I apologize in advance for the geekiness of this blog.
Just saw the new Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens. It was amaaaazing! I have to say that Star Wars has been like a religion to me. And I wish I could have explained this to the people I was sitting next to as I cried, laughed and generally flipped out way beyond the level of appropriate. Good thing it was dark in there.
In a strange and totally geeky way, Star Wars planted the seeds of my own spiritual journey. I was 12 when the first one came out in 1977 and I saw it about 27 times in the movie theatre that summer. I loved the hero’s journey, mythic part of it, but what I haven’t been able to get enough of, was the idea of The Force and the Jedi training.
I grew up as a very psychic child and struggled tremendously with this. Back in the day, there were no psychics on TV, no New Age bookstores and no conversation anywhere about these topics. Just three books in the library on ESP, which I read cover to cover by the time I was ten years old. I was always seeking to understand my own psychic and spiritual experiences, so the explanation of The Force made total sense to me.
YES! There is this unseen energy all around us, which connects us and binds us. I knew there was because as a psychic child I could see it. I used to call this my “energy vision.”
And yes! I knew there was the concept of polarity, the light and dark, good and evil and that we had to choose. We have to choose, every minute of every day. Every choice we make commits us more and more deeply into the path of the Light or the Dark.
This pretty much sums up the basic universal laws of our planet. We have physicality (a body) and polarity (Light and Dark) and then we have free will. We must choose and learn by experiencing the results of our choices. (The law of Cause and Effect.) My personal belief is that there is way less fate involved down here than people like to think. I don’t buy the “It’s all meant to be…” New Age-ism. Mostly I think we get to choose.
I remember sitting in the movie theatre as a lonely, geeky preteen and saying over and over again. “I choose the light, I choose the light!” I really, really meant it.
And I was determined to become a Jedi no matter what. The only place I could think of where that kind of magic was real, was in the marital arts. So I studied diligently for many, many years. some of that time living in Japan and Okinawa and training with my own real version of Yoda, my Sensei in Japan. Two black belts later, I was as close to being to a Jedi Knight as I could get down here on Planet Earth.
As I went deeper into my spiritual training, my roots in this philosophy went deeper too. I began to see Luke’s journey as not so much the Hero’s Journey, but more as the Initiate’s Journey- and this is also my own journey. My work as a psychic and energy healer eventually lead me to being the co-founder and a lead teacher in a energy medicine school, but it’s really a Mystery School.
Initiates are people who have dedicated their lives to a very specific spiritual path. I believe that at some point, an Initiate enters into a Mystery School and makes vows at a soul level to walk that path, the path to enlightenment and from that point on, it becomes the backbone of your cycle of incarnation.
Jesus was an Initiate and trained with the Essences. And so was the Buddha, trained by many Gurus and spiritual masters. (They would have been great Jedi Knights!) Initiates go through spiritual training and a great initiation completes the cycle of each phase of training. For most of us, life itself brings us those initiations, not our spiritual teachers. Death, divorce, serious illness, exile, loss, incarceration; all of these grand initiators are how we grow.
Initiations change us, transforming us at a deep soul level. We are not the same person we were before the initiation. And most of us don’t choose these initiatory events, they are downloaded to us by our souls. Our personalities don’t really dig these initiations except sometimes after the fact!
As Initiates, we choose one side and take a stand. The battle between the Light and Dark sides of the Force is fought on a daily basis, mostly internally. The Initiate knows that spiritual growth and the journey towards enlightenment is about continually purifying and mastering our internal Dark Side and then using that energy to fuel the quest for the Light.
It’s not easy, even in Star Wars. The pull to the Dark is powerfully seductive and we must be ever vigilant. Anger, hatred, fear, ignorance and the desire for power fuel the Dark Side. I was thrilled to see this theme become the central conflict in the new movie. I love the mainstream conversation that this opens about the path of the Initiate. How exciting.
In stories, the conflict between the Light and the Dark is projected outside ourselves. The hero of the Light must actually battle a real counterpoint, a student of the Dark, light saber against light saber. And yet in The Force Awakens, you can see each of these Initiates engaged deeply in their own inner battle the whole time.
Throughout all of history these mythic stories have both fed our souls and also pointed us in the right direction for our own quest, the Journey of the Hero/Initiate. I am eager to see where the story goes next.
And I am also struck by the fact that it’s the winter solstice today, the longest night of the year.
In the meantime, may the force be with you!
