A Tribute to Star Wars: A Jedi Holocron

On Movement, Moral Discovery, Liberty, and the Living Force

Power says: Look what I can do.
The moral asks: What did I have to become so that I would never need to do it?

A little Jedi wisdom.

A Jedi enters the room. The Jedi is here to present a lesson on the telepathic arts. The Padawans have heard of this and are a little fearful.

He stands before the Padawans, ignites his lightsaber, and holds it for a moment. Then he switches it off and places it aside.

“This,” he says, “is still only a device.”

A Jedi’s mastery of telepathy—the listening of mind—far outweighs the power of any device. The mind of a Jedi may render the device useless before it is ever used. With greater understanding, the Jedi may even prevent the moment in which such a device becomes necessary, because fear itself has already been understood.

The Jedi would not tell you merely to learn the motions of the master—to study every punch, kick, block, and parry.

The Jedi Master would tell you to observe the current of a river. Study the movement of the river in order to become the river. Do not study merely the whirlpools and turns of one particular river. To a Jedi, that is the study of knowledge, not the study of the Force.

The Jedi studies movement:

the movement of the master,

the movement of the river.

What is this movement we call mastery?

Or, stranger still:

why do we call this movement a river?

To sense an object in front of you is still the study of knowledge.

And the study of knowledge, by itself, is emptiness.

You will try to understand where you are by your relationship to the object you already know. You see the object, recognize it, name it, and from what is known you attempt to establish your own position.

But turn instead toward the study of movement itself.

Then you no longer perceive only the object where it stands.

You begin to perceive what brought it there.

You begin to perceive where it may go.

You begin to see its arrival and its departure, its ignition and its extinguishing.

The Jedi’s lightsaber suddenly ignites beside him, though his hand has never touched it.

The Padawans look toward the weapon.

The Jedi does not.

“For to know something,” he says, “is also to know when it is not.”

Knowledge appears and dissipates. What is known arrives, changes, and eventually departs. To study movement is therefore to study both the moment something becomes known and the moment it passes beyond knowing.

The object is only one position within that movement.

The lightsaber is here.

Then it is there.

It is silent.

Then it ignites.

It burns.

Then it disappears again into stillness.

If you study only the object, you know the lightsaber. To know something, to study what is known or unknown, is often to let it go only to know it again.

If you study movement, you begin to understand what makes the lightsaber appear, act, change, and cease.

This is why the study of movement is broader than the study of what is known and unknown.

The known and the unknown are themselves only positions—only movements within the greater movement.

Movement is what carries one into the other.

In a way, to see through illusion is also movement, and this comes very close to the understanding of telepathy.

The Living Force is movement. It moves through you, through me, and even through the saber.

Therefore, it is paramount for the Jedi to study movement itself rather than merely imitate the motions that appear to produce mastery. In doing this, the Jedi becomes free to discover his own movement within the Force—to become, in some sense, the Force itself.

Not its suffocation of life, but its blossoming.

The blossoming even of impossibility through the movement of mind, body, spirit, and self.

Because in this existence, life itself is an impossibility—

but a successful one.

The Jedi smiles.

From time to time, life must confront.

At other times, it must let go.

The balance between these two movements is the balance of the Jedi:

patience,

life,

and Force.

If you come before us and say that you have found something—a realization, a lesson, something you wish to teach—we may answer:

“My sense is sense enough.”

If I sense it, I learn it.

I may even say that I know it.

If I touch a cup, I learn something of what the cup is, what it does, and what it may be used for. I may use another sense, such as sight, and without touching it still recognize what it is and understand its purpose.

For us, what you know, who you are, and even what you have done are not doors that must first be opened through explanation.

I can sense the moral that you hold.

Not in exactly the same way that I touch the cup or see it before me, but through another kind of perception.

This sense allows me to perceive the moral—the lesson to which you have come and which has led you here. You could call this your story, but within your story lies the lesson you have been attempting to bring into understanding, first for yourself and now before us.

And here, now, we can perceive something of why you have come.

You do not necessarily need to speak it.

Because to us, it is not merely you that matters.

It is the moral that has blossomed within you.

And that moral is what blossomed your capability.

The capability we seek is not simply telepathy.

