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Star Wars
ZenLunatic
Veteran
OK, show of hands, who here got one of their first buddhism lessons from Obi-Wan or Yoda :wavey:
There are quite a lot of similarities between the jedi way and the buddhist way!
There are quite a lot of similarities between the jedi way and the buddhist way!
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My fave quotation comes from the bit where Luke Skywalker's ship is in a swamp, and Yoda lifts it out for him....
L. S. "I don't believe it!!"
Yoda: "That is why you fail!"
How true.... how very, very true.....!
:banghead:
However, I dislike how some movies really play upon the Christian focus on duality (good vs. evil). Sometimes it's more of a Taoist duality, and I can stand that. But this with good guys in white vs. thoroughly evil guys in black - come on! Oh no, the Dark Side! At least they in Star Wars they did attempt to show the personal changes Anakin underwent with some continuity and how both sides could see themselves as in the right. Kudos for that.
That said:
Oh so cute Yoda is!!!!
Ep 2: discussion between anakin and padme about attachment and love
Ep 3: Fear leads to self destruction
Ep 4: let go of your perceptions. Don't be fooled by your senses
Ep 5: EVERYTHING yoda says during luke's initial training.
Ep 6: Vader's redemption
<-- biggest star wars nerd ever
Someone posted that at least he no longer sounds like fozzie bear....
I commented....
"As long as he doesn't start sounding like Miss Piggy....
"Pretentious? Moi? Haaaaaaah-yah!"
*flings hair back off shoulders after flooring a Storm-trooper with a deadly left hook*!! "
The Matrix (at least the first one, I haven't seen the other two yet) is wrought with Buddhist and Post-modernist thought. In the beginning, when the people come to Neo's to get something presumably illegal, he gets it out of a hollowed out book. That book was written by one of the forefront thinkers of the postmodern movement, Jean Baudrillard. The book, which should have been a dead give away to what 'the matrix' was, is "Simulation and Simulacra".
I also love the little shaved head kid at the oracle's house who tells Neo that it's not really the spoon that bends, as there is no spoon. Rather, it is your mind that bends!
It reminds me of my favorite quote from Baudrillard, and one I use as a signature on other boards:
"the simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none."
" To dissimulate is to pretend; in pretending, one imitates something real and thus affirms it: one "leaves the principle of reality intact." To simulate, on the other hand, is "to feign to have what one doesn't have." This destroys any connection to reality. "
" It is by putting an arbitrary stop to this revolving causality that a principle of political reality can be saved. It is by the simulation of a conventional, restricted perspective field, where the premises and consequences of any act or event are calculable, that a political credibility can be maintained (including, of course, "objective" analysis, struggle, etc.) But if the entire cycle of any act or event is envisaged in a system where linear continuity and dialectical polarity no longer exist, in a field unhinged by simulation, then all determination evaporates, every act terminates at the end of the cycle having benefited everyone and been scattered in all directions. "