Analysis of Star Wars; The Force

Being an energy field that surrounds and penetrates everything, and is somehow produced by life, one could imagine it as a kind of living ether, or an ether that reacts to life. One imagines something like the images from Kirlian photography: bioelectricity. Jungian psychology also posits something called a collective unconscious, which in a sense binds us all together. If one considers also that the Force is involved in all life, not just humans, it must go beyond human psychology, though, and reach down into the occult. Magic. Practitioners of magic have always proposed theories about how magic works, but I am convinced that these are reverse-engineered imaginative excuses. When the mind encounters something it does not understand, its instinct is to try to understand it, even if there is not enough data to provide a rational explanation. We have God, gods, spirits, ghosts, demons and all manner of anthropomorphic beings to represent these subtle forces of nature and to give us a pretext for having some influence over them. After all, a stormfront that is nothing more than a low pressure zone in the atmosphere caused by a complex interplay of heat, light, chemicals, land, and water is much harder to reason with than a god or demon that you can talk to with proper training and ritual. The Force, though, is not anthropomorphic, so it bridges a kind of gap between gods, which we see as psychological constructs, and the raw forces of nature, over which we have no influence. It is like the ether, and with proper training, you can wield it. Imagining the ether as the surface of water, one can learn to swim, create ripples, watch ripples and deduce the origin of the ripples, and, when the water is quiet, you can even see a reflection of the sky. However, for me, the most compelling idea of the Force ties in with Janes's concept of the bicameral mind. The Force is name we give to the activity of the non-dominant hemisphere. The right hemisphere in most of us, which processes information in a sort of spreading activation method, non-linearly, so as to provide successive approximations of truth that cannot be directly approached through logic or reasoning: intuition. The right hemisphere picks up information that is ignored by the conscious process (which is exceedingly limited in scope) and filters it somehow to provide a solution. This solution will often transcend the solutions arrived by our conscious minds because its approach is broad and vast instead of needle-sharp and linear.

This last interpretation is more compelling when Kenobi tells Luke to let go of his conscious mind. This is a necessary step in learning to be sensitive to the quiet voices in our heads that try to speak to us from the right hemisphere. Janes also discusses how in biblical times, various rulers tried to eliminate the crazy heretics who lived out in the desert, who still listened to those voices. Ultimately, I think the story of Star Wars is a kind of parallel to this time, wherein those who were close to God were systematically exterminated. Lies and deceptions are largely possible through language. Even today, you can see that language is a sort of weapon used by politicians to enslave the minds of the masses. If you were ruling a people dishonestly, you would be using language to do so. You would not want anyone around who could see through your deceptions, and people who were in tune with God (able to process information and see truth without language) would be a threat. So, an evil and corrupt ruler, a dishonest ruler, would seek to eradicate those who can see the truth.