Kyrins Jedi Initiate Training Journal

Lesson 8 – Essay 7 – Jediism Essays

A Healthy Body and Mind
Many people believe that a healthy body breeds a healthy mind. How much importance do you place on keeping your body, as well as your mind, in shape? Does one take precedence over the other? How do you think keeping your body in shape might help you on your Jedi path?



I place a great deal of importance in the balance of all things in my life and thus I find an equal importance in the balance of keeping not only a healthy mind and body but spirit as well. Of course the question then rises as to what exactly one means by keeping these things “in shape”.

For the body I think this question can be easily answered. Being in shape when it comes to the body equates to being healthy. Healthy is something that can be measured and quantified by a doctor. Keeping the body healthy takes a multifaceted approach. Exercise, Diet and abstinence of abuse are all aspects of keeping the body healthy. The body is a machine and it needs to be “run” through exercise which lowers blood pressure, decreases cholesterol, reduces fat, adds muscle and improves cardiovascular function. The body also needs the correct fuel in the foods we eat to accomplish these things. And finally we should not abuse the body; “over revving it” so to speak by smoking, over eating or drinking. When done correctly all these things keep the body running smoothly and free of gunk. It gives us the energy and stamina we need to complete any task in life we decide to undertake.

When it comes to the mind this question gets a bit trickier. What is a healthy mind? How do you make a mind healthy? Some might say that continual learning makes a healthy mind while others might say that it is the emotional state one is in that makes a healthy mind. This also leaves us with the question of mind body association. Is the mind and body one thing or is the mind separate from the body? Does one affect the other? These are questions that have tormented philosophers for centuries since René Descartes suggested that mind was separate from the body and the pineal gland of the brain was the place where mind interacted with body.

Regardless of one’s view on the issue of mind body, we can agree that in some aspect our cognitive, perceptual and emotional faculties - our sense of self - are nestled in some capacity within the neurons of our brains. We also know that exercise not only causes changes in the body but also reduces stress, anxiety and depression and allows us to maintain focus and to think clearly. So if exercise can have lasting effects on the mind, then exercise must also affect the brain.

It stands to reason that these physical and psychological states give rise to a strong and healthy spirit. When we feel good physically and emotionally we have a higher confidence and that is something we desire. It drives our will to keep those things. The spirit is our source of will. It is what drives us to do more and be more and push ourselves further. This feeds back into the cycle of self-improvement; exercise, eating well, studying harder, making that effort to change some aspect of self. It is this interconnected internal cycle that drives the rhythm of our lives. If one aspect fails to perform then the machine breaks down and does not function to maximum capacity.

When enacted correctly, this process allows us to evolve as individuals. To grow and to learn and to experience the way we were meant to in a never ending spiral upward. So yes keeping a healthy body through exercise is very important and it is a critical part in keeping a healthy mind as well as a healthy spirit. No one aspect takes precedence over another as they are all equally as important.

Lesson 8 – Essay 9 – Jediism Essays

Letting Go of the Past
We teach that it is important for a Jedi to let go of the past and to not dwell on it. We need to remember that things gone by can no longer be changed. What do you think this means? How and where does this teaching tie into acceptance, acknowledgement and forgiveness? Why do you think this might be important for a Jedi?



We can never let go of the past. It is an integral part of us. The pain and joy, triumphs and defeats, loss and attainment of our past are all tools that we use to define who we are. It is in the way we use these tools that we shape our own present and future. We have the choice every day to take these tools and use them to build something dark and brooding or angry and resentful or we can use them to build something that is strong and steadfast, balanced and self-reflective. It is not the shedding or letting go of our past that we need to focus on but rather the constructive utilization and affirmative incorporation of our past that we should strive for.

It’s about whether we ignore our past or face it. In this process we can either use it to hone us or allow pain and fear to define us. Will we accept our past for what it is, learn from it and integrate it or will we fight it and deny it? Will we allow it to change us for the better or will we allow it to haunt us through fear or anger or resentment? It’s ok to feel these darker emotions but we also must understand that we cannot just let them continue on forever or bury them and ignore them. Over time we need to face each one and process it. Convert it to something constructive and then incorporate that as a part of our character and experience and wisdom.

