My question

Hello everyone, I know I haven't been too active this days but, I am still in this path.
So I basically read about Taoism because It's similar to the philosophy of the Jedi, and I found about duality and how one thing can't be without the other. And I started wondering about the light side and the dark side of The Force. Does it mean that if there isn't the dark side of The Force there can't be light and reverse? Can't just there be the light and no dark? It's confusing so take your time.
Thank you and may The Force be with you.

Depends on what you think the Force is probably, though I personally don't see how some sort of supernatural force can be 'dark' or 'light' (I don't believe in the Force really, just FYI). After all, nighttime is dark but not 'dark', and tornadoes are destructive but not 'dark', pain hurts but is not 'dark'.

I think that life in its all-encompassing way is not dark or light, but different gradients of the same thing. All nature is natural, regardless of how constructive or destructive it is. Only humans assign arbitrary labels based on our perceptions.

We assign opinions of 'goodness' and 'badness' to people's actions based on our own internal moral and ethical compasses, but they won't align with those of everyone else. After all, some countries have the death penalty and others do not, in some countries marital rape is generally acceptable/legal and others not.

We often talk about 'balance' in the Force here on TOTJO but that's also an arbitrary label of a kind. Things are and they are not, what we call them is wholly dependent on how we see them.

The Hero’s Journey is a wonderful thing. In real life it’s called know and unknown. Light and dark are easy ways to understand things sometimes. Easily understandable. Those caves or those places we find out and figure out things - that’s called life. Some things we gotta figure out for ourselfs or go through it.
In real life , we as chosen Jedi can choose our beginnings.
Some times we can ask ... why do I ... or do I really... there’s the cave - that choice to seek more or not to. Know or unknown can be represented in many ways in the real world.

Light and dark are one of the many ways to say the same thing.
Black and white
Know and unknown


The balance is to every Modern Jedi to form for them self’s. The mix - is the light that shines from that vessel - by the actions we can see what’s inside.
Hope this can help

https://www.templeofthejediorder.org/forum/Clergy/115769-the-block?start=0

See if that can help a bit as well. New stuff every Monday


Pastor Carlos

So what does the Taoist philosophy say on this matter? If it is so easy to question whether it applies to all things in general or to (some conceptions of) the Force in particular, clearly, I'd argue, it is thus not obvious at all. How do the teachings you read defend that point, then? What argument do they provide that the idea of a sort of fundamental duality/symmetry is plausible, or even compelling?

And there is a lot to unpack here, for sure. Of course if you take one whole cake, you cannot cut half of it off without leaving behind a second half in so doing. But likewise it can be argued that without the unit, without the whole, there would be nothing to subdivide into two either. And on the subject of subdivisions, what's stopping us to cut the cake into three thirds, anyway? Maybe the simple most logical algebra knows only two values, maybe our language only knows YES and NO (No, stop. "Maybe" is not a third option. It's always "maybe YES" or "maybe NO" or a combination of the two, but never something genuinely third.) but who is to say that no useful system can be composed of more than two poles? In fact, some efforts have been made to consider what a system with a non-finite count of values would look like, or even uncountably infinite. Of course cutting up a cake like that swiftly ceases to be an intuitive analogy at that point but noone said that there had to be one.

Nature itself, it should be noted, provides all of one, two, and three way charge distinctions with the forces we know about, and it is not at all obvious that there are not or could not be yet finer ways to... cut the matter cake, as it were. It's not clear that the separation into two is either fundemantal, or special, and it certainly isn't universal. So even if we insist that the Force is an actual substance or power that permeates the universe, it is not at all clear just how many aspects it would have, or even if there would be any but one.

That being said, there can be any number of Codes and it may be a matter of clear communication to give certain Jedi paths labels like "light" or "dark", or classify them into such categories. But even then nothing forces us to define as many or as few as two of them.

In conclusion, I would shrug the division of the Force into a "light" and a "dark" aspect to be inherited mostly from the fiction, perhaps an artifact of the history of Jediism, moreso than a demonstrable fundamental property of either the Jedi religion as a class of philosophies, or the Force as something more substantive than a mere figure of speech. Maybe there are reasons to divide it at all, maybe into two aspects, maybe into more, but if the Taoist insists that a division into two in particular is special or even necessary, they have most of their way yet ahead of them to show that it is so.

