Posts Tagged ‘Star Wars’
Hatred
I watched the original Star Wars trilogy (i.e. episodes IV – VI) again recently (and wasted half an hour instead of going to bed last night watching lightsaber duels on YouTube), and am as usual seeing things in I didn’t see before. I used to watch it over and over some years back and it is still an exceptional series. Particularly, I like the Jedi: I believe I would make an excellent Jedi knight because I could follow the code:
- There is no emotion; there is peace.
- There is no ignorance; there is knowledge.
- There is no passion; there is serenity.
- There is no death; there is the Force.
The dark side of the force is defined by power surrounding darker emotions: “Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering” – Yoda. This has got me thinking about hatred. It is clearly incredibly powerful but really the Jedi are absolutely right: it can only be destructive. Is anyone truly evil, that they deserve to be hated? Given the fact that all we do is likely to be pre-determined by a chain of cause and effect, it has seemed to me for some time that we can’t call anyone truly evil, putting aside for a moment all notions of what good and evil actually mean and taking an intuitive stance. Can we really blame someone for doing something we might call evil, and if they do it enough, can we call them evil? We can, and we do, but firstly no-one is helped by this, and secondly it seems clear to me that any blame is merely attacking someone for being in the wrong place at the wrong time – or to be more specific, being at the end of the wrong chain of cause and effect.
Often though we use the term hate far more liberally than with this kind of severity. ‘Oh I hate it when that happens’ is often heard, from myself of course too. We’re just using language in a different way here. One thing however that I am regularly criticised for is how I have said for years that I hate my father. As I’ve posted about on here at least once before, we have not had a good relationship for many years. It seems to me that he is very unreasonable with demands made, and it seems to him that I am consistently rude and thus should change who I am in order to suit his standards of politeness. Of late, I really had thought that we’d been doing a lot better, and I hadn’t said it because I was trying not to jinx the situation, so to speak. However this was broken last night.
The row was the usual kind of thing: put simply, I had forgotten to empty the dishwashed as asked and was settled in bed. I apologised, said I would do it in the morning (I would have been happy to get up ten minutes earlier than usual), but because I believed that 10:20pm was not the time to be emptying it, I have been banned from his computer for Wednesday and Thursday evenings. This is a typical situation, but the real issue is how I then tried to mentally deal with it. Being human makes one so fickle in one’s opinions towards others! But yesterday, having watching Star Wars, I was ready for the inevitable burst of hatred. I tried to ‘let it wash over me’ as is described in books and considered the rational view described above. It worked, but of course the situation wasn’t changed. I still think my father is being unreasonable. But at least I’m no longer emotionally hung up on it.
This seems to me to be the core reason why we must be so careful about what is actually causing us to do something. So often we blow things out of proportion due to emotion and we must have others to keep a check on this. Of course, this post probably seems like a lot of common sense, but I’m just trying to point out that I’ve recognised myself doing something, and I intend to continue to recognise when I do things like this, as I’ve said before.