may the fourth be with you 

May 4, 2020~ this page isn’t about Star Wars, but i do love Star Wars. yoda’s my favorite, well, after R2D2. best movie character in the history of cinema: he’s the quiet center to the series, the calm in the storm. his emotions are conveyed with simple chirps and wheedles and beeps and bops. i swear it’s easy to tell what he’s saying, or at least what he means. artoo doesn’t have a gender, i was just a boy when i met him and so he was a boy because girls were stupid.

jedi is buddhism and yoda is a bodhi. you never discover the origin story of jedi, or a buddha of the galaxy. the force seems recognized by jedi as having always been there and jedi follow it, bacome one with it, and use its power. maybe it was never “discovered,” just remained part of the animal we evolved from. i’d love to pick Lucas’ brain about the backstory, a desire to learn just a bit more.

if i understand Buddha correctly, desire is natural and of itself is not a problem. desire is simply the root of all human mind-made suffering. the root of all suffering, not the manifestation or form the suffering takes. desire is the seed. wanting, desiring, and working toward a goal, are natural in us and can be a beautiful process. like cake or a girl in a bikini.

desire points our feet in the direction of the path. a path we choose out of our own minds. that’s rare in nature, unique to us and maybe other animal few, we aren’t quite sure yet. our mind can feel desire and do something about it, we have free will. but like all good things in the human mind, it can go horribly, horribly torturous as it grows. it leads to expectation and fear of not happening. dread of what lies ahead. like alcohol, choosing more changes one’s path, sometimes drastically.

so one way to navigate is to catch a desire early, mull it over, and choose to keep an eye on it. by that i mean try to watch it like it is someone else’s desire. benign objectivity, if you’re the scientific or academic sort. look back down the path and see what brought you here. look forward to the visible path ahead and see what lies ahead. like a good meal with someone you love on a friday night… on wednesday, something to look forward to.

why’s the desire in you here in the first place? be rigorously honest about he place it comes from. healthy? anger? bad habit or good one… all the lights and darks. now, as you’re mulling it over, weigh what it takes to obtain the thing (they’re all “things,” by the way). would obtaining be worth any effort or sacrifice? ask yourself if this is truly something you want or a flight of fancy. even a flight of fancy can be nice, they often are, because they’re glimpses of dreams while awake. would this desire bring you harm or put you in dangers? how about others? even, will this desire help or hinder your pursuit of happiness? rigorous honesty’s answers might surprise you about the things you want. like a BMW and the price to keep it running, given thewir notorious need for mechanics.

it’s good to radically accept what is natural. the desire is natural in you and you have to come to have and hold that nature. when you’re doing all this seeing and rigorous honesty, accepting even the most onerous of things helps temper them. so much outside and inside is out of your control. you have genetics, you know. society is made up of people all around you with desire and the pursuit of happiness. you don’t live in a forest of one pathway you walk alone. golly, that would be simple, like taking a hike to your favorite meditation spot in the woods, or walking home after.

the bigger world and solar system and galaxy you live in has infinite forces acting on you. those you cannot help and are natural. and those forces are far more than you even know. like radio waves from outer space, they bombard you constantly in case you didn’t know. and meteorites fall from the sky all the time.

the smaller world inside you has many many forces acting on you from the inside. maybe infinite as well (i mean if you can’t count something, doesn’t that make it zero or infinite?). that’s genetics and your path to get here, the uncontrolled path of your lineage that births you on earth at a time and place you cannot control.

from the beginning you start dreaming. the world is imaginary and you grow into it, your mind is grown like a plant and you learn many things of earth and the universe’s reality. you also learn the ways, human mind things, of people. you learn in school, you learn at home. you always learn, because naturally, you have a human mind. a blessing and a curse. light and dark things.

the above stuff can be thought of, as we are want to do, as a superpower. the superpower of the human mind. there’s always the choice to use one’s power for good or for bad. what Buddha is saying is, desire can spark either one, and if followed, can cause suffering. can cause suffering. and it is the root of all mind-made suffering.

that’s a big statement! a simple truth that cannot be refuted. i’ve tried and not succeeded yet. i have no desire to prove it wrong, though.