This weeks guest instructor is :

HellFlower

Living in the Force

What is The Force?

The Force can be reckoned in many ways. Because the concept of the Force came to us in a movie, it is quickly dismissed by many people. However, Lucas didn't simply pull these ideas out of thin air. Rather, he pulled them from somewhere within himself, having managed to make contact with a deep?rooted harmony which civilization long ago knocked from the consciousness of mankind.

Wisdom: The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.

The world is made of energy, boys and girls, and it does "surround us and penetrate us" and bind all things together. Life, the planet, the universe??all are part of a cybernetic system.* One part feeds the other even as it takes what it needs to sustain itself. Because energy can be neither created nor destroyed, what we are we have been for billions of years in one form or another.

Only when we truly realize we are part of a larger entity can we begin to understand the world and, therefore, ourselves. Such understanding provides great strength to those who immerse themselves in it, and great peace to those in whom it abides. It provides a singular clarity of vision which goes unrivaled by anything scientific thought can provide us with. When we learn to listen to that clarity, we can see outcomes, anticipate actions, hear through deceptions. We become unified with all living things and thus, finding true empathy, we can never be severed from the world of being.

To achieve this realization, we must "unlearn what [we] have learned." We have become so encapsulated within our own bodies and our cars and our homes that we often fail to see outside ourselves, and so used to thinking solely in linear terms that we fail to see the other possibilities. We have foolishly limited our paradigm. We are not taught to question, to rely on intuition, to trust our instincts. And so we lose sight of the limitless, we fail to feel the magic around us, that humming throbbing heart beat of the universe.

The Force speaks to us, if we learn to listen, through a myriad of means. It's in the song of birds, the sound of a plane, the touch of your fingers to your cup.

Wisdom: Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.

As we begin to see past our paradigms, past our physical realities, we become aware of our intrinsic nature. It frees us from worries about how we look to other people, how our bodies feel, how they limit us, how they eventually cease working. The body is but a shell, a great pregnant casing, the womb of our spiritual essence. We are a piece of the Force contained in flesh. Every breath we take in contains the Force, and every exhalation returns a piece of us to it. In remembering this, we can traverse that fleshy boundary and re-join our spirits with the true body. We can transcend time and death and mortal worries.

Wisdom: My ally is the Force.

Knowledge, serenity, empathy, and absence of fear in the face of our mortality are the “side-effects” of being at one with the Force. In the face of one’s enemies, in response to ignorance and hate, these are the real weapons of a Jedi. To overcome any obstacle, you need never look any further. You have the strength of every living thing within you when the Force is with you.

May The Force Be With You.

*Cybernetic System: Basically, a cybernetic system is a looped system which has attenuated itself to a myriad of factors, thus creating a self sustaining balance. Cybernetic systems occur at many different levels: on grand scales such as the universe, down to the most microscopic. They occur at biological levels and cultural levels. When any factor comes into play within a system that will impact an aspect of that system and throw it out of balance, the system itself manages to regulate that change by counterpoint.

For example, a pond’s cycles of density of fish, algae, water temperature, etc are self-regulating. If the water gets too warm and too much algae starts to grow, the microcosm of the pond will “come up” with a response to keep the algae under control. This is a cybernetic system.

- HellFlower