Trying To Understand

for me the word Jedi was something that was always there but took years to embrace and accept because i didnt want to put myself into the category of space cadet new ager who thinks hes luke skywalker

but no other word is more appropriate; regardless of the origins of the word JEDI the fact is that in the modern psyche there is no other word which more fully embodies the synthesis of mysticism and warriorship

there is the shaolin warrior monk of the past, and there is the lightsabered Jedi of the future

i know i know - the movies specifically say "a long time ago" lol welcome to mysticism 101 - the future is now, which incidentally makes it the past which btw is nothing more than the memory of an observation of the unfolding of the cosmic cycle of perception and suchness - lol - if it doesnt make sense then just say its not supposed to make sense, thats part of the point; disrupt the cognition - reframe the point of reference. find a way to convincingly BREAK what you thought was real and when it reforms it will be bigger and more expansive - repeat the process: shatter the syntax enough times and it stops expanding and instead drops all but the simplest and most essential components

concepts useful to me have been jungs synchronicity and collective unconscious

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_unconscious

http://www.highexistence.com/how-to-read-the-signs-of-the-universe/

a quote from part of the ensuing discussion in the above link

".. time and time again following this sort of synchronicity has lead me to better places in my life, and deeper places within myself. Everything I believe is derived from directly experiencing it myself, occasionally validating these experiences with the experiences of others. Some of these things were weird as fuck and no one i know can explain them in a logical fashion. To validate everything I experience by science alone, experience alone, or spiritual/religious belief alone would be tomfoolery and unfair to myself.

I have the beliefs I have today due to the direct experiences widening my realm of possibilities. I feel like you must use all of these methods to reach a mutual understanding within yourself. I felt myself as a part of a collective, just as I am made of a collective of cells, and they a collective of atoms, and those collectives of particles. I felt how the energy in my body vibrated at specific frequencies just as a plethora of light waves blend together bouncing off my environment into my eye to make what I saw in front of me. It was far different from reading about it in a textbook but a textbook makes it verifiable, at least so far as science has come already.

The problem I have with validating things by scientific evidence alone is that it is only capable of measuring with whatever tools we’ve managed to create so far. And since this is always advancing, indeed at a steeper and steeper curve, we continuously learn new things that we did not previously, we see further and more than before. As such a lack of evidence can be caused by two possibilities (excluding things that we are capable of studying but have not yet noticed or studied):

1: It is not true, and will be scientifically proven false.

2: We have not yet figured out how to measure it or study it, let alone know of it’s existence.

As such we can only claim to understand based on what we’ve learned thus far. What we do understand from religions is many and varied, and often deals with codes of conduct and ways of living. Direct experience also, ironically, varies from person to person by nature, and skeptics and mystics are both essential to look at the world from different viewpoints in order to grasp all possible angles, right or wrong regardless. The one thing that validates MY direct experience most was science. Science taught me that at the very least, we are all made of three things: protons electrons and neutrons, not mentioning that these are made of even smaller bits, all the same materials, but because of how they are put together, everything is unique. My understanding is that the very basic deep down building block for all things is ‘energy’ in the wide and varied sense not just metaphysical (ie: electricity, ‘Chi’ or ‘Qi’, sound waves, potential and kinetic energy ect). And that last bit I have no science to back, but It is not my job to convince people I’m right: that’s my personal truth, and it’s subject to change when the universe can prove me otherwise."

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the vedic MAYA, and atman

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_%28illusion%29

http://study.com/academy/lesson/the-hindu-belief-system-darma-karma-and-moksha.html


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the writings of castaneda

http://www.prismagems.com/castaneda/

"A warrior starts off with the certainty that his spirit is off balance; then by living in full control and awareness, but without hurry or compulsion, he does his ultimate best to gain this balance. In your case, as in the case of every man, your imbalance is due to the sum total of all your actions.

I urge you to feel at ease and confident and trust your personal power.

You must cultivate the feeling that a warrior needs nothing. You have everything needed for the extravagant journey that is your life. I have tried to teach you that the real experience is to be a man, and that what counts is being alive; life is the little detour that we are taking now. Life in itself is sufficient, self-explanatory and complete. A warrior understands this and lives accordingly; therefore, one may say without being presumptuous that the experience of experiences is being a warrior.

A man goes to knowledge as he goes to war, wide awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance. Going to knowledge or going to war in any other manner is a mistake, and whoever makes it will live to regret his steps.

When a man has fulfilled those four requisites there are no mistakes for which he will have to account; under such conditions his acts lose the blundering quality of a fool's acts. If such a man fails, or suffers a defeat, he will have lost only a battle, and there will be no pitiful regrets over that.

There is nothing in this world that a warrior cannot account for. You see, a warrior considers himself already dead, so there is nothing for him to lose. The worst has already happened to him, therefore he's clear and calm; judging him by his acts or by his words, one would never suspect that he has witnessed everything.

We are dealing with that immensity out there. To turn that magnificence out there into reasonableness doesn't do anything for you. Here, surrounding us, is eternity itself. To engage in reducing it to a manageable nonsense is petty and outright disastrous.

For a sorcerer, reality, or the world we all know, is only a description that has been pounded into you from the moment you were born. The reality of our day-to-day life, then, consists of an endless flow of perceptual interpretations which we have learned to make in common. I am teaching you how to see as opposed to merely looking, and stopping the world is the first step to seeing.

The sorcerer's description of the world is perceivable. But our insistence on holding on to our standard version of reality renders us almost deaf and blind to it. When you begin this teaching, there is another reality, that is to say, there is a sorcery description of the world, which you do not know. As a sorcerer and a teacher, I am teaching you that description. What I am doing with you consists, therefore, in setting up that unknown reality by unfolding its description, adding increasingly more complex parts as you go along"

Whenever the internal dialogue stops, the world collapses and extraordinary facets of ourselves surface, as though they had been kept heavily guarded by our words. You are like you are, because you tell yourself that you are that way. You are too heavy and self-important. Let go!

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warrior philosophy in general and the japanese conception of BUDO especially

http://mountallison.maritimeikd.com/senshin/?page_id=24

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for me, these ideas form the context or the background

my view is that within all of the above as the essential context, to be a jedi means to consciously develop ones character, cultivate personal excellence, and be of maximum service to society in particular, and to the earth in general.