Finding Wisdom in Anakin Skywalker
The first of the Cinema playlist series where I go into depths of Anakin's psyche, extracting wisdom from all good traits and flaws and summarising how we can apply it to ourselves.
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I was thinking about this video today and the importance of frameworks.
I am a theist; I have a dear friend who is agnostic. Our friendship isn’t affected by this because he is a lovely person and we share very similar values. Even if mine are rooted in a sort of spiritual soil, we can usually find a common denominator which allows us to explore concepts and ideas together. We both happened to lose our fathers within a couple years of each other...and death—death is different. There’s no common denominator. It dawned on me when he was going through his grieving process that I couldn’t comfort him in the way I would comfort someone who believed in an eternal soul. What was for me a change in a relationship was for him an exercise in bereavement. His dad was here and now he’s gone. A framework that ends at death views life very differently than someone whose framework extends beyond it. So while I have had to reframe my relationship with my father since his passing, I still think of it in an active sense. I pray for him, I implore him for guidance and ask for his intercession, and I believe that the essence of who he was continues to exist in an even purer form, without the earthly limitations that characterized his material life. I didn’t grieve my father’s loss in the same way others grieve the loss of a parent. I know my father was prepared spiritually for what came next. He spent his entire life acquiring virtues in preparation for an endless journey of the soul. He didn’t fear death; he embraced it. He spent months working on his will and testament, which was 5% will and 95% testament. It was more a mission statement than anything else: “Here is what I believe and this is what I want to do with my eternal life. The nature of my work may change but it is not done.”
If we view Anakin’s world on its own terms, he found himself in a very similar situation. He was consumed by a sense of grief and loss from the deaths of his mother and spiritual father, and the fear of losing his wife. He couldn’t see beyond his physical separation from them. It resulted in a sort of self-centeredness that belied his selfless nature as a child. Their loss was his loss. But in that universe, a parallel reality existed: those who had passed on remained ever-present. In fact, their lifeforce became more potent than it was when they were alive. Obi-Wan and Yoda continued to train and guide Luke—and if I remember the newer episodes correctly, even continued to influence worldly events through the power of their relationship with the Force. Those who had passed on were never truly gone, and the understanding of that continuity allowed the living to lead very different corporeal lives. Anakin instead leaned into his bereavement and lost sight of himself in the process.
I find the following quotes to be very appropriate to the topic:
“The conception of annihilation is a factor in human degradation, a cause of human debasement and lowliness, a source of human fear and abjection. It has been conducive to the dispersion and weakening of human thought, whereas the realization of existence and continuity has upraised man to sublimity of ideals, established the foundations of human progress and stimulated the development of heavenly virtues; therefore, it behooves man to abandon thoughts of nonexistence and death, which are absolutely imaginary, and see himself ever-living, everlasting in the divine purpose of his creation. He must turn away from ideas which degrade the human soul so that day by day and hour by hour he may advance upward and higher to spiritual perception of the continuity of the human reality. If he dwells upon the thought of nonexistence, he will become utterly incompetent; with weakened willpower his ambition for progress will be lessened and the acquisition of human virtues will cease.”
~ ‘Abdu’l-Bahá
"[M]an must ever remember the earth plane is a workshop, not an art gallery for the exhibits of powers. This is not the plane of perfection, but earth is the crucible for refining and moulding character."
~ ‘Abdu’l-Bahá