This goes for positive past experiences as well; those things in our lives that we have done well or found great joy or pleasure in. We can let these things begin to rule our lives. We need to take away a certain amount of humility in all things we do. We can’t let these things turn into hubris, overconfidence or arrogance. As soon as we do this, life has a funny way of slapping our hand. In all things we should find the balance. There is something to be taken away and learned for any negative experience and there is something to be left behind for any positive experience.

It is about knowing the past and embracing it and being accepting of what has come before. We need to understand that everything in our lives is there for a reason; acknowledging that fact and processing that information. Then forgiving where necessary or maintaining an attitude of self-effacement where it is required, but never forgetting. Then taking those things and using them to build a better “you” in every aspect of your life. This is the meaning of the spiral of life.

Everything repeats in this universe, the orbits of the planets, the seasons in a year, the cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth – all cycle endlessly. What we must do in this cycle is strive to move ever upwards and not get stuck in the groove of an endlessly repeating rut. We do this as a function of time. We experience things linearly so that we can process events and use them to spiral upward in a cycle of growth. Failing to recognize this and ignoring our past or not processing the past events in our lives or letting those events sent us spiraling downward into a pit of self-pity or resentment, fear or anger dooms us to the rut.

ADVANCED INITIATE PROGRAM

Lesson One
For your first lesson, please post in your IP journal and take your time to really think about it:
Please tell me why you want to be a knight?
What is it you want out of an apprenticeship?
How will they help you in your life?



Why do I want to be a Jedi Knight?

A lot of times people covet this title or that title but they don't want to do the work required to get that title. Instead they seek out some path of least resistance and pay some money to someone that claims the authority to bestow that title and suddenly they are a High Priest or some other such title that they flaunt around and say “look at me” I’m such and such. They consider it some fashion statement or badge of importance they can use to impress others but they really have no idea what it actually means to be what it is they are claiming to be.

For me the work is the reward, not the title. Our spiritual journey in search of even a glimpse of some form of universal enlightenment in the pursuit of self-knowledge never ends. It’s a grueling, all-consuming pursuit of seeking out the holes and misconceptions in our spiritual selves. It is a never ending task of filling in those holes in our own personal belief system or digging up previous holes and refilling them with new stuff. Any titles that are earned along the way are just a consequence of that work, not the focus of it.

I pursue knowledge and focus and wisdom. I do not pursue titles. I crave the experience of doing the work necessary to carve out just a tiny bit more understanding into what it means to be a part of this vast incomprehensible universe, to experience that connection with all things, to understand what it is to be a part of something so much greater than I can even begin to fathom. I want to live life, try everything, never be afraid to be vulnerable or open but always be strong enough to be there for others when they reach out in pain or need.

I want to share this journey with others. I want to have that deep, meaningful connection that can only be felt between master and apprentice. I want to learn things I never knew existed and delve deeper into the mysteries of life than I ever thought possible. I want to take such joy and delight in this process that nothing but pure ecstasy is the result. That is not to say that I think this journey is only about the delights of life. I don’t expect it to be nor would I find any value in it if it was. For me, to share in the joys OR the sorrows of life hold no distinction to me. It is in the sharing alone that I find value. I want the experience of surmounting this hard work. That is what I want out of apprenticeship.

I want to take these experiences and this knowledge and this wisdom that is imparted to me and share it with others that come after me. If we can’t pass these things on to our up and coming generations the journey becomes meaningless. It is the dance of the perfect spiral of life – inception, birth, life, death and rebirth. This is what is significant. That spiral is for all, not any one individual. It is the accumulation of the collective consciousness that is the soul of the universe and if we can’t share our selves with that we are doomed to hopelessness.

If you want to call me a Jedi Knight because of these things, then so be it. A title is just a name that we assign to identify a particular aspect of our lives. In the end the title is inconsequential. It is the thing it represents that is important. A desire and an awareness… a deep reverence for the comradeship I feel for my brothers and sisters in this life’s journey, my kindred spirits. The energy of the journey and our emotional connection to the lives we encounter are the focus. The title is just a mundane working of the corporeal. It is simply a way to distinguish one thing from another that in the end is really just one thing – meaningful, passionate, empathetic connection, a place where the lines of individuality no longer hold any meaning.

