The Tao of Star Wars
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May the Force be with you. Utter this famous line and there's no mistaking it. You're referring to the driving force (pardon the pun) behind the Star Wars world of exploding planets and intergalactic wars. But what exactly is it? In the words of the character Obi-wan Kenobi, a Jedi knight: "The Force is what gives the Jedi his power. It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together."
Neat. A power in all of us that we can manipulate to, say, blow up an evil empire or control the galaxy. Played out in a world of Jedi knights, princesses and evil Imperial troops, it's a tantalizing basis for a hyper-tech fairy tale. But, as synonymous as the Force is with the make-believe world of Star Wars, some of its basic principles can be found in a real-life, ancient Chinese philosophy called Taoism.
"The Tao is kind of, well, a force that pervades the universe," says Anne Collins Smith, a philosophy and classical studies professor at Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania. "It is the source of the universe, but it also IS the universe."
There are enough similarities between the Force and the Tao that Smith, an avid Star Wars fan, uses the movie to help explain concepts in Taoism in her classes. Taoism is one of the two major indigenous religio-philosophical traditions that has shaped Chinese life for more than 2,000 years. A mysterious, master Taoist named Lao-tzu, an archivist at the court of the Chou dynasty (c. 1111-255 BC) and an instructor of Confucius, is said to be one of its founders, after writing a series of poems called the Tao-te Ching.
Tao, often translated as the way or the path, is the ineffable, eternal, creative reality that is the source and end of all things. Te refers to the manifestation of Tao within all things. Thus, to fully possess Te, one must be in perfect harmony with one's original nature.
Put another way, the Tao can be understood in three ways, explains Smith. It is the nature of the universe. It is also your true essence. And it is the way to lead your life. "Really this meaning ties the other two together, because the way to lead your life is to get your personal Tao in touch with the Tao of the whole universe."
Sound familiar? "Be one with the force, Luke," advises his teacher Obi-wan Kenobi, as our hero learns the "ways of the Force".
Learning the "ways of the Force"...
A key principle in becoming a master Taoist, is wu-wei, sometimes translated as creative inaction. "It literally means getting things done without doing anything," says Smith. But perhaps it's better described as an action that is so well in accordance with things, that there is no evidence of the action. To the Taoist, any deliberate intervention in the natural order of things will eventually turn into the opposite of what was intended and result in failure. And that is a common theme in Star Wars, says Smith.
Take the scene from the first Star Wars movie, where Obi-wan Kenobi is teaching Luke Skywalker the "ways of the Force" on Han Solo's Millennium Falcon. Luke is trying hard to avoid laser blasts from a remote, but fails miserably. When Obi-wan Kenobi places a blaster helmet on his head so he can't see, he easily deflects the remote's laser blasts.
And remember the last battle scene when Luke blows up the Death Star? Several deliberate attempts by the Rebels, using a targeting computer, end in failure. But when Luke, once again listens to Obi-wan Kenobi to "use the Force", he turns off the device and takes a successful shot. "That's really Taoist," says Smith.
One poem in the Tao-te Ching describes the Tao like this:
The Tao is like a bellows: it is empty yet infinitely capable. The more you use it, the more it produces; The more you talk of it, the less you understand.
This idea of doing rather than understanding is paralleled in Luke Skywalker's experiences with his second Jedi teacher, the small, wrinkled Yoda. When Luke tries and fails to lift out his spacecraft from a swamp after trying to get a mental grip on such an impossible-seeming feat, Yoda replies "Try not. Do," and effortlessly raises the ship onto dry land.
But that's where the analogies end. Taoism "celebrates a kind of agrarian lifestyle where people are very much in tune with nature - trees, grass and growing things," points out Smith. "It's against the idea of conscious manipulation of the environment." Not exactly in line with the technology-driven world of Star Wars.
In Taoism, the yin yang symbol represents the unity of apparent opposites in the universe.
The Force is also expressed as two opposites - good vs. evil, dark vs. light. And on a superficial level, it has a parallel in Taoism. One of its icons is the yin yang symbol. A circle divided in two, it represents the unity of apparent opposites. The Yin represents the dark, death, winter and female side of the universe, while the Yang symboilizes the light, life, summer and male side.
But unlike the theme of the positive energy of the Force overcoming the Dark Side in Star Wars, the two sides are inseparable in Taoism.
"The ethics in Taoism is to respect both the yin and the yang aspects because both are necessary," explains Owen Smith, also a philosophy and classical studies professor at Susquehana University and Smith's husband. "It is a mistake philosophically to try and foster the yang at the expense of the yin."
