The Twelve Jedi Reflections are each assigned a month long period of intro- and outro-spection on ideals, values or issues which are not otherwise typically presented in either the training or other parts of a Jedi’s doctrine. There is a reason each term in the reflection is not presented as a perfect opposite to its pair. Not least does this allow for a more numerous number of terms we can include in the twelve member list, but the intention was more to broaden the scope of one’s reflection on any particular dichotomy for rarely are things so black and white.
But many of us yearn for a sense of self-assured knowledge of when things are unjust or immoral, we want to know when something happens if this is a good something or a bad something. We want to know that our reactions to this something are appropriate, when someone does something wrong we want to be assured that they are punished accordingly.
We want to make sure we get things right.
Of luck for this topic there has been the recent scandalous release of hacked personal data from the Ashley Madison website. For those who don’t know Ashley Madison is a website one can join to organise the having of an affair with another. This might make many of you upset at the thought and maybe you think it is wrong that someone would ever conceive of doing such a thing. Indeed many have agreed with you, I saw one person post about this on Facebook saying that those people (who’s data was released) deserved to get found out by their partners. Maybe they’re right to lambast them.
But is this issue as clear cut as it seems? I doubt it. Sure these people cheated on their spouses and this is certainly dishonest of them, but then a very large minority of people will cheat on their spouses so maybe this is almost an expectation (if not an admitted one)? Maybe you still feel justified that these people got found out, but perhaps it is sometimes better to live the lie? After all one may have cheated only once and felt disastrous about it and never done it again, maybe that realisation helped them to appreciate what they had in their partner even more?
Was what the hackers did the Right thing to do? There have certainly been a number of couples who have begun divorce proceedings, is the breaking up of one’s home-life a desirable result of their Right action? Did you know there have been suicides over this release of information? And what of those of the LGBTQ community who conceal their sexual identities and have now not only been outed as an adulterer but had their sexuality exposed too? What harm will this now cause in their social, familial and work lives?
People aren’t perfect, but what these hackers did was take the choice of revealing these secrets away from the people who kept them. Keeping such secrets in the first place may not have been the Right thing to do, but as the saying goes two Wrongs do not make a Right.
And how do you make a Right? The other day I was tuning my violin and thought the process by which I settled on the right note was a rather appropriate metaphor. There is a note, the Right note, which I am trying to achieve and each pass of the bow provides me with information on how tight to make the strings, and with each tightening and each pass the note (hopefully but not always) gets closer to the desired effect. Each alteration is small, too much and the point one is aiming for will be missed, or worse the entire string will snap.
Getting things right is much the same. If one blunders around without much care or tact then the goal one is aiming for can easily elude us, better to be supple and sympathetic to the numerous variables in a given situation. These allow us to adjust our reasons and responses, to better suit the uniqueness of the situation itself.