We seek telepathic purity:

telepathy free from the hunger for power,

free from suffocation,

free from domination,

free from desire,

free from manipulation.

We seek to know whether you have freed yourself from these states or whether these states have overcome you and twisted what you have discovered.

Do not come before us merely to demonstrate power.

We have seen power before.

We have seen these abilities before.

And we have seen their outcomes.

Power, when separated from moral understanding, has suffocated many.

The danger is not simply the person who possesses the power.

The danger is the power becoming the lesson.

Power says:

Look what I can do.

The moral asks:

What did I have to become so that I would never need to do it?

Hear this again:

We have seen these powers before.

But the morals that blossom from those who overcome them are always different.

They are unique.

They bloom endlessly.

Power is often narrow. It grows easily from fear, suffering, desire, and the need to control.

But the moral is what overcomes.

And so we seek the morals.

The strong ones.

The lessons born in those who stood against power, who stood against desire, who resisted suffocation and refused to become what their abilities allowed them to become.

This is why you stand before us.

Not because we wish to see what you can do.

We wish to see what has blossomed within you.

That is what we seek.

That is what we protect.

That is what we foster.

And we must know whether the power has been overcome—or whether it still seeks to consume you, me, and everything around us.

The Jedi reaches again for the lightsaber.

He holds it before the Padawans.

“You see,” he says, “without mastery of telepathy, without freedom from power, you may become no different than this.”

He raises the saber slightly.

“A device.”

Then he lowers it.

“But a device wielded by another who would not face us.”

The Jedi understands the movement of the Force by first freeing himself or herself from power.

Only then are they able to think for themselves.

Thinking, to a telepath, is contradiction.

To say, I think to myself, is to say that what is known is not yet complete. You are attempting to contradict what has become known by you, by another, perhaps even by the movement already taking place around you.

This is where freedom begins.

But if you are overcome by power, you cannot truly contradict what is known. The beginning is already there. The outcome is already there. Yes, this may still create a tremendous movement of Force, but you—as who you are—are lost within it.

The man or woman you once were becomes swallowed by the movement.

Gone.

Destroyed.

Overcome.

Perhaps never to return, because the moral within you did not fully overcome the power you came upon.

The Sith might say:

“I hate you.”

And there is tremendous movement within that statement.

Emotion is powerful. Raw emotion can still wield the movement of the Force.

Hatred moves.

Love moves.

Desire moves.

Fear moves.

But when you lose the ability to contradict the emotion, the emotion begins to become your identity.

Then you no longer simply feel hatred.

You become hatred.

You no longer experience fear.

You become fear.

You no longer experience desire.

You become desire.

The emotion overcomes the person who was supposed to perceive it.

And so emotion may create a fierce movement of the Force while still collapsing the self into inevitable chaos.

Emotion is itself a way of contradicting what is known—but it contradicts through feeling rather than through thought.

This is not yet discipline.

Yes, the Jedi is told to feel the Force.

But to feel the Force does not mean to be overcome by feeling.

You observe it.

You sense it.

You allow yourself to experience it.

But you do not surrender your entire identity to it.

Because when you become the feeling rather than remain the person capable of perceiving the feeling, something dangerous occurs:

before you realize what has happened, the very reasons you felt the emotion in the first place may be destroyed by the emotion itself.

You loved something, and through uncontrolled possession you destroy what you loved.

You feared losing something, and through fear you become the cause of its loss.

You hated an injustice, and through hatred you become capable of producing another injustice.

This is why feeling alone cannot overcome fear.

You must think to overcome fear.

You must be capable of contradicting what fear has declared to be true.

Fear says:

This is what will happen.

The disciplined mind answers:

Perhaps not.

Fear says:

There is no other movement.

The Jedi answers:

I will find one.

In this way, thinking contradicts what has become known.

What was known was fear.

And now you have moved beyond it.

This is why restraint, reason, compassion, and moral discipline become so important. They allow the individual to remain present within the movement of the Force rather than simply becoming an instrument of whatever emotion happens to move through them.

And this brings us again to telepathy.

We use telepathy to sense the moral within another.

Perhaps there was a moment in your life—or many moments joined together—that brought you to some realization.

Something happened.

You remained open enough to it that you learned.

And from what you learned, something new emerged within you.