A mistake for those practicing Taoism, but it's a perfect way to incorporate a mysterious, unidentified religious force into a fairy tale.
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How to Use the Force
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You are sitting in a chair in an acoustically-shielded room with two halves of a tennis ball taped over your eyes. A red light, placed about a metre in front of you, produces a uniform pinkish visual field while your ears take in the sound of white noise. Seventy-five feet away from you in a second padded and shielded room sits a "sender," concentrating on transmitting what he sees on a video monitor to you. An image starts to form in your mind as you receive this information. It's a brown cow in a golden pasture. No, it's a horse eating from a bale of hay. It's spotted and it seems to be having trouble with his hind leg...
It's a common scenario at the Koestler Parapsychology Unit at the University of Edinburgh. For the past 14 years, researchers there have been studying psychic phenomena, or what Robert Morris, head of the research unit, calls an "apparent new means of communication or interaction between organisms and their environment beyond those presently understood by a consensus science."
It's hard to know what to call it. For some, words like psychic and parapsychology conjure up images of psychics, seers, and the occult - things scientists seriously studying parapsychology don't want to be associated with.
Whatever its name, these phenomena can be seen in an extreme form in the powers of the Force. In the fantasy world of Star Wars, those who have the Force strong within them, can instantly sense things that would not be known to them in ways we know of. When Grand Moff Tarkin blows up Princess Leia's adopted planet of Alderaan, Jedi knight Obi-wan Kenobi says, "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced." They can also physically affect their environment and everything in it by willing it. Remember how the tiny, wrinkled Yoda raised Luke Skywalker's X-wing from the depths of a swamp and onto dry land?
Scientists who study parapsychology don't claim effects nearly as powerful as these, but they do report some very strange results that suggest we're missing something in our scientific world view.
Back at the Koestler Parapsychology Unit, the red lights and white noise described above provide what's called a ganzfeld, or a sensory deprivation chamber. Generally used in psychology experiments on visual imagery, the conditions stimulate your vision and hearing without providing any specific patterns. Now, they're being used by Morris's group. The theory is that if some new form of communication exists, people would be more in tune to picking it up if their senses were cut off from everyday sounds and images.
Under such environments, a "sender" is shown one of four 60-second-long video clips chosen randomly by a computer. He is then asked to transmit what he sees to a "receiver" in another room on another floor, 75 feet away. The receiver is asked to describe what images come to mind and is then asked to pick one of the same four video clips that most closely matches his image. If the receiver were to pick the same clip as the sender had "sent" by coincidence, the success rate would be one in four, or 25 per cent. But among 300 participants in the past three years, "we've been finding a 40 per cent success rate," says Morris.
A random event generator uses the chaos of electronic noise to produce a random stream of numbers.
So what's going on?
"It looks to us under pretty tightly controlled conditions, we have very good evidence that some new means of communication is going on."
Either that, or there's a flaw in their experiments that hasn't yet been discovered. The field of parapsychology has been dogged by a history of lax experimental procedure, misplaced hopes and outright deception. There are many cases of experimenters who've either fiddled with their results or have been duped by cheating subjects.
To overcome such a tainted history, those seriously researching the subject are trying to be a shining model of scientific experimentation. Morris explains that the rooms used by their study participants are regularly checked for acoustical flaws that would allow a sender to send the information through sound. Students of parapsychology also study the psychology of magic and deception to counter fraud. "We try to learn about self-deception, deception by others."
A cascade of polystyrene balls are released at the top of this device and fall through a series of pegs. By chance, balls should bounce left as often as it does right and form a bell-shaped distribution at the bottom.
In another lab, in the basement of the engineering building at Princeton University, scientists are finding even stranger results. After 20 years of controlled experiments in what they call 'human/machine anomalies,' they're finding that people can influence random events with the power of thought.
"Somehow, in these experiments, the results of these interactions - whatever is going on - are having a very slight but definite impact on the way the physical world is working," Brenda Dunne, laboratory manager of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) laboratory told @discovery.ca. "At least in the way a random process in the physical world is working."
The researchers used a variety of devices programmed to perform randomly, and then tested to see if thinking it would make them behave not-so-randomly. Over several million trials, the researchers found that the machines produced slightly less-random results when study participants willed them to.
The effect is very small - of the order of a few parts in 10,000 on average. But, they are statistically significant and repeatable.
"[In] my global opinion, humans don't just stop at their skin," says Roger Nelson, Operations Coordinator. "Consciousness is bigger than the physical body and I believe there is evidence, we have good evidence, that there's an interaction of consciousness with physical systems."
