Marek McGann
What is it like to be a Jedi? As an order of monastic knights, spiritual and ascetic, you might imagine their experience of the galaxy around them to be mystical, ethereal, almost abstract. It's clear that their world is very different from our own, that their awareness of the universe is more encompassing, richer. The Jedi call that other, mystical aspect of reality they perceive the Force.
Jedi feel the Force, as if it were tangible. It's not some vaporous, ghostly thing – it surrounds, penetrates, and binds us. Jedi speak about the Force akin to how a fish might talk about the ocean. Everything a Jedi does is immersed in the flow of the Force's eddies and currents. Its power is viscerally felt. When Alderaan is destroyed, Obi-Wan Kenobi puts his hand to his chest and stumbles, feeling faint and barely able to remain standing. From light-years distant, the sense of millions of voices crying out in terror and being suddenly silenced is something that literally takes the veteran Jedi's breath away. Just trying to lift his X-wing out of the swamp exhausts Luke Skywalker, leaving him panting for air, while even Yoda heaves a sigh of effort once he's done the job. For a group of spiritual beings, the Jedi are a very physical bunch.
This doesn't come as much of a surprise, however, if you consider the ideas of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961).1 Merleau-Ponty was interested in consciousness, what the raw form of our experience tells us about ourselves and about reality. Phenomenology involves paying attention to what we're aware of in a way that avoids forcing it into conceptual boxes or making prior assumptions about it. In his phenomenological philosophy, Merleau-Ponty made a few key observations, and primary amongst them is that, as living beings, we always perceive the world around us through our bodies, from an “embodied” perspective.
There's just no getting away from the fact that we're made of meat, blood, and bone. If you're alive, you have a body that plays a crucial role in all your perceptions and everything you do. Some see the inherently bodily form of our experience as a challenge to understanding the mind, worrying about how we might reconcile the ideas of mind and body.2 For Merleau-Ponty, it's a mistake to separate the two in the first place.
The Jedi don't make that mistake. When introducing someone to new ways of experiencing the universe around them, making them more aware of and sensitive to the Force, they don't try to avoid dealing with the body, or stop the person from being aware of the brute realities of being alive. In fact, Jedi training tends to reinforce a student's awareness of their own body and that they're a living being. Jedi younglings and padawans must put their body to new uses, perform new tasks, and learn new skills in physical activities that have profound effects on the way they see the world around them.
Obi-Wan gives Luke his first lesson in interacting with the Force through a challenging physical problem – using a lightsaber to block energy bolts from a hovering seeker remote. The challenge involves wielding a new tool, being acutely aware of where his body is and its relationship to the remote, and reacting both quickly and accurately to a strike. The motivation to do the task properly is as down-to-earth and physical as it gets – avoid being shot. If Luke is to succeed, he must develop a new kind of awareness, not through a mystical abstraction, but through the experience of his own body and its place in what's happening, in the flow of events in the world.
Later, Yoda takes Luke through a grueling series of activities: running an obstacle course, along with acrobatic challenges such as handstands, leaps, and somersaults. These aren't the kind of things you'd imagine would help a person become more aware of an ethereal Force. Such physical efforts push the young trainee to his limits, but they're much more than just exercise. They force Luke to become more conscious of his body, his own living being, and how he copes with the demands of what he's doing, thus unlocking new ways of experiencing and engaging with the world around him.
The Jedi figured all of this out a long time ago. Lacking the Force to guide us, it took us a bit longer. Merleau-Ponty and more recent thinkers, such as the biologist and philosopher Francisco Varela and his colleagues Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, have led us to acknowledge the nagging fact that we are always embodied.3 They explore the importance of the body and its actions, noting that when we perceive a thing, it's always as part of something we're doing. This runs against our usual intuitions. It would be normal to think that, first, we see what's going on around us. We aren't acting yet, just taking in information. Once our minds understand what's happening in the world, we make a decision about what to do next. Finally, once we've decided what to do, our brain sends the right signals to the body and we take appropriate action.4 Essentially, before thinking starts, perceiving has to finish. Before action starts, thinking has to be complete.