Perhaps something we ourselves have missed.

That is what interests us.

Not merely the event.

Not merely the power that followed it.

The moral.

The lesson.

The teaching.

The realization.

And we ask:

Does this bring betterment?

For me?

For you?

For everyone else?

Notice the word.

Not benefit.

Betterment.

Benefit asks what can be gained.

Betterment asks what becomes better.

The betterment of life.

That is what we seek.

And this is also how we recognize the Sith.

We sense power without moral freedom.

Fear.

Corruption.

Suffocation.

Manipulation.

Immoral influence.

The use of power not to help another discover what may blossom uniquely within them, but to prevent that discovery.

Because perhaps the greatest corruption is not merely harming another person.

It is keeping them from discovering their own moral—the lesson they were meant to encounter or overcome.

Keeping them from reaching the lesson that only their life could have taught them.

Keeping them from bringing forward the unique gift that might have belonged not only to them—

but eventually to everyone.

“I want you to look at something for a moment.”

The Jedi raises his hand.

“You see this?”

Upon his finger is a ring set with a ruby.

“It is a ring. I received it from a Sith.”

The Padawans look more closely.

“A ring of power. The power of eloquence.”

He turns the ring slowly upon his finger.

“The Sith and I began an argument. We spoke for some time, and eventually he conceded to me. When he did, something strange happened.”

The Jedi pauses.

“The ring unlocked from his finger.”

The Sith looked down at it and smiled.

“I don’t think I need this anymore,” he said. “You have shown me something today.”

He removed the ring and held it in his hand.

And there was something different in the way he held it. It was as though the ring had once weighed heavily upon him, though now it seemed almost weightless.

Then he looked at me.

“Take it,” he said. “It is a gift.”

I looked at the ring.

He explained that once placed upon the finger, it would lock itself there and could not be removed.

The ruby burned as brightly as fire.

I smiled.

“Sure.”

And I received it.

He placed the ring upon my finger.

It locked.

Then the Sith said:

“Understand what has happened here. This is a gift of power, and you are able to receive it because you overcame its power without possessing it.”

I looked at him.

“You have demonstrated that you may safely receive a gift of power precisely because you do not need it.”

He pointed toward the ring.

“It will adorn you.

You will not adorn yourself with the power it holds.”

The ruby continued burning upon my finger.

“To everyone who sees it,” he said, “they may say: There is a ring of power.

“But when they look at this man, they will discover that to him it is only a ring.”

Then he smiled.

“And I tell you that this is itself a greater power:

to not need it.”

The Jedi looks down at his hand.

“The moment he said this, the ruby began to dim.”

Its fire faded until the stone appeared almost ordinary.

“And now,” the Jedi tells the Padawans, “here it is.”

He holds his hand before them.

A simple ring.

A quiet ruby.

“And do you want to know something?”

The Jedi reaches down and pulls the ring effortlessly from his finger.

The instant it leaves his hand, the ruby bursts again into brilliant fire.

The Padawans stare.

The Jedi places the burning ring upon the table between them.

“Power becomes most dangerous when you require it to tell you who you are.”

He steps away from the ring.

“And sometimes the greatest evidence that you have mastered a power is that you are finally able to put it down.”

For some, I may call it a lesson.

For others, a teaching.

But as you can see, we have capabilities that are difficult to notice because we go further than this.

At first, there is a lesson.

Then the lesson becomes a teaching.

The teaching becomes a realization.

The realization becomes manifestation.

And manifestation may eventually become physical mastery—a representation within the world of the moral that was first discovered within the individual.

But it goes further still.

After physical demonstration, change may become more definite. It no longer belongs simply to one individual. It begins to move through groups of individuals, through societies, perhaps even through an entire planet.

You may find the lesson enough.

And it is enough.

There is nothing wrong with learning the lesson and carrying it quietly within yourself.

But sometimes it continues.

The moral becomes manifestation—a capability brought into resonance with the moral itself.

Something that was once understood inwardly becomes real outwardly.

Then, deeper still—or perhaps simply further—it becomes concrete.

Significant.

Visible.

This becomes especially important when such a manifestation appears during a time of unrest, corruption, or confusion.

But understand this carefully:

corruption did not create it.

