The Force Explained

Hi, Ariane!

You don't know me, but you said something that I thought necessitated a response.

Ariane wrote: Semantics! Doesn't matter how you describe something, in whatever language, the truth is still the truth.

See, around here, if anybody would disagree with that statement, it's likely to be me . So, believe me when I say that if anybody here wants explanations, or definitions, or consistency, it's me.

That said, the very best we can do here is get close. We're describing something we can't see, we can't touch, we can't taste, we can't smell, and we can't feel. We can't prove it exists anymore than we can prove that an invisible teapot is floating just outside the reach of our telescopes.

There are those, like Zenchi, who would argue that you can "feel" the Force. And I won't argue that notion. What I will say is that the Force as Zenchi feels it will never be the same as the Force as I feel it, or as you feel it, or as Rosalyn feels it. It's impossible, because while we all may be just expressions of the Force, or the Universe, or what-have-you, we're all unique expressions, built individually, each completely different than another. Since our frames of reference are necessarily different, and any conclusions about the Force would require us to agree on a frame of reference, we'll never be looking at the same thing from the same angle.

(I will also say that "feeling the Force" is arguable itself, because how can you know it's the Force if you have no basis for comparison? A basis which is all but impossible to have the first time you experience it? You may label that feeling as a feeling of the Force, but how do you know it is? How do you know it's not simply self-awareness, or that bean burrito you had with a cup of coffee? What if we're all mislabeling the Force? What if all our experiences are actually something else, and none of us have actually even touched the "true" Force?)

We are all using our experience as glimpses into the "truth", but they aren't clear and they are short-lived. Any sketches we make are likely to resemble our own minds more than they resemble the Force, because that's how our minds work. Since each of our minds is different, each of our experiences will be different.

We can come to agreements on points where we (mostly) agree or (mostly) disagree, but even then, we're going to be wrong. We don't have the perception to actually be "right" about anything where the Force is concerned. No matter what we do, we can never be "right," because "right" in this case means to have an opinion that is measured against facts. We have no facts. They're not possible to obtain.

Does that mean we shouldn't try? No.
Does that mean we shouldn't discuss our experiences and try to come up with a single, coherent "definition"? No.
Does that mean it's more subjective than you'd probably like? Almost certainly.

When you start looking for proof that, by definition, cannot exist, you're going to spend a lot of time searching. And time spent searching for something else is time not spent searching yourself.

This is a "search yourself" Temple, primarily.

steamboat28 wrote: This is a "search yourself" Temple, primarily.

Good phrasing. If we embrace something as dogma and not a recipe, we get blinders. For me totjo is like spiritual search engine and making any strict borders is like building a Chinese firewall, which endangers my freedom of belief.

den385 wrote: For me totjo is like spiritual search engine and making any strict borders is like building a Chinese firewall, which endangers my freedom of belief.

Welcome Den385. If this thread were to end I would like the final comment to be Den385 as seen above. Any description would remove the ability for a Jedi to choose freely their idea of the force. But without a description then none of us would understand what anyone was talking about. It seems a dichotomy that must be approached with balance, when approaching the description of the force. Many of you who have posted have already expanded my knowledge. Such as with comments like.

Adder wrote: Matter more broadly I interpret in different time dilations

Interesting. It seems like a description that matter is in a state of flux in time.

Fenton wrote: These 'particles' can become 'entangled'. No matter how far apart they are, they remain connected somehow. If you look at one particle, the other will immediately change to match its partner.

Love your description of quantum mechanics Fenton. It seems as though there is an underlying force connecting all things together. Good Post.

Adder wrote: Have you seen the movie 'Lucy' yet. I saw it on the weekend for the first time, it sounds a bit like what you’re thinking of there, but the movie is obviously still fiction (at the moment).

Yes i have seen it today since your post. Great movie. And yes Jedi as described in Star Wars Saga, are still very fictional. Brilliant movie though.

Adder wrote: Tranhumanism talked about integrating technology and methods to evolve consciousness so that humanity could more directly benefit from the singularity. I don't think Jedi are anti-technology but depending on the level of integration it might blur the lines between human and cyborg, but who ever said only human's could be Jedi!?

Ah I see so Jedi do not have a criteria for who is Jedi such as only force sensitive’s. It seems like an alignment rather than a title which brings me on to nine alignments.

Easy Damus wrote: The Nine Alignments of Good Vs Evil

Alexandre Orion wrote: We waste a lot of valuable "is-ness" by trying to become something that we are not. Looking for an "explanation" is entertainment. It is a puzzle with a lot of pieces -- too many really to count. IF we try to count "pieces", that is ... But please, continue this ... indefinitely, if you feel like it. It is entertaining.

Yes this conversation is just for fun. But also we must accept who we are, self improvement is the only task that seems to be worthwhile and hopefully we all improve ourselves.

steamboat28 wrote: See, around here, if anybody would disagree with that statement, it's likely to be me. So, believe me when I say that if anybody here wants explanations, or definitions, or consistency, it's me.