The group's research shows an even more puzzling result. A participant can influence a random event even if he or she is thousands of kilometres away from the device. Even more provocative, the effects seemed to transcend time itself. Mental willing produced positive results even when the experiments were performed 73 hours before to 336 hours after the machine operation.
So are there any theories to explain such phenomena?
"Not at this stage," says Morris. "It looks to us as though it would be some additional, natural means of communication. We don't regard ourselves as being involved in the so-called supernatural."
Some scientists hope to explain their studies' strange results through quantum mechanics, a theory that describes behaviour of subatomic particles, including light particles.
As for the Princeton group?
It suggests that these consciousness-related physical phenomena might be explained using an expanded model of a theory in quantum mechanics, a theory that describes the behaviour of subatomic particles. However, both the model and the findings are not exactly welcomed by all scientists.
"We have a few colleagues who are vigorously hostile to what we're trying to do," says Robert Jahn, program director, "but by far, the greatest proportion of them ignore us and go on doing their own thing...Ultimately, the proof has to be in the pudding. It has to be in the application. If indeed, we can come to understand these things well enough that pragmatic utilization of them becomes possible, then science will have to pay attention."
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Zen and the Art of Being a Jedi
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there were great men—guardians of freedom and justice—who were in touch with nature. These men were known as Jedi, and they had a deep understanding of how the world really works. A Jedi is not a Buddha. But many of the practices and concepts that are part of their art can be found in the Buddha's teachings. In developing Star Wars, George Lucas has drawn on many religions, myths, and cultural practices from all parts of planet Earth. As we will soon see, the roots of the Jedi can be found in Asia.
Clear Your Mind
In Star Wars, we often hear Jedi masters, such as Yoda and Qui-Gon, telling their pupils to clear their minds or to "let go." This is one of the most basic principles in Buddhism.
Through the act of meditation, those who want to touch the Buddha are encouraged to clear their minds of all thought and to become aware of the moment. This can be done through breathing meditation. When beginning breathing meditation, it is helpful to count from 1 to 10. This helps you clear your mind of other thoughts and pulls you into the moment. Once you are in the moment, the next thing is to be "mindful." This means that you are aware of what you are doing, of your body, of the moment.
Breathing meditation was actually seen being practiced by Qui-Gon in The Phantom Menace. Near the end of the film, during the climactic battle with Darth Maul, the two become caught in a corridor of doors that open and close, apparently on a timer. As they approach the final door, Darth Maul gets through but Qui-Gon doesn't. Instead of yelling at or taunting Darth Maul through the force field, Qui-Gon simply kneels, closes his eyes, and breathes calmly. He is quieting his mind and collecting himself. He is truly in the moment.
There's No Time Like the Present
One of the problems that we all face in the modern world is that we are always dwelling on the future and the past. Our lives are so hectic that we are always being pulled in many directions at once. We get so caught up in what happened at work last Wednesday or what we are having for dinner tomorrow night when the guests come over that we forget to be aware of the moment. For us, the flow of time is very real and we are locked into a vicious cycle of birth and death, beginning and ending. We dwell so heavily on these first and last moments that we forget to live in the here-and-now.
The Buddha taught that these are only concepts, not true reality. What we believe is reality is subjective—it is what we make it. To be caught up in concepts is to be out-of-touch with the moment. If you are concerned with concepts, theories, and ideas, you can't see the true nature of things.
Seeing the true nature of things is one of the keys to being Jedi. Abandoning preconceptions, avoiding being caught up in past and future, and focusing on the present are all things that Jedi masters teach their apprentices.
At the beginning of The Phantom Menace, when Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan are in the meeting room aboard the trade federation vessel, Obi-Wan begins thinking about things yet to come. Qui-Gon tells him to keep his mind focused on the here-and-now. In response, Obi-Wan says, "But master Yoda says that I should be mindful of the future." Qui-Gon replies, "Yes, but not at the expense of the present." He is teaching his student to be aware and mindful. In Buddhism, this known as Right Mindfulness.
The Circle of Life
Ever since the first film, Star Wars: A New Hope, it has been taught that everything in the universe is interconnected. The details of how this works have changed with the development of the series, but the basic principle has stayed the same. I titled this section "The Circle of Life," but when we speak of interconnectedness, both in Star Wars and Buddhism, we speak not only of living things but of non-living things as well.
In A New Hope, Obi-Wan taught Luke that if he let go of his thoughts he could "hear" the Force speaking to him, guiding him. He said that this is because everything is connected through the Force. Later, in The Empire Strikes Back, Yoda teaches Luke of the interconnectedness of all things, that Luke and the rock are one in the same. Finally, in The Phantom Menace, Qui-Gon finds himself explaining this principle to young Anakin. This is where Lucas changed the concept a bit.
