as opposed to a person that is consumed with self-interest, a selfish person. Those are the two things. We all have good and evil in us, because we have the selfish side of us and we have the compassionate side of us. The idea is, how do you keep those things in balance? And by keeping those things in balance, you can do a lot of good things.
"Everybody’s human, everybody’s greedy. When you become greedy, then you do bad things to get stuff from other people. Once you get that stuff, then you become afraid. Once you become afraid that somebody’s going to take it from you, then you start striking out at people. You get angry at things, you get worried, and that puts you in a whole psychological mindset that ultimately turns you into an evil person, where you’re doing horrible things to people, thinking you’re doing the right thing.
"But you’re doing it because you’re afraid they’re going to hurt you before you hurt them.” --interview with Bill Bradley. 2015
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Now compare this (especially the first quote from Academy of Achievement Speech) to The Hijacking of the American Mind by Robert Lustig, MD, MSL, which is a book about how corporations have hijacked our pleasure centers to make us focused on reward over pleasure. It talks about the exact same concepts, with only slight word adjustments, but otherwise might as well be verbatim:
“At this point it’s essential to define and clarify what I mean by these two words—pleasure and happiness—which can mean different things to different people.
“Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary defines “pleasure” as “enjoyment or satisfaction derived from what is to one’s liking”; or “gratification”; or “reward.” While “pleasure” has a multitude of synonyms, it is this phenomenon of reward that we will explore, as scientists have elaborated a specific “reward pathway” in the brain, and we now understand the neuroscience of its regulation. Conversely, “happiness” is defined as “the quality or state of being happy”; or “joy”; or “contentment.” While there are many synonyms for “happiness,” it is the phenomenon that Aristotle originally referred to as eudemonia, or the internal experience of contentment, that we will parse in this book. Contentment is the lowest baseline level of happiness, the state in which it’s not necessary to seek more. In the movie Lovers and Other Strangers (1970), middle-aged married couple Beatrice Arthur and Richard Castellano were asked the question “Are you happy?”—to which they responded, “Happy? Who’s happy? We’re content.” Scientists now understand that there is a specific “contentment pathway” that is completely separate from the pleasure or reward pathway in the brain and under completely different regulation. Pleasure (reward) is the emotional state where your brain says, This feels good—I want more, while happiness (contentment) is the emotional state where your brain says, This feels good—I don’t want or need any more.
“Reward and contentment are both positive emotions, highly valued by humans, and both reasons for initiative and personal betterment. It’s hard to be happy if you derive no pleasure for your efforts—but this is exactly what is seen in the various forms of addiction. Conversely, if you are perennially discontent, as is so often seen in patients with clinical depression, you may lose the impetus to better your social position in life, and it’s virtually impossible to derive reward for your efforts. Reward and contentment rely on the presence of the other. Nonetheless, they are decidedly different phenomena. Yet both have been slowly and mysteriously vanishing from our global ethos as the prevalence of addiction and depression continues to climb.
“Drumroll … without further ado, behold the seven differences between reward and contentment:
“Reward is short-lived (about an hour, like a good meal). Get it, experience it, and get over it. Why do you think you can’t remember what you ate for dinner yesterday? Conversely, contentment lasts much longer (weeks to months to years). It’s what happens when you have a working marriage or watch your teenager graduate from high school. And if you experience contentment from a sense of achievement or purpose, the chances are that you will feel it for a long time to come, perhaps even the rest of your life. Reward is visceral in terms of excitement (e.g., a casino, a football game, or a strip club). It activates the body’s fight-or-flight system, which causes blood pressure and heart rate to go up. Conversely, contentment is ethereal and calming (e.g., listening to soothing music or watching the waves of the ocean). It makes your heart rate slow and your blood pressure decline.
- “Reward can be achieved with different substances (e.g., heroin, nicotine, cocaine, caffeine, alcohol, and of course sugar). Each stimulates the reward center of the brain. Some are legal, some are not. Conversely, contentment is not achievable with substance use. Rather, contentment is usually achieved with deeds (like graduating from college or having a child who can navigate his or her own path in life).
- “Reward occurs with the process of taking (like from a casino). Gambling is definitely a high: when you win, it is fundamentally rewarding, both viscerally and economically. But go back to the same table the next day. Maybe you’ll feel a jolt of excitement to try again. But there’s no glow, no lasting feeling from the night before. Or go buy a nice dress at Macy’s. Then try it on again a month later. Does it generate the same enthusiasm? Conversely, contentment is often generated through giving (like giving money to a charity, or giving your time to your child, or devoting time and energy to a worthwhile project).
- “Reward is yours and yours alone. Your sense of reward does not immediately impact anyone else. Conversely, your contentment, or lack of it, often impacts other people directly and can impact society at large. Those who are extremely unhappy (the Columbine shooters) can take their unhappiness out on others. It should be said at this point that pleasure and happiness are by no means mutually exclusive. A dinner at the Bay Area Michelin three-star restaurant the French Laundry can likely generate simultaneous pleasure for you from the stellar food and wine but can also generate contentment from the shared experience with spouse, family, or friends, and then possibly a bit of unhappiness when the bill arrives.
- “Reward when unchecked can lead us into misery, like addiction. Too much substance use (food, drugs, nicotine, alcohol) or compulsive behaviors (gambling, shopping, surfing the internet, sex) will overload the reward pathway and lead not just to dejection, destitution, and disease but not uncommonly death as well. Conversely, walking in the woods or playing with your grandchildren or pets (as long as you don’t have to clean up after them) could bring contentment and keep you from being miserable in the first place.
- “Last and most important, reward is driven by dopamine, and contentment by serotonin. Each is a neurotransmitter—a biochemical manufactured in the brain that drives feelings and emotions—but the two couldn’t be more different. Although dopamine and serotonin drive separate brain processes, it is where they overlap and how they influence each other that generates the action in this story. Two separate chemicals, two separate brain pathways, two separate regulatory schemes, and two separate physiological and psychological outcomes. How and where these two chemicals work, and how they work either in concert or in opposition to each other, is the holy grail in the ultimate quest for both pleasure and happiness.” – Robert Lustig, MD, MSL, The Hijacking of the American Mind
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And that also ties into:
“In the end, it’s about fundamentally becoming selfless moreso than selfish. It seems so simple, but it’s so hard to do. And when you’re tempted by the dark side, you don’t overcome it once in life and then you’re good. It’s a constant. And that’s what, really, Star Wars is about and what I think George wanted people to know. That to be a good person and to really feel better about your life and experience life fully you have to let go of everything you fear to lose. Because then you can’t be controlled.
“But when you fear, fear is the path to the dark side, it’s also the shadow of greed, because greed makes you covet things, greed makes you surround yourself with all these things that make you feel comfortable in the moment, but they don’t really make you happy. And then, when you’re afraid of something, it makes you angry, when you get angry, you start to hate something, sometimes you don’t even know why. When you hate, do you often know why you hate? No, you direct it at things and then you hate it. And it’s hard because anger can be a strength at times, but you can’t use it in such a selfish way, it can be a destroyer then.
“These are the core things of Star Wars.“ –Dave Filoni, Rebels Rebembered