This breakdown of the process makes sense, and it keeps the edges of different concepts – perception, cognition, action – clean and unblurred. But this is not the point of view you're looking for. The Jedi know better. What the Jedi say more than anything else about the Force is that it flows. Deliberate, intellectual thought might have some of that stop-start character – first seeing, then thinking, then acting – but both phenomenology and the Jedi resist that kind of overthinking.
So our normal intuitions suggest that the mind is buffered from reality by perception on one side and action on the other. Jedi let go of such precious illusions and feel the Force flow within what they're doing; their perceptions and actions are part of one unified process. This is why changing a person's perceptions gets them to do new things and interact with the world in new ways. Obi-Wan doesn't profoundly affect Luke's perception of the world by having him meditate quietly, being inactive and pensive. Instead, he makes Luke dodge lasers from a remote while wearing a helmet with the blast shield down, forcing the young would-be Jedi to let go of his old habits and pay closer attention to the task in which he's presently engaged. He becomes more sensitive to the Force within the flow of what he is doing. Luke takes the first step into a larger world where perception, thinking, and action aren't neatly separated, but intimately intertwined. Awareness and understanding of the world around us are not abstract; they involve our bodily selves in the process of getting things done.
Bodily actions don't have to be dramatic, though. One of the differences we often see in bodily movement as a person develops some expertise in an area is that their movements become increasingly efficient, increasingly subtle. Learning to do less takes effort and skill. Jedi must be “calm, at peace, passive,” but they are living beings. Such quiescence is not our natural state, as though we were droids who can “close down for a while” when not in use. Passivity, rather ironically, requires effort, practice, and discipline. But skillful masters still utilize some kind of bodily activity. There's no more accomplished master of the Force than Yoda, but even he directed the motion of Luke's X-wing with his hand. Likewise, we see several Jedi push against the weak minds of stormtroopers and others with a slight wave of the hand.
Scholars such as Varela, Thompson, and Rosch emphasize not breaking the “perception–action” loop and separating its components. These philosophers and cognitive scientists5 are often called enactivists, because they claim that thinking and experience are enacted: they don't exist except while they are happening. Running doesn't exist in your legs and get switched on once in a while, and you don't walk around with a handshake in your pocket for whenever you need one. Running and handshakes are something you do, not something you have. For enactivists, the mind and your experience are, similarly, things you do. This means that you can't separate knowledge, or perception, from action. It's a bit like stopping a spinning wheel to get a better understanding of its motion, or like Luke trying to predict the seeker remote with his conscious self, instead of feeling his way, actively, bodily, through the task – just as Qui-Gon exhorted Luke's father Anakin just before the Boonta Eve podrace, “Remember, concentrate on the moment. Feel, don't think.”
We normally think about experience as involving us creating it moment by moment. We take in information continuously from the world around us and use it to build a little model for ourselves of what's going on, so that decisions can be made and actions planned. It's as though our bodies are starships with hierarchical command structures, Com-Scan providing data, a captain responding to the information, and a crew implementing the action the captain commands.
If the enactivist appreciation of the perception–action cycle is right, though, it means that experience isn't constantly built, consulted, and then acted on. It's always present, but also always in a process of developing and changing as we interact with the world. Think of it like a dance. At any moment, the dance has a certain progression to it. One step is already going on as the next begins. Each is a continuation and transformation of the last one – there aren't clear lines where one step ends and the next begins. The same is true in a masterful lightsaber duel, as we witness Anakin and Obi-Wan on Mustafar struggling to breach each other's defenses, but being anticipated and blocked before they've even begun their strike. It's the same way with experience: there's never a time when the perceiving bit is “finished” so that the thinking bit can get started, and never a final time when the thinking is “done” so that we can start the action.
Every perception and action carry a certain momentum from what we were already seeing and doing at the time. That natural flow helps us get things done. Obi-Wan emphasizes to Luke that a Jedi feels the Force flowing through him. It's a powerful experience, partially controlling their actions. Our normal experience is similar; we're always in some flow of activity and are constrained or limited by that to some extent.