Darkness does not deserve credit for the light that answers it.

Rather, there comes a point when the Jedi must relinquish the personal quest of moral establishment.

The lesson is no longer merely:

What must I become?

The question becomes:

What must I now return with?

The Jedi returns for the people.

For the rest of us.

So that we might remember something we had forgotten and realign ourselves with our own connection to the Living Force.

That is why the Jedi are celebrated when they arrive.

Not because they arrive with power.

Because they return with something.

A moral.

A realization.

A movement that may restore movement within others.

You see, this is one of the great differences between the Jedi and the Sith:

the moral and power.

Power would tell you to seek the moral within power.

The Sith works through control and influence.

And control takes away Jedi sense.

You are meant to learn.

You are meant to sense.

You are meant to discover your own.

You still need to breathe in order to grow.

But if the direction of your breath is manipulated, then the Sith Lord has won.

What do I mean by this?

I mean what you breathe, and in which direction you seek breath.

Your life.

Your experiences.

The people you encounter.

The people you love.

The people you affect.

And, horribly, those you may injure or destroy in ways that can never completely be repaired.

Soon you are left wondering:

Is this what I should breathe—or that?

Is this what I should understand—or that?

Am I supposed to move here—or there?

And eventually, having lost confidence in your own sense, you begin seeking power, control, and influence over others.

This is why the Sith is narrow-minded.

The Jedi mind must be broader than that.

The Jedi knows that the sky remains above us.

Breath is still given.

Life still offers its direction.

And when proper guidance is given, it does not tell you what your moral must be. It helps lead you toward the conditions in which your own moral may reveal itself.

Your own unique moral.

You could say that you seek it.

I would say that, eventually, it discovers you.

It discovers in you a vessel capable of bringing it forward into the world for the betterment of life—for your life and for the lives of others.

A moral does that.

Suffocation does not.

Let me demonstrate.

Suppose I tell you:

“This is the moral I discovered—or perhaps the moral that discovered me.”

I am standing in a desert.

Nothing but sand stretches before us.

I kneel.

I touch the ground.

And water begins to issue forth.

You would say:

“That is impossible.”

But I would tell you that impossibility is not the first thing the Jedi studies.

First, the Jedi asks:

What is the moral of the manifestation?

Water appears where there was none.

Life becomes possible where life was struggling.

Thirst is answered.

Growth becomes possible.

The desert may blossom.

Do you see it?

The betterment of you.

The betterment of me.

The betterment of everyone else.

The moral is simple:

it supports life.

It supports growth.

And from that moral another sense awakens within you—

imagination.

Perhaps the boundaries of what you believed possible are not the boundaries of reality itself.

For reality contains possibilities beyond the ones we have already encountered.

Yet power, influence, fear, and suffocation can make those possibilities extraordinarily difficult to perceive. Sometimes an individual spends a great portion of life merely overcoming what another person convinced them could never be.

And so we struggle to protect these morals.

We struggle so that what each of us might uniquely bring forward does not become lost within us before it ever has the chance to bloom.

And we struggle so that these discoveries do not fall into the service of power, influence, control, and suffocation.

Your mind may still tell you:

Water cannot issue from the desert merely because someone touches the ground.

Very well.

The Jedi does not demand that you abandon reason.

But the Jedi sees the moral within the image and recognizes that the moral itself may be a clue toward possibility.

Perhaps.

And that perhaps matters.

To the Jedi learner, it is a lesson.

To the Jedi Knight, it becomes something worthy of a quest.

To the Master, perhaps something to demonstrate.

And to the Grand Master, something to teach and bring forward for others.

This is the progression:

Lesson.

Teaching.

Realization.

Manifestation.

Physical representation.

And then, perhaps, change.

A true moral, when brought into the world, seeks the betterment of you, me, and everyone else.

It supports life.

It supports growth.

And perhaps one of its greatest gifts is that it reminds us how much of reality remains undiscovered.

The Padawan looks toward the Master.

“I think I understand.”

The Jedi smiles.

“There is no understanding, Padawan.”

The Padawan looks confused.

“You see, even the demand to understand can sometimes arise from fear, control, and suffocation—the belief that everything must immediately be placed into the categories of what you understand and what you do not understand.”

The Jedi looks toward him.