In the first three films, the Force was presented as a mysterious power that simply flowed through the universe. But in The Phantom Menace it is presented as the result of a symbiotic relationship between living things and microscopic organisms called medichlorines that reside in all living cells. But regardless of this change in position on Lucas's part, the concept remains the same. We are all part of one another. Everything in existence is interdependent on everything else. Everything contains everything else. A flower, for example, contains not only flower elements like a stem and petals, but also stardust, the earth, and the gardener. In Buddhism, this interconnectedness of all things is known as Second Dharma Seal.
As Qui-Gon explains this to Anakin, he says that these micro-organisms speak to us and tell us the will of the Force. When Anakin says that he doesn't really understand, Qui-Gon encourages him by saying, "When you learn to quiet your mind, you will hear them speaking to you." Again, this returns us to Right Mindfulness and being aware of and in touch with the moment.
Hate Leads to Suffering
If you had to sum up the goal of Buddhism in just four words it would be "the elimination of suffering." The purpose of the practices taught by the Buddha—The Four Noble Truths and The Noble Eightfold Path (Right View, Right Thinking, Right Mindfulness, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Diligence, Right Concentration, Right Livelihood)—is ultimately to identify, come to terms with, and eliminate suffering.
Suffering can be caused by many things. The desire for something you can't have can cause you to suffer. A physical ailment can cause you to suffer. Exposure to things that can water the seeds of fear and hate that we all posses can cause you to suffer. In order to achieve nirvana, you must identify and eliminate all suffering. Nirvana is, in fact, the elimination of not only all suffering but also all concepts, all thought.
In The Phantom Menace, when Anakin faces the Jedi Council, Yoda questions him about his mother. "Afraid to lose her, I think," he says. Anakin responds by saying, "What does that have to do with anything?" To this Yoda replies, "Everything! Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger; anger leads to hate; hate leads to suffering… I sense much fear in you."
What Yoda was telling him is that being controlled by fear makes it impossible to eliminate suffering and find happiness. The Jedi are aware of this and, because of the danger posed by the "dark side" of the Force, they identify and train Jedi soon after birth, before they have time to know fear, anger, or hate. As we already know, Anakin ultimately will allow his fear to get the best of him and lead him to the dark side.
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"May the Force Be With You"
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Does global consciousness exist? If so, can people with a common focus use a force within themselves to affect worldly events? Can the effects of human consciousness be measured? Studies point to "Yes!" And growing scientific evidence documents the power of human consciousness to influence and change the world. In one project, highly sensitive electronic equipment indicates that certain events—such as New Year's Eve celebrations, Princess Diana's funeral and the World Trade Center attacks—stimulate enough collective human consciousness that the level of combined consciousness can be measured.
Other experiments show how people using group meditations can impact social conditions such as war deaths, violent crimes, traffic accident fatalities, cigarette consumption, and stock market fluctuations.
IS THERE PROOF OF GLOBAL CONSCIOUSNESS?
Since 1998, electronic equipment has been recording "disturbances in the force," as the Star Wars movie character, Obi-Wan Kenobi might say. Obi-Wan was the Jedi knight who tutored our hero, Luke Skywalker, in the "ways of the force." Throughout this epic science fiction movie, Luke learned how the force could be used for constructive or destructive purposes. Now, modern science experiments indicate that large numbers of people who have a common focus do, in fact, radiate an energy force that influences physical reality.
In over 50 centers around the world, variations in this common focus, or shared consciousness, are being recorded as part of the Global Consciousness Project (GCP). The GCP wants to know if the thoughts and feelings of huge numbers of people whose attention is on the same event have a global presence. To find the answer, the GCP created a network of devices located on every continent that are sensitive to human mental and emotional frequencies. Similar in approach to medical EEG's where electrodes measure activity in the human brain, the GCP "electrodes" measure activity in the "global brain." Research scientists in physics and psychology at such institutions as Princeton University in the U.S. and other major universities in Britain, Germany and the rest of the world have been gathering data about this fluctuating force for five years.
Variations in this energy force occur when people are triggered by certain disasters, celebrations or events that stir human thoughts and feelings to a large degree. The equipment measures responses that correlate to peaceful gatherings, global meditations, dramatic events and disasters. Some examples are the Papal visit to Israel, the funerals of Princess Diana and John F. Kennedy, Jr., the O. J. Simpson trial, the first hour of NATO bombing in Yugoslavia and major earthquakes.