The constraints the world places upon us often limit what we can do, but they also enable us to achieve great things when we work with them rather than resist or try to ignore them. When we learn to use a new tool, it may restrict us, forcing us to act in a strange or different way. But once we become disciplined in its use, coordinating our actions within its constraints, we can achieve much more with it than without. Be clumsy or random with a lightsaber, and you'll likely lose a few limbs, but once you've taken the time to master the weapon, to discipline your actions with it, you will make a formidable opponent – even more formidable are the few Jedi or Sith who've mastered the double-bladed lightsaber, such as Darth Maul and Exar Kun, which introduces novel constraints but even greater fighting abilities. The sheer energy being swung around with a lightsaber makes it heavy to wield, and Luke is forced early in his training to use both hands to keep the weapon under control. A Jedi can learn to use the weight and momentum of a lightsaber to almost move itself, just as we might learn to use the weight of a hammer as a benefit to its swing, rather than an obstacle to its use. Similarly, as a Jedi's proficiency improves, we see more fluid, one-handed use.
The flow of the Force partially controls a Jedi's actions, but as they become more disciplined, it enables them to achieve truly remarkable things. This is what Yoda means when he says that a Jedi's strength flows from the Force. Jedi who are able to coordinate their actions with that flow can work with the full potency of the universal relationship between all things. Of course, there's a certain appeal in ignoring the effort and patience required for such discipline. The ease of acting in a careless and brutal manner is certainly seductive, but let's not start down that dark path.
Being alive simultaneously puts demands on you and makes things possible. You have a body that you have to keep in working order and that allows the world to affect you – things can bang into you, trip you, cut your hands off, and so on. But your body also enables you to do things – eat, drink, buy droids, and fly starships. Varela, Thompson, and Rosch argue that having to cope with the world around us is what gives rise to consciousness and experience in the first place. The world isn't full of abstract, neutral stuff; it's full of things meaningful to us, things that affect us and can help or threaten us. Your world depends on your point of view, and it is always experienced in terms of what you need to do and can do – as Qui-Gon instructs Anakin, “Always remember, your focus determines your reality.”
When you look around you, you'll see flat bits of ground you can walk on, or drops over which you might fall. You might see things coming at you to be dodged or things you could lift, throw, or catch. When holding a hammer, you'll start seeing things in terms of whether they can be hit, driven, or broken. Hold a lightsaber and things look much more cuttable.
The Jedi's sensitivity to the Force makes a host of special actions available to them, but they still perceive the world in terms of those actions, from their bodily perspective. For us non-Jedi, an object has to be within arm's reach to be perceived as immediately liftable. Not so for Jedi, who can pick things up at a great distance; but that “liftability” will still be part of how they see objects. The more they live in the Force, the more their actions are coordinated with the Force, and the more different their perceptions will be from ours.
Think of the difference between Luke's and Yoda's perceptions of the sunken X-wing. Luke still sees the world more in terms of his old habits and so doesn't perceive the ship as liftable. He's unable to interact with the ship in that way, and, as a result, the action is inconceivable for him. He thinks his master wants the impossible. For Yoda, the ship is just one more object embedded in the flow of the Force. Size matters not.
The more we know, the more we become aware and become capable of; though we could just as well say that the more we're capable of, the more we become aware, and so the more we know – these things aren't cleanly separated. The character of our experience owes as much to the kinds of skills we have as to anything else. This is a particularly important point, because philosophers who emphasize embodiment and bodily experience are certainly not saying that we are just bodies, merely “this crude matter.”
We tend to think about our experience feeling the way it does because of the influence or nature of the sensory organs involved. Things look like they do because of how our eyes work. Things have sounds because of our ears. If that's the case, to experience the Force we're going to need a special Force-organ, right? Well, things are much more complicated. Skin, for instance, has many different kinds of receptors – for texture, pressure, temperature, and more than one kind of pain. We also have a plethora of other kinds of sensory systems – a sense of balance, the position of our own limbs (proprioception), various visceral systems associated with things like hunger and thirst, and so on.6
These various sensory systems also interact; there's no simple one-to-one relationship between a sensory organ and a perceptual experience. None of our normal ways of perceiving the world are only supported by their supposed sensory organ. Normal vision owes a surprising amount to our sense of balance – one marvels at how well Luke and Han kept their visual focus on the incoming TIE fighters while spinning around in the Millennium Falcon's gun turrets.
