Path of the Jedi Episode #4: “THE TRUTHS WE CLING TO”

In this episode, we discuss the Obi-Wan Kenobi quote: “Luke, you’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.” In this scene from Star Wars: Return of the Jedi Obi-Wan appears to Luke as a Force ghost to explain why he wasn’t completely forthcoming about the death of Luke’s father.

Obi-Wan explains that it wasn’t so much a lie of omission but rather a version of truth he chose to believe. And in this context, it makes perfect sense. How else could Obi-Wan have made living with the weight of having lost his Padawan, brother, and best friend to the Dark Side?

Obi-Wan’s most difficult crossroad

In the light saber duel on Mustafar, the conflict in Obi-Wan in palpable. Losing Anakin to the Dark Side and then having to be the one to destroy him, it is heart wrenching to watch Obi-Wan surrender to the inevitable. So, as difficult it is for us to watch, how much more difficult must it be for Obi-Wan to go through.

The Remorse of Obi-Wan Kenobi

It makes perfect sense in that context for Obi-Wan to tell Luke that his father was killed by Darth Vader. To Obi-Wan, in a very real sense, he was. So he passed this truth on to Luke not only to protect Luke but also to protect himself from the difficult realities of his past.

We discuss the concept of TRUTH through this lens and examine whether truth is something that can in fact vary from perspective to perspective and whether we have any choice in what we believe that truth is.

Listen to the full episode and read the full transcript below

Transcript: Path of the Jedi – Where Star Wars Meets Personal Development

Episode #4 – “The Truths We Cling To”

(Intro soundbite) So just with this example, Obi-Wan is saying truth is not absolute, belief systems are not absolute. And they in fact vary from perspective to prospective, person to person.

(Intro Music/main podcast)

Welcome to Episode 4 of Path of the Jedi! We’re a week in so thank you guys for continuing to tune in. It’s been a week since we launched this podcast on September 1st. For me it certainly doesn’t feel like a week. It has been quite a crazy ride so far. And I also didn’t take into account that we would be leaving for a two-week road trip the day after we launched.

So this episode is coming to you from the road. I’m actually sitting at a campground and you’re probably going to hear background noise, some nature sounds which is nice. Adds a little ambiance to the podcast. Also maybe the AC unit running in our camper, my dogs rustling the leaves as they walk around camp. The occasional car and or truck driving by. It is Texas so it’s not outside of the realm of possibility that there are cattle around… All kinds of wacky background noises… a plane just went by I think, or maybe that was a helicopter.

On top of that, I’m completely… well I don’t want to say old school, but very minimal in terms of equipment. I’m just here on my laptop sitting at the picnic table with my earbuds recording this. No fancy equipment. They’re not even Bluetooth earbuds. These are old school wired earbuds. We’ll see how the quality turns out. I’ll do my best in in and post-production to give you guys the best quality recording as I can. But we’ll see how it turns out, we’ll see how it turns out.

News and announcements! A lot has actually happened here at Path of the Jedi in our first week and I wanted to fill you guys in on all of the cool stuff that’s been going on.

Up first: we are now officially listed and available on Google podcast. I thought this process was going to take anywhere from four to five weeks but we were able to get approved! We are now in the Google directory. For those of you guys who are Google listeners, you can find Path of the Jedi at Google podcast.

Next announcement is actually a milestone. As of this recording we officially have a hundred followers on our Facebook page. I think that makes us Facebook official. If you’re not following us yet on Facebook you can find this at facebook.com/potjpodcast. That’s going to be a really cool resource for you guys. If you want to get more involved, if you want to have more discussions and share your reflections on the episodes, this will be a great place to do that. Again, go to facebook.com/potjpodcast

Another thing that has happened in the past week, at least I think this is super cool. In Apple Podcast – for those are you guys in Apple Podcast – when you search for Star Wars, Path of the Jedi actually shows up in the search results! I mean it’s way down in the search results. But for me as a lifelong Star Wars fan, for this podcast to show up in the search results for Star Wars is – I don’t know I love it and I will wear that as a badge of honor.

Speaking of Apple podcast, a huge thank you to everybody who has taken time to rate Path of the Jedi. I really appreciate it. When you guys rate the podcast it helps us show up and remain relevant in the searches. So thank you again for taking time out to to rate our show. If you haven’t done so please feel free to give us a rating no matter what it is, good or bad because it also informs me whether or not I’m doing a good job. So again, thank you to everybody who’s taken the time to rate.

A special shout-out to user “readytogrow”! “readytogrow” has actually gone above and beyond and not only rated the podcast but also left a review! And a glowing review at that. So “ready2grow”, thank you so much for leaving that review. Thank you so much for your kind words. I really, really appreciate it and I commit to you guys to continue to do better. This kind of feedback is very encouraging and again it can inform me on how I can do better.

All right final update for today. I just finished reading “Into the Dark” by Claudia Gray. “Into the Dark” is part of a series called Star Wars: High Republic. This series consists of books, comic books, and I believe manga as well. Star Wars: High Republic introduces a whole new cast of characters in an age and era that takes place two hundred or so years before Episode 1: Phantom Menace.

This series is incredible – at least what I’ve read so far – in expanding the Star Wars Universe and introducing us to an age at it in my opinion is really like the Golden Age of of the the Jedi Order. So these have been really fun to read.

“Into the dark” is the second book in this series. The first one was “Light of the Jedi” by Charles Soule and I am just now started reading “Out of the Shadows” by Justina Ireland. I bring up these books because 1) reading is fundamental. I feel like reading is a huge and very important aspect of personal development –which I can talk more about in a future episode. Reading is good for you. Number two, you don’t have to have in-depth, intimate knowledge or even be familiar with Star Wars to enjoy these books. I think that can be said about this particular series as well as all the books that have come out pre and post Disney.

I think all these books as stand-alones are incredibly enjoyable. Which leads to my third point: there are a lot of lessons that you can learn from all of these. With “Into the Dark” in particular, I have a ton of notes and highlights from that particular book that I’m going to be sharing with you guys in a future episode. So you have lots of lots of reasons to pick up a book, especially Star Wars books.

[Soundbite of Obi-Wan from Return of the Jedi]”Luke, you’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.”

Okay, I chose this particular quote because aside from Obi-Wan being one of my favorite characters this quote is so incredibly relevant and timely with everything is going on in the world – especially with people’s inability to relate, communicate, and connect.

This quote is from Episode 6: Return of the Jedi. The scene is when Luke is on Dagobah and is about to leave again and he’s visited by Obi one who appears to him as a Force ghost. They proceeded to have the conversation about why Obi-Wan wasn’t forthcoming with telling the truth about what happened to his father. In the previous movie, for those guys who don’t know, Darth Vader is Luke’s father’s – spoiler alert! Only one of the most famous moments in in in cinema history – and so in this scene Luke is confronting Obi-Wