Moves like Jedi

In college, students are persuaded to take a course based on what will ensure their future (read: financial security) even if it’s not the path they choose to take. But take a tip from Yoda: What’s fear, really, but another challenge?

The Phantom Menace isn’t exactly my favorite Star Wars episode, but when it was re-released in cinemas, Feb. 9, I nonetheless sped to the nearest theater and battled for a seat. I was ecstatic to see the famous Mos Espa pod race in 3D, a teenage Natalie Portman and her lookalike (a then-unknown Keira Knightly who plays Amidala’s decoy), and the Jedi Council scene where Yoda utters one of his most potent sayings.

“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.” I was in my early teens when I first heard this and I realized that the opposing forces of light and darkness — not merely pertaining to the Jedi and Sith, but the powers constantly wrestling within us and in the world around us are essentially love, and the other is not really hate, but fear.

Fear is all around us. It can take us away from ourselves and cause us to make unconscious decisions. Whether we’re aware of it or not, we’re frequently making choices out of fear. Big companies use it as a tool to make us patronize their goods. Switch on the TV and you’ll see how many advertisements feature creepy-looking animations of bacteria to make us shudder and buy their germ-killing products. If you really think about it, not only is this depiction of the world as “dirty” and bacteria as “yucky” an act of fear-mongering, it’s also false advertising because the truth is, only less than one percent of all bacteria can cause disease while most bacteria in our surroundings and those living in our bodies are neutral or beneficial.

More than germs, daunting monsters of our time include violence, crimes that increase in number and variety, abusive relationships, the financial crisis, loss (everything is insured now, from homes to cars, to body parts), sickness, pain, death, terrorism, natural, man-made and technological disasters, fear of making mistakes, fear of aging, and fear of fear itself. Airports, once recognized as the crossroads of the world, are now among the foremost abodes of fear. So are schools where young kids are pushed to learn advanced academics and are pressured to get high grades after grueling exams. Then in college, students are persuaded to take a course based on what will “ensure their future” (mere financial “security,” that is) even if it’s not the path they choose to take. And what usually happens when you’re made to do something just because it’s what’s deemed “safe” and your heart is not really into it? It leads to anger, then anger leads to hate, and then — well, go figure. What’s more is that nowadays, learning is reduced to mere numbers on a report card, and life to mere survival.

At the Jedi Council meeting, young Anakin Skywalker is questioned about his fears. Anakin: “What’s that got to do with anything?” Yoda: “Everything.” Lucasfilm Ltd.

So we’ve pretty much identified the adversary and we’ve recognized its existence. How do we deal with it, then? It’s our choice. We can retreat using drugs or alcohol, push the eject button and hide behind our valiant video game avatars, Sims alter egos and seemingly perfect Facebook profiles, and perhaps even opt to live in a dream where we battle fear with our light sabers and delude ourselves into getting rid of it completely. Or, we could embrace it. Instead of saying, “How do we get rid of fear?” perhaps we should challenge ourselves and aspire to develop the courage to work with it, rather than having it work against us. Instead of letting it take us away from ourselves and put us to “sleep,” why not use it to shake ourselves awake and make us consciously ask questions in order to distinguish objective truths from mere propaganda? If we look at it this way, we can view fear as essential to our existence, just as bad bacteria is vital to our health.

When my brother and I went skydiving a few years ago, we noticed that others who did it weren’t daredevils at all. Some actually confessed to being scared of heights and claimed they wanted to do it because they were afraid — to overcome their fear. Similarly, fear of deep water was what challenged me to go scuba diving. Sure, it was also that same fear that almost got me to quit, but to my surprise, it was also what stimulated me to want to develop that driving force that helped me rise above it and keep going.

Going back to Yoda’s saying, indeed fear is the path to the dark side — but only if we let it overcome us. Otherwise, fear can be our teacher and friend — in the sense that we can use it to keep us on our toes and to develop new capacities and strengths.