“I could look more deeply into you. I could examine your fears, where they began, what followed them, how you overcame them, what memories grew around them, what thoughts you developed, and what explanations you constructed afterward.”

He pauses.

“But I am not going to.”

The Padawan waits.

“And please, do not replace that uncertainty with fear.”

The Jedi smiles.

“You are capable of sensing too.”

I can stand apart from you and perceive your fears.

I can follow how they came into being.

I can see how you confronted them.

I can see what became of those confrontations—the memories, the thoughts, the explanations, the decisions, the transformations.

And eventually I may arrive at something much more pleasant:

your moral.

What did you learn from your life?

What did you learn from the lives of others?

What did your experiences reveal to you that perhaps no one else could have taught you in precisely the same way?

There is a great deception at work whenever another person convinces you that these discoveries must come from them instead of through your own living relationship with the Force.

This is why I say that fear, power, influence, and suffocation are improper paths.

They interfere with this discovery.

They may keep you from discovering your own uniqueness.

Your lesson.

Your teaching.

Your realization.

Your manifestation.

And eventually, perhaps, its physical property within the world.

The Jedi points upward.

“The sky is the sky for all of us.”

You will grow.

That is all.

You will grow.

But the suffocated may begin wondering where the sky has gone because they have been directed for so long toward the ground.

Sometimes they chose that direction themselves.

Sometimes another chose it for them.

But the sky has not disappeared.

You need only remember:

the sky is still there.

It never went anywhere.

So do not worry, Padawan:

What must I understand?

What must I not understand?

What am I supposed to know?

What am I forbidden from knowing?

It has nothing to do with that.

Breathe.

Live.

Sense.

Grow.

And when the moral comes—

do not be surprised if you discover that you were not the only one searching.

Perhaps the moral was searching for you.

Grow a strong trunk.

Grow a strong vine, interwoven with time and experience, with friends and family.

You may see yourself from below, always trying to reach upward, believing that if only you had more light, you would become larger.

But what the Jedi begins to notice is something different:

you seek liberty because you already grow naturally.

You know that you do.

What you need is not someone to manufacture growth for you.

What you need is liberty.

And liberty, at its simplest, is clarity.

Like air.

Like water.

Like one another.

Walk with me for a moment.

Look at the trees in this forest.

Like you.

Like me.

Like another.

But do not stop at the word tree.

Notice what is happening.

What if I told you that the word tree can itself become an obstacle to noticing that this being lives in liberty?

Look at how steadfast it is in its existence.

I could shout at it:

“Do this.”

I could whisper:

“Do that.”

I could tell it:

“This is what they are saying about you.”

And still the tree stands.

It remains free of me.

Free of people.

Free of argument.

Free of our demands.

Free even, in its own way, of our ideas about life and death.

It seeks only to grow.

And in liberty, its roots become strong.

Its trunk becomes strong.

Its branches reach outward.

It does not require a ruler standing beside it, measuring every inch and telling it how to become a tree.

And frankly—

look at the forest.

They seem to be getting along.

In liberty, the size and strength of one exists alongside the size and strength of another.

They do not need to become identical.

But together they begin to resemble one another enough that something larger appears.

A forest.

And a forest itself provides protection.

The Jedi kneels in the moss.

A squirrel approaches.

The Jedi smiles.

“There. Do you see it?”

That too is liberty.

Not command.

Not fear.

Not influence.

Not suffocation.

He does not seize the animal.

He does not summon it through force.

He does not bend it to his will.

He simply kneels.

And because he is there properly—because he is with life rather than above it—the small living thing comes forward of its own accord.

Sometimes you forget how important it is simply to get along with others.

Sometimes you forget that strength provides protection even to those you do not notice.

And sometimes you forget that gentleness is also evidence of strength.

The squirrel approaches because, in that moment, the forest is not at war with him.

The Jedi is in accord with it.

That too is liberty.

Now consider the ruler beside you.

The measuring ruler.

It is artificial.

Point after point has been marked upon it, just like the points we make with one another.

But those points are fixed.

The ruler is fixed.

The points do not grow.

The ruler does not grow.

People grow.

Life grows.

There will always be points.

There will always be measurements.

There will always be teachings written somewhere.