For now, don't think about "light and dark". Think about Yin and Yang. In other words, polar opposites of things. Good and bad, despair and joy, hard and soft, fast and slow, etc. If any one side of these dualities ceased to exist, it's opposite would disappear as well. We use Yin and Yang on a daily basis. We think in terms of Yin and Yang. We need the existence of duality, of comparison, in order to understand our world and make decisions.

However, when it comes to the Force, I don't believe in light and dark. The Force simply is what it is: everything and every not-thing Light and dark are no more than nomenclature, words to describe how little we understand. On the other hand, WE have light and dark within us. We are equally capable of good or evil.

The Tao takes no sides. It is Void, which allows it to exist everywhere, since it has no substance in and of itself. To say it another way, there is no light or dark side to the Tao.

Honestly it's all about how you view the force , personally I don't think the force has a dark or a light side but it's how you use it . For me it's more emotional good emotions and actions are the light side and negativel emotions and actions is the dark side , and life is just a grey blur with both because we are both . To have light we must have dark and vice versa it's a duality if you will . But if you see the force as the will of the universe then there is no dark or light just different views and ways of thinking . Honestly I'm probably not making much sense to you but if anything the IP here has taught me to not look at the world and my surroundings in a dualistic tone such as " the game of black and white " .

LuckyBamboo wrote: Hello everyone, I know I haven't been too active this days but, I am still in this path.
So I basically read about Taoism because It's similar to the philosophy of the Jedi, and I found about duality and how one thing can't be without the other. And I started wondering about the light side and the dark side of The Force. Does it mean that if there isn't the dark side of The Force there can't be light and reverse? Can't just there be the light and no dark? It's confusing so take your time.
Thank you and may The Force be with you.

At that point it really depends on how your defining the Force.
Since I think the Force is everything already - I'd say it's not of sides, and that these concepts of the Force having sides is rather a function of the users connection to it, with it, and as of it. So in effect (according to that view) the dark side of the Force does not require the light side of the Force to exist, or vice versa. To me the associations with Taoism and its Yin Yang theory is more in line with the observation/awareness of ones focus, connection, and flow with the Force. And in that regard we can break down concepts into a polarity. In terms of feeling it one might call it a weight, or seeing it a light, hearing it a sound etc. From a polarity you can entertain the experience of a singularity or its pole of emptiness, neither sustainable because they are parts of a pair. Going the other way, the iteration of two increases, like within the I-Ching to form more complex patterns of balance. But what is balance in a concept, perhaps truth, but in this context of relations I'd say it's more like coupling.... and the more complex the patterns of balance the more new patterns can be formed by the exploration of imbalance with those concepts. But it has to be conservative otherwise it needs artificial supports to retain its form, and from that we get consumption, greed, anger, hate etc. So to me the dark side of the Force is the abuse of focus to sustain something which is not sustainable on its own merits. In the fiction its sorta super-charged by the whiz bang lightning wizardry to the extent that power becomes all consuming for those who cling to their own desires as purpose (no matter how noble they think they are), for example, it consumes them.

In the West, we use the terms “Light” and “Darkness” as metaphors. There is a purpose and utility in this with which I agree but it doesnt apply to Taoism. When Taoism speaks of Light and Dark, it is not Good vs Evil or Jedi vs Sith or God vs the Devil. To my knowledge, there is no moral dichotomy in Taoism. It is rooted in observations of nature. While there is what we consider cruelty in nature, human morality is hardly the defining feature of the natural world. Think of this: imagine sitting somewhere. just watching the world as it exists around you. Imagine noticing a shadow and spending hours watching that shadow move further and further, relentlessly. Imagine suddenly realizing that the shadow is moving because the sun up in the sky is moving. The darkness of the shadow is fundamentally linked to the light of the sun in the sky. Darkness and Light are linked: Bang! Now youre on the road to the Tao. Observation of reality and the relationships between natural forces - without moral judgment.