Meditating on Doctrine: One Pieace at a Time

Day 11: Focus is the art of pruning the irrelevant from your mind and pouring the best of your mind into what you are doing.

Focus is the key that opens the door to knowledge. It's useful in meditation, it's important in learning and accomplishing tasks. Given that focus is required for knowledge, and that application of knowledge is wisdom, it all stems from the ability to focus. Focus is a skill like any other, practicing that skill is vital to improving it, but it can be difficult to sustain. It is also the 13th maxim. I tend to feel that things that pop up repeatedly in the doctrine do so because they are important.

When I started this exercise I said that throughout the day I would try and stay mindful of that morning's meditation. So today is the day of the week that I clean my apartment and take care of general life business during the day. So for me that means I need to stay focused on being focused on these things, not let myself get distracted and idle.

Day 12: There is no emotion, there is peace.

Emotion is the product of our endocrine system. Many cartoons and video games have explored the joyless rationality that our brains would supposedly exhibit without the burden of the glands to instill emotion that can frequently override our logic, but we can hardly shut off our endocrine system and enter a real-life version of this. I doubt any Jedi has ever taken this to mean that that is what we should emulate. The greater emphasis is on peace. Our emotions can batter us like a storm, or if we allow them lead us far and away from where, and who, we want to be. The real issue is when our emotions come, take the time to find peace in a situation before we either say something we regret, or do something foolish.

This can be especially difficult when we are close to a situation, or when we have something invested. Some outcome we would like to see. There's no trick to situations like this. I'm actually going through this right now. There is no answer I can find. Without going into detail it isn't a situation I can readily distance myself from. If I try and get far enough away to be objective I tend to agree with my own stance, but I'm not even sure how genuine that is because it's my own situation.

This is taking a very different turn than expected. I feel angry at my current situation, but I'm realizing that I can't go on and on about it without giving any details. So in this situation, I just need to accept what's been chosen, and allow the Force to work as it will. I hope the worst does not come to pass. That's as close as I'll get to peace.

Day 13: There is no ignorance, there is knowledge.

I see this line comparing knowledge to heat, or light in physics. Hot and cold, light and dark, these are qualitative, and dependent on biology to create context for. Really both just represent the absence or presence of energy. The hotter the ambient temperature, the more energetically the air molecules are colliding with our skin. The brighter something is, the higher the saturation of photons coming from it. Darkness and cold are simply the absence of energy, or the absence of photons. Knowledge is the same way. Ignorance is like the cold, or the darkness. It isn't a force or an energy of its own, it is simply the absence of knowledge.

Day 14: There is no passion, there is serenity.

There is a reason that two versions of the code are given side by side, passion, yet serenity. I see this as a simultaneous call to serenity during those moments in our lives when we're feeling reactionary, and a call to balance. When something stirs our passions the impulse is to pursue it. In many cases this would be good, but it's important to do it while balancing the other parts of your life, not to the exclusion of all else. In terms of events that could lead to crimes of passion it is better to forgive, no matter how difficult, and go about your way. Like in the over-recited Christian prayer, "give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change."

Day 15 (sort of, it's been more than that but this is the 15th meditation): There is no Chaos, there is harmony.

I immediately think of the quote attributed to Morticia Addams that is floating around the internet, "Chaos is a matter of perspective, what is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly." What seems like chaos is really just the natural ebb and flow of the Force. The Force is never static. It's constantly moving, changing forms in the way creatures live, thrive, and die. The deer who is one day vibrant, with his powerful crown of antlers declaring his status and power is laid low by the hunter. Thus the Force, in the form of the deer's vitality is passed on to the predator, who dies and passes it to the scavengers and decomposers. All this could be perceived as chaos, but there is a balance to it all. And more things are interconnected than humans typically realize. A great example of this is the wolves that were reintroduced into Yellowstone. I think I may have gone on about this in my initiate journal one time. As the wolf population thrived, the rivers stablized. This carnivore, this predator altered the very landscape, something park authorities had been struggling to contain, because of the unchecked deer and other grazers, the wolves solved by their mere presence. At first glance they might have sown chaos among the prey animals, but they ultimately helped harmonize the landscape. So many things are interconnected in ways that we cannot see. Looking at bits and pieces it looks like a great swallowing chaos. Terrible and tremendous, and to contemplate it and experience it, is to feel insignificant in its presence. But we are part of this great interconnected web. We are each of us a single note in a symphony, and playing our part looks chaotic. But when we look at our lives against the cosmic tapestry, our one strange, chaotic melody fits seamlessly into the harmony of it all. I think when we can manage to glimpse that, we are moving in tune with the Force in the most powerful fashion.

Day 16: There is no death, there is the Force.

This line serves two purposes. First it brings to mind for me the law of conservation. The physical law stating that energy and matter cannot be created or destroyed, they can only change forms. This is true of the electrons flowing through our bodies, keeping our heart pumping, our diaphragm pumping, moving my fingers around these keys to type this. When my body dies, that vitality, that energy that makes this form move will not simply vanish. It will only change form. Second it teaches us not to fear death. The person who cloisters themselves behind stone walls, never venturing out, never having an adventure for fear of death, never truly lives. The stories about the Knights Templar during the crusades say that they fought like they didn't fear death. That this is part of what made them so fearsome. Living the life of a Jedi is not done on the temple website. It's out there in the world. And as we carry our message of love and peace to the people out there, we will be much less effective as instruments of peace, if we never take chances for fear of death.