WISDOM OF THE JEDI KNIGHT
What is this force? Obi-Wan Kenobi tells Luke that "The Force is what gives the Jedi his power. It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together."
Dr. Roger Nelson, the director of the Global Consciousness Project at Princeton University, seems to agree. "In my global opinion, humans don't just stop at their skin," says Nelson. "Consciousness is bigger than the physical body and ... we have good evidence that there's an interaction of consciousness with physical systems."
A DISTURBANCE IN THE FORCE
"Our purpose," states the Global Consciousness Project website, "is to gather evidence and study indications of the subtle reach of human consciousness in the physical world on a global scale. Usually, because we are busy with individual lives, there is little to produce structure in the field (of consciousness), so it is random and not detectable. But occasionally there are global-scale events that bring great numbers of us to a common focus and an unusual coherence of thought and feeling." And, "This," as Obi-Wan Kenobi might say, "creates a disturbance in the force." The greatest measured disruptions by far were the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on September 11th.
The overall statistics for the GCP indicate a probability of less than one in a million that the correlation of data with global events is merely a chance fluctuation. Plus there are a growing number of additional experiments indicating that consciousness and focus influence the physical world.
USING THE FORCE INTENTIONALLY
In 20 years of controlled experiments at Princeton University, scientists found that people can influence random events by using their intention. Researchers experimented with coin-flipping machines that normally produce random results of 50/50. After several million trials, the machines produced slightly less-random results when study participants focused their intention on influencing the machines. The effect was small. And, the deviations from random patterns are statistically significant and repeatable. "Somehow, in these experiments, the results of these interactions—whatever is going on—are having a very slight but definite impact on the way the physical world is working," says Brenda Dunne, manager of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory.
GROUP MEDITATIONS IMPACT SOCIAL CONDITIONS
Other research demonstrates that group meditation can be used to effect the number of war deaths, violent deaths, cigarette consumption, the stock market, traffic accidents and crime rates.
One study of a special assembly in Israel, which tracked the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for two months, showed that on days when the number of group meditators was the highest, war deaths in Lebanon fell by 76%.
Canada has also reaped the benefits of unified meditation. During the period studied, violent deaths (traffic fatalities, homicides, suicides) fell by 4%, and cigarette consumption fell by 10%.
When a meditation group focused on the stock market of Great Britain, the stock market index rose at 8 times the ordinary rate.
Over a ten-year span in Holland, the number of traffic accidents and crime rate went down significantly each time the number of meditators went up.
$6 MILLION CRIME REDUCTION DEMONSTRATION PROJECT IN WASHINGTON, D.C.
One of the most dramatic experiments in using "the force" happened in the summer of 1993 in Washington, D.C. Four thousand experts in Transcendental Meditation participated in large group meditations that focused on reducing social stress and violent crime.
After months of rapid increase, HRA (homicide, rape, and assault) violent crime declined during the demonstration. (Violent crime usually increases in June and July.) Data analysis from the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police revealed that there was a highly significant decrease in HRA crimes that was associated with increases in the size of the meditation group during the demonstration project. The maximum decrease in HRA crimes was 23.3%, which occurred when the size of the meditation group was the largest. The statistical probability that this result could reflect chance variation in crime levels was less than two in a billion.
This $6 million scientific demonstration was the largest and most rigorously designed sociological experiment in history. The project review board was comprised of leading research scientists, sociologists and criminologists from universities throughout the U.S., leaders from the community and local government, and members of the DC Metropolitan Police Department.
The ways of the force are still being defined in scientific terms. And the evidence is mounting that humans can use this force to change the world. Perhaps, the time is ripe for people to notice the effects their own personal force has on the world and begin their own personal experiments in "ways of the force." How? Obi-Wan Kenobi offers our hero a clue. "Be one with the force, Luke."
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Conclusion
There are positive and negative energy amount us. Every impouse of our mind will send out signal which latter become energy which will affact us and the surrounding enviroment which we all live in. E.g. A boss in office have a argument with his wife in the morning before came into the office. He is very bad mood and not feeling happy. When he come into the office the whole office people will definately scence it from the first step he put his foot into the office door stept. For sure everyone will feel a bit different and will know that today definately not a good day and hopefully won't make any mistake which will make the boss angry.
Try your best to control every tiny little thought which came out from your mind. As you have the power to change the world. Imagine 1000 people send out 1000 positive energy in every second, for sure this will make this world a better place for all of us. Again try to repand on all those bad or negative thought which came out from our mind.
The more we do that the more we will able to control the energy or the "Force" around us.