ADVANCED INITIATE PROGRAM

Lesson Three
Pick a chapter from the power of now.
What chapter did you choose?
What was it about?
Why did you choose it and what did you learn that you can use in your life?



I picked the introduction and chapter one from the book “The Power of Now”. In the opening of Eckhart Tolle’s book “The Power of Now” He speaks about a transformation he went through at age 29 which revealed to him many great truths about the nature of our existence. One of the first things he speaks about is the idea that all religions are actually forms of one great spiritual teaching. But they have become so overlaid with extraneous matter that their spiritual essence has become almost completely obscured so their deeper meaning is no longer recognized and their transformative power is lost. He claims that his book is a restatement of that one timeless spiritual teaching. I think I would beg to differ. If this deep underlying single teaching existed then why has there always been and continues to be so much inter-religious violence in the world? Why have we as a species failed to come to any sort of consensus on this “truth”?

He goes on to speak further that this incident showed him that we are made up of two separate entities. The first being “Mind” and the second he calls “Being”. He states that at the core of our essence we are all one, we are “Being”. Being is Deity and Deity is everything. “Mind” on the other hand, is something separate from “Being”. Mind is a discretely possessing entity of incessant “thinking” that gives us a sense of individuality. It is this screen of thought that gives us the illusion of separateness which we interpret as “Self”. It separates us from “Being”.

This seems nothing less than a way of restating the Christian view of religious duality - good vs evil contained within oneself. It depicts the idea that we need to shed or deny or shun the evil in favor of the good. Tolle states at one point that we do not use our minds, instead our minds use or control us. It seems he is implying some sort of demonic possession. We are victims of the mind demon! This seems a ridiculous concept. It is through mind that I interact with my environment and connect with others. It is how I protect myself and sustain myself. It is not an evil possessing entity. It is that element of myself that enables me to be aware of the world, to have experiences, to feel and to be conscious.

Tolle goes on to say that Mind includes emotion. Emotion arises at the place where mind and body meet. He states that all emotions are modifications of one primordial undifferentiated emotion that has its origin in the loss of awareness of who you are beyond form. This brings a sense of fear and a deep feeling of abandonment and incompleteness or pain. The mind fights to remove this pain which is the reason for its incessant activity. But the best the mind can ever do is to cover it for a bit because mind is an intrinsic part of the problem. So you will never be free of this pain until you cease to derive your sense of self from identification with “Mind”.

Tolle speaks about having the experience of freeing himself from Mind. He states that he became an observer of Mind. What seems to have taken place is he simply blocked off his emotion and then he spent 2 years wandering park benches in a seemingly “self-imposed” bliss. He was completely disconnected not only from what he calls ‘Mind” but also from everyone and everything else around him. In effect he demonized his emotions and then disconnected from them which in turn disconnected him from everything else in reality!

Tolle states that emotions are subject to duality and thus have opposites. For example pleasure is just part of the alternating cycle of pain/pleasure. Humans have been in the grip of pain since they fell from the state of grace and entered the realm of time and “Mind” and lost awareness of “Being”. But Tolle never defines what this “state of Grace” is or how we could have fallen from it? Is he implying we were we cast out or Eden or otherwise separated from ‘Being’ as some sort of judgment or punishment? This seems another thinly veiled reference to the original sin of Christianity. He goes on to say that because of this event we as humans start to perceive ourselves as meaningless fragments in an alien universe unconnected to the source or to each other. Pain arises because of this. Our desires, our cravings are the “Mind” seeking salvation or fulfillment in external things and in the future as a substitute for the joy of experiencing “Being”. As long as we are “Mind” we become those cravings, needs, wants and attachments. We spend our time searching for happiness in external things while never realizing true joy is derived from within.

I don’t agree with this at all. It is through emotion, through pain… and joy that we find connection, not in spite of it. We need to embrace our emotional selves. It is these tools that give us our connection in this corporeal realm where we are forced to experience reality as a conglomeration of individual components. We can unite as human beings and feel a sense of connection to all life, everything in existence for that matter, through these mechanisms. We use emotion to express empathy and compassion while gaining great satisfaction in the process. Tolle seems to be saying that we were cast out of “the whole” and this caused pain and our goal is to abandon this reality and this realities devil in “Mind” and return to “Being”.