But even teachings do not grow by themselves.

You grow.

We grow.

I grow.

That is why living things are true in a way measurements never can be.

A true destination should reflect this.

Think carefully about that.

A true destination contains no suffocation.

It exists in liberty.

Not control.

Not fear.

Not even desire, necessarily, because desire can itself become another form of control.

A person may begin small and suffocated, and because the direction of growth has become distorted, they begin saying:

“I need to understand this.”

“I do not need to understand that.”

“I choose this.”

“I reject that.”

“This is better for me than what is better for you.”

No.

You can become lost after being drawn toward the dark side.

That is part of what the dark side means.

Eventually fear arrives.

Anger follows from a frustration that does not exist in liberty.

It is as though you have been cut off from the sun—

and yet you continue trying to grow.

Growth continues, but now it twists in search of light.

Finding your true direction again can be difficult.

But it can be done.

The Jedi looks at the Padawan.

“Now you understand—”

He stops.

“Now look.”

A red saber ignites.

“Now unto Order 66.”

The Padawan freezes.

The Jedi continues.

“The clones are what you know.”

“What you have been taught.”

“Your teachers.”

“Your inherited explanations.”

“Even the language through which you learned to describe the world.”

They have been beside you this entire time.

You might even say they have fought beside you.

You relied upon them while fighting the robot army.

They helped organize your world.

They gave you names.

Definitions.

Categories.

Rules.

And then one day—

they turn against you.

You have fought for them.

For what you know.

For what you have been told.

For what you inherited from others.

And suddenly you discover that knowledge itself cannot always remain loyal to life.

The Jedi gestures toward the red saber.

“There is a Sith standing before you now.”

He says:

“Understand death.”

“Understand God.”

“Understand Buddha.”

“Understand the higher planes.”

“Understand dimensions.”

“Understand the world.”

“Understand science.”

“Understand.”

“Understand.”

“Understand.”

And behind all of this may stand another command:

“You are not allowed to sense beyond what has already been explained.”

“You are not allowed to use telepathy.”

“You are not allowed to discover something outside the structure already given to you.”

And I might ask:

“Why do you not understand?”

You will answer:

“I do understand what you are talking about.”

But notice carefully.

You understand the words.

You understand the structure.

You understand the explanation.

But are you able to see how the demand for understanding itself may become another form of suffocation?

That is the deception.

That can become control.

That can become fear.

That can become the desire to fight desperately for what you already know.

But I assure you—

sometimes what you are defending is only a clone dancing beside you.

The red saber disappears.

The Jedi looks again toward the Padawan.

“The Jedi are here for guidance.”

“I only want to see you grow.”

“That makes me happy.”

“To see another living world in which growth is occurring.”

“So do not worry so much.”

“Grow.”

Proper growth.

And proper growth means:

mind yourself.

Yes, you may use artificial constructs in your life.

A ruler.

A calendar.

A schedule of events.

A system.

A teaching.

These things can guide you.

They can produce progress.

They can produce prosperity.

The Jedi knows this.

But eventually, if growth continues, you may have to step beyond the very structures that once helped you.

And perhaps that too is part of the moral.

Every individual may carry a unique gift.

Imagine that someone comes before you wounded.

You place your hands upon the wound.

And the wound closes.

Or perhaps I take a simple stick and touch the trunk of a tree.

A branch suddenly grows outward, covered in leaves, perfectly joined to the tree as though it had always belonged there.

Or perhaps I place my hand upon water—

and fire rises from its surface.

Do not misunderstand what I am describing.

I am not talking about the modern fantasy of heroes collecting powers, each person assigned an ability like a character in a story.

I am talking about morals.

A moral brought so completely into resonance with a life that it acquires representation.

A lesson becoming realization.

A realization becoming manifestation.

A manifestation becoming something that can be shown.

Each person has something unique that life may teach through them.

But we are suffocated in so many directions that we scarcely know how to imagine this anymore.

Look at everyone around you and consider the possibility:

each one carries something that has never existed in precisely that form before.

A lesson.

A moral.

A gift.

Something capable of adding to life.

And immediately the conditioned mind shouts:

“Impossible.”

“Never.”

“Never.”

“Never.”

The Jedi smiles.

“And there is your clone again.”