George Lucas: The interspiritual force



(Author:  Jeff Keyzer)

When George Lucas, a self-avowed “Buddhist Methodist,”

refers to “the Force” - what does he really mean?

Adherents.com reports that Lucas said this about the Force:

I wanted a concept of religion based on the premise that

there is a God and there is good and evil.  I began to distill the essence of all religions into what I thought was a basic idea common to all religions and common to primitive thinking.

According to Adherents.com, the Force wasn’t always that

profound.  In earlier drafts of the film’s dialog, it was simply

a catch-phrase that characters used to wish one another luck.

That, however, was before Lucas began “groking” such books as Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces.  After that, the Force began to evolve as exponentially as Lucas did.

Now Luke Skywalker was beginning to say things like this:  In another time, long before the Empire…  a holy man called the Skywalker became aware of a powerful energy field which he believed influenced the destiny of all living things.  A bit of a leap from Lucas’ “strongly Methodist” upbringing…

Another growing influence on Lucas was Gary Kurtz.  Kurtz, who first collaborated with Lucas on American Graffiti and then again with Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, was a Mormon with a wide background in comparative religion.  Wikipedia reports that “many of the more mystical and spiritual elements of Star Wars were influenced by Kurtz.”  Adherents.com quotes Kurtz as saying:  I saw Ben Kenobi as a shaman, really, rather than a character tied to any conventional religious background.

In modern-day terminology, the Force might be described as “interspiritual.”  “Interspirituality” is a word coined by the lay monk Brother Wayne Teasdale.  In his book The Mystic Heart, Teasdale claims that everyone is a mystic, and that truth is “true no matter what or where or how it is expressed.”

Resources

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lucas

http://www.adherents.com/people/pl/George_Lucas.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kurtz

http://www.topia.net/interspirituality.html

http://www.stillnessspeaks.com/wayne_teasdale_non-duality_interspi/

Copyright May 14, 2011 by Linda Van Slyke   All Rights Reserved