Tolle Goes on to state that in order to free ourselves from the possession of ‘Mind” we need to begin to realize that we are not this entity. We are not the thinker. When we realize this we can begin to observe this entity. We start watching the thinker and this causes a higher level of consciousness to become activated. In this process you come to the realization there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought. By watching the thinker we listen to our inner dialogue with objectivity, and impartially never judging or taking it seriously. When you do this the thought becomes powerless over you and subsides.

Once again, I think Tolle got it backwards. In this reality in which we exist we are not by any means “one” except in the sense that we are from the same stardust, formed from the same elements and evolved from the same beginnings of life from the same ocean on the same planet that revolves around a single sun. I’m an individual in the idea that my consciousness is unique in the universe and it was created at the moment of my conception and will cease to exist at the moment of my demise. That energy that was me will go into a million other forms of matter for a million other purposes up to and possibly including new consciousness. However “I” as an individual will never exist again.

Just as I am one in this sense I am also an individual “form” or manifestation of a greater whole. For me I call this Goddess or Force. This is the vast realm of intelligence Tolle speaks of. In the end everything is just energy. Energy is just another term for Goddess or Force or Tolle’s “Being”. We are both individuals and an individual form of the whole. We are the universes will to experience itself. It’s this duality of our existence that is the gift of this will and no part of it should be denied or sectioned off. In fact it is by design that we exist as we do and it is not something to “escape” from but something to embrace.

Tolle states that freeing ourselves from the possession of mind is the end of compulsive thinking. These dismissed thoughts begin to form gaps. Over time the gaps get bigger and bigger until a natural state of still oneness with “Being” emerges. As these gaps grow, pure states of being like Love, Joy and Peace emerge. These states of being are not emotions and have no opposite. They arise from beyond mind. You go into a state of “no-mind” a state of pure consciousness. This is enlightenment – a state of wholeness of being. Enlightenment is an end to suffering. We come to the understanding that it was not through the mind or thinking that the miracle of life on earth or your body was created and is being sustained. There is clearly an intelligence at work that is far greater than mind. How else can a cell contain enough instructional dna to fill 600,000 pages.

This last line is simply an assertion of ignorance. He can’t come up with a better explanation for the existence of the reality he perceives so he employs a God of the gaps explanation. Considering his earlier references to Christianity I can take this only one way. He is touting the idea of Intelligent Design. I don’t believe there exists a conscious entity somewhere within or without the universe that has created all that we see. Instead we are a manifestation of the unconscious will of the universe to experience what it is to be conscious. We are Goddess or The Force as is everything. There is no separate intelligence apart from that.

The problem I have with Tolle’s philosophy is the same issue I have with Buddhism in general. It advocates a disconnection from responsibility. Tolle refused to take responsibility for his emotional self and the result is a complete disconnection from reality. By design we are supposed to have extremely active minds. It is what has allowed us to gain survival advantage and to thrive as a species, to experience emotion and feel connection to one another. If we are to just “exist in the now” as Tolle states, and just be happy in each moment with who we are and the state of our existence, why should we ever be motivated to do anything productive or spend any effort to improve ourselves or our surroundings or help any others in any way? It seems this is the way Tolle lived for 2 years on a park bench. It does not bode well for our ability to protect or take care of ourselves, our planet or others in need.

The peace Tolle advocates seems to come from formlessness and a loss of individual identity by suppressing emotion and rational thought. I just can’t get behind this concept. It is just so much New Age meaningless Fluff. Instead I feel we are perfect in our imperfection. Our design in this realm is perfectly suited as the consciousness of Goddess (or the Force). We possess the perfect set of faculties to accomplish this and we should not deny any of them. We need to embrace these things and explore these things and utilize these things. Emotion, pain and pleasure are all to the benefit of the collective consciousness of Goddess or the Force, or whatever you want to call it. To deny those things is to deny our purpose. To deny those things is to deny the very thing that makes us human.