Steamboat28 thanks for your input. I will read your thread after this post thanks for your time. But i agree while the truth is universal the interpretation is subjective.


Thanks all for your time

Peace and blessings, Love and Light xx

For me, the Force is not a thing, but a principle.

Also, truth is neither absolute nor objective, eternal nor universal, but is rather relative to our conceptual system which is not objective, etc. Truth is based upon understanding, and how we understand is relative to the nature of our human bodies and our human interaction with the environment, which includes other humans. Perception and the physical nature of our bodies determine how we interact with other bodies in the physical and cultural environment, and this interactional experience is subject to human purposive and functional categorization. Human adaptation to and negotiation with our environment has been evolutionarily successful because, in part, of our ability to categorize our environment and our experience of it. Truth is the result of the correspondence between our conceptual categories and the properties of objects. The correspondences change as our categories change, which they do all the time.

"Moreover, since the natural dimensions of categories (perceptual, functional, etc.) arise out of our interactions with the world, the properties given by those dimensions are not properties of objects in themselves but are, rather, interactional properties, based on the human perceptual apparatus, human conceptions of function, etc. It follows from this that true statements made in terms of human categories typically do not predicate properties of objects in themselves but rather interactional properties that make sense only relative to human functioning...In making a true statement, we have to choose categories of description, and that choice involves our perceptions and our purposes in the given situation" (Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson, pages 163ff, italics original).

I like it.
Now if we could use that knowing to encourage people to work together and be accepting of each other because we area all one in that we are all creations of the Force. We are all matter and energy combined to form life. We all exist - here - on this one little planet.

I would hope that this universal understanding of the force would/could bring the jedi community together, lol.

We ARE the force.

Ruminator wrote: We ARE the force.

I would argue The Force is ALL existence in this dimension and beyond. Every quark of it. If you look into the behaviors of Electrons you'll find out they seem to pop in and out of existence. Technically we are 99.9% empty space. And we still don't know WHY Gravity works, we just accept that it does.

In reality, we are so un-knowledgeable on the grand scale of things that it's a little ridiculous to assume we can define The Force at all.

It's not pointless to contemplate, but it is pointless to put restrictions on it.

We may not know what exactly causes gravity, at least not if you really, really get down to it. You can however stay on a more classical level and say that it is a property of mass. It is not satisfactory to a theoretical physicist but it is just about all any engineer will ever need within foreseeable future.

Anyway, gravity is not a thing. It does exist in the sense that there is an interaction to be observed between the things that influences them (which is quite enough, too, one might add). It does not exist as anything you can point to however. You hear people say that love is this thing the existence of which you cannot demonstrate. Love is more discrete than gravity, believe it or not. Though one might just argue that we know less about the cause of love than the cause of gravity. But I shan't go into this unless needed.

What gravity is though is a description of that interaction. We found a correlation between the mass of the things and their behaviour and we put it to an expression that helps us predict future events with enough accuracy to make our lives better. We found other forces, too, that work in a very analogous way. We don't really really know what causes them either but we have enough of an idea to allow me to write these words and to display them on your screen at any time after the fraction of a second that it takes to transmit, receive and process the data.

We have nothing close to that when it comes to the capital-F Force. The Force doesn't influence anything we can't attribute to other things. The Force concept doesn't have any predictive capabilities whatsoever and as such has precisely no practical application (notice the "practical application" bit; the comfort it gives you is not being questioned here) nor value in the quest of other knowledge that might redeem its own inherent irrelevance. If anything, it may be a distraction in that it occupies our minds with a buzz-word sophistry when we could be using them to advance real understanding instead.
The Force also has no consistent, much less coherent definition. I might as well say Shmaguffle and take a poll as to what all of you feel about it and call it an achievement when I'm done, as if anything was accomplished except wasting your time to comment on a made-up word that means no more than it used to before it existed.

We may be deeply ignorant but we have no trouble at all defining gravity in a consistent and coherent enough way for that definition to be applicable more or less universally. We have yet to see a definition of the force that is applicable in any way other than a purely subjective one and not even a useful one as such, as it never fails to turn out.
The Force is not like gravity. It is nothing like gravity.

Idk, I don't think gravity makes for a decent comparison to the force, I can't taste gravity. On the other hand, there are bars, nightclubs in New York City, New Orleans, Paris and Amsterdam where a particular type of clientele congregate. Their DJ's play specific types of music that move their audience to produce an energy. Much of these crowds are populated with individuals experienced in energy manipulation, they'll draw in and gather the energy created from the crowd, cycle it through their body's while running it through specific filters, and force it back out into the crowd, over and over again, heightening the overall experience. I can honestly say the drug ecstasy doesn't come close to it, It is something that simply must be experienced first hand...

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson

I leave this here for discussion. Could this potentially be science discovering what we understand as the force?