To Be a Jedi
Though it is perhaps difficult to imagine, the Western individual is a relative newcomer on the world stage. In a broad sense, the ritual life in most primitive, archaic societies revolved around the continuous reenactment of certain mythological dramas that were often linked to the cosmogonic cycles of the universe itself. This is rather elaborately covered in Mircea Eliade's "The Myth of the Eternal Return," but the point here is that the old myths were not about self-aggrandizement, but rather about moving through a pattern of events already performed by both the gods as well as countless generations of mostly anonymous ancestors.
As a whole, Star Wars differs from them. While certain themes, motifs, and even mirror images do form the path the two generations of the Skywalker family walk, thus demonstrating that the galaxy does follow a largely cyclical pattern, the twin journeys of the trilogies do part company in rather dramatic ways.
Though the case can be overstated, in Asian cultures it is largely prefereable that the personal ego is all but eliminated. While it is true that in the Chhandogya Upanishad the Sanskrit "Tat tvam asi" translates "thou art that," the "thou" is not the personal you that has been defined by name and numbered on a social security card. In the Vedanta philosophy of the Indian Upanishads, there is only one true Self, and that Self plays the many from the inside out. There is only the One, but it manifests as this, our illusionary world of multiplicity. As the brilliant student of these philosophies, Alan Watts defined this as meaning that the Hindu view of religion is that this whole universe is really an elaborately staged game of cosmic hide-and-seek, in which God, the Self, pretends to be each of us.
While this idea is not without its charm, it needs to be stressed that the Self only pretends to be personal individuals. So in the context of both Hinduism as well as Buddhism, the personal ego is eradicated, and though it works on many levels, the supreme mystical experience is precisely that. The Hindus call this liberation "moksha," or union with the ultimate. While Buddhists dropped the Upanishadic terminology, the very meaning of "nirvana," the highest blissful state of experience, is to "blow out" or "extinguish." Peace from suffering is therefore won by the blowing out of all the fires of personal passion and desire.
Yet in strong contrast to
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