We're not a science fiction podcast, we're a spirituality podcast. So why is our latest episode all about Star Wars? There’s a moment early in the second act of A New Hope that will help me explain it. Luke Skywalker, eager but untrained, stands aboard the Millennium Falcon, holding his newly acquired lightsaber. A floating training drone hovers before him, shooting lasers at him. At first, he fights as anyone would—using his eyes, relying on his reflexes, thinking about his next move. And he gets stung by the drone—it's too fast and he's too unsure.
Then Obi-Wan Kenobi steps forward and places a helmet on Luke’s head, lowering the blast shield so that he can’t see. “This time, let go of your conscious self and act on instinct,” he instructs. Luke hesitates but obeys. Blind, forced to trust something beyond himself, he suddenly succeeds. The lightsaber moves like it's guided by an unseen hand, deflecting the bolts with ease.
“That's good,” says Obi-Wan with a hint of a smile. “You’ve taken your first step into a larger world.”
Beyond Self-Reliance
In every true initiation, there comes a moment when the initiate must abandon their desperate trust in themselves. If you're dangling off a cliff and you know nobody is coming to help you, you have to rely on yourself exclusively and desperately. If you're dangling off a cliff and you know that help is somewhere close at hand, you still have to rely on yourself, but not totally. An uninitiated person (like Han Solo) believes that he and he alone is in charge of his destiny. He has few friends and no cause beyond himself because he's still too independent to get too involved. Han is the archetype of the self-reliant person, the rogue who trusts in nothing but his own skill and firepower. To Han, the idea that there is a greater reality, an unseen order, a force that moves through all things, is absurd.
But Han is not being initiated (yet). Luke is. And initiation is only possible when we are willing to accept the reality of forces beyond our own understanding. Our old way of navigating the world—through sight, reason, calculation—is no longer sufficient. The world is bigger than we thought, and so we must reach beyond our own capacities and trust in something larger. For Luke, this “something” is the Force. But for us, it might be God, or spirit, or consciousness, or some hidden pattern woven through reality that we can sense but not fully understand. what we call it is far less important than the fact that we surrender to it, that we lower the blast shield down over our eyes, and reach out to feel that invisible force that other's might even laugh at—to discover that strength beyond self-reliance.
The Initiatory Power of Star Wars
Just as Star Wars is made up of stories about the initiation of its heroes, it also serves as an initiatory experience for its audience. Within many Star Wars narratives there is an invitation into deeper ways of seeing the world.
For many of us, Star Wars was a first exposure to ideas that had been buried by modern Western culture. The notion of the Force is an obvious example—a mystical, animating energy that flows through all things, much like chi in Taoism or prana in Hinduism. But it goes beyond that. Star Wars is filled with initiatory symbols and themes: the master-student relationship, the journey into the unknown, the death and rebirth of identity. Star Wars plants seeds. It allows our imaginations to begin to operate in a play space in which reality is deeper, stranger, and more interconnected than we were taught.
This is why I describe Star Wars as a “gateway drug” in our culture to spiritual or mystical thinking. It offers, through the language of science fiction, a vision of reality that feels both more ancient and more alive. It bypasses cultural resistance to these ideas by cloaking them in pop-culture fantasy, making them safe to consume and metabolize. And for some us, those seeds grow—they're still growing.
Your First Step into a Larger World
The world we live in encourages us to keep our eyes open at all times—to rely only on what we can see, measure, and verify. But the mystical path, like Luke’s training aboard the Falcon, teaches us something more: that there is a hidden dimension (or dimensions) to reality waiting to be let into your world. To see what is hidden we must stop seeing what is right in front of our faces, and step out of our own way.
To be initiated, we must let go of our desperate reliance on ourselves. We must put down our trusty blasters and pick up our hokey religions. This doesn't mean we abandon all reason or give up our agency. But we must recognize that there are forces beyond us, and that sometimes, the only way to move forward is to trust that they are real, that they active, and they are waiting to be let in.
Comments