Psychologists have also studied a host of what are called cross-modal illusions involving more than one sensory system.7 One example is seeing two flashes where there was only one because you either hear two beeps at the same time or feel two taps on your arm. Another is hearing some spoken sounds differently depending on what you see a person's lips doing. We tend to perceive the whole of what's happening, not its different parts. It actually takes some skill to pay attention to just one isolated aspect of what we're experiencing. On Dagobah, Luke's first brush with the dark side in the bog tree causes him to feel “cold, death,” something not quite right. The experience is a mishmash of senses that he's aware of as a whole, but can't clearly understand or perceive yet as different elements.
So it isn't just the kind of sensory organ involved that matters to how we experience things. But can the way you're acting really make such a difference? Yes. The Tactile-Visual-Substitution-System (TVSS) is a piece of technology originally developed in the 1960s by psychologist Paul Bach-y-Rita to help blind people.8 It consists of an array of vibrating pins, normally worn on the back, controlled by a small computer connected to a camera. The person wears the camera on a pair of glasses. The patterns of light picked up by the camera drive the patterns of vibrations on the person's skin. With practice, the person can learn to do elementary things, such as move around a room without bumping into furniture, or spot when something is moving toward them. Users of the device don't pay much attention to the sensation on their skin, though. They don't speak as though they're touching things, but rather talk about objects around them almost as if they can see them. What the TVSS tells us is that what matters for the flavor of our experience isn't which sensory organ is involved. What matters is how we can interact with the world around us.
So Jedi don't need a special Force-organ to perceive the Force – midi-chlorians are kind of redundant. The Force's influential flow is present everywhere – between every tree, rock, and spaceship, and even between proton torpedoes and exhaust ports. If you can be sensitive to those kinds of patterns, ready to pick up on the influence of the Force, you can learn to perceive as the Jedi do with any (and probably all) of your sensory organs. The Force isn't something Jedi just see, or hear, or taste, or touch, but rather it is something they experience on its own terms, probably using their whole body to do it.
Our experience of the world around us isn't determined by what sensory organs we have, but about the kinds of things that we can do.9 The body matters, so we can't get away from that. But the body isn't all that matters. What the body is doing, the flow of skilled action as an embodied person interacts with their world – that's where experience happens.
In Obi-Wan's succinct description, “The Force is an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us. It penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.” Everything that happens exists within its flow, creating relationships between all things – from people and their thoughts to other living beings, objects, and even worlds. Jedi discipline, their skill, enables them to feel the flow of the Force, through which they can perceive how all things are related. By acting in coordination with it, at one with it, they can achieve marvels.
Merleau-Ponty, Varela, Thompson, and Rosch aren't so mystical about it, but for them, it is the same with human perceivers. We don't exist outside of our worlds, like someone receiving information remotely through a droid, able to send commands back to move the droid's limbs. We are living beings embedded in the flow of what's happening, dealing in a continuous way with various demands, influences, and opportunities in the world around us. We always see the world in terms of the demands it's making upon us and possible actions we might take. It's our lot as physical, bodily beings to have to face those demands, but as capable beings to be sensitive to what we might do in order to cope with them. To that extent, our reality depends greatly on our own bodily point of view. Our experience of reality emerges in the flow of our actions, and continuously changes as we interact with the world and as we learn new skills. Experience, like the Force, isn't static; it flows. Though ever present, it's also always changing, always different.
You are a living being – not just “crude matter” – always bodily but never just a body. You live in a Force of habits, skills, and abilities, of environmental pressure and social influence. You know what it's like to be a Jedi because you experience and act within a field of pervasive forces already. Your life creates it, and your increasing skills make it grow. You have spent your life becoming attuned to this field of forces, more sensitive to it, able to do more, and continuously taking another step into a larger world. And it will be with you, always.