The Force Awakens: Why Free Will Triumphs Over The Dark Side

An interesting article by Josh Adler examines the Star Wars’ mythos and how  Jedi “mind tricks” relate to the human psyche and our everyday responses to external stimuli…

Just like in the movies, in our daily lives our wielding of the Force of response-ability can create new possibilities, or bring discordance and harm to the people in our lives. Even if we can’t predict our absolute impact on social or professional challenges; nonetheless we can always indirectly influence the conversations and behavioral trends around us by being more response-able. Part of the secret of the Force is that we “show up” better prepared for whatever we encounter in life. Every event becomes an opportunity to exercise our creative capacity, or skillfulness of response. This kind of responsiveness teaches us to tune into what’s true for ourselves, and eventually we become Jedi of making up our own minds.

If we seek to heal others, we naturally begin by healing ourselves. If we are to experience the highest levels of individual freedom possible for our species, we must control and govern every aspect of our own lives. Our emotions may be the hardest part of our selves to govern but we are capable…

An individual or community’s ability to generate and value its relation to itself, as witnessed by the heroic efforts at Standing Rock, means that there’s an inherent grace in our reality to “play” within our fates, even amid society’s most dire events. However, it’s up to us to remain vigilantly aware of that grace, to cultivate our responsive agency, and to proactively create within it, rather than giving in to the Dark Side’s seductively constrained, essentially passive, states of blithe consumption, reductiveness, and reactiveness.

By exercising the conscious “muscle” of responding creatively to life’s unpredictability, a fundamentally liberating and empowering vista of human existence emerges. We can freely cope, adapt, and innovate our relationships to our experiences, rather than being oppressed by them. In other words: our Force within is real, and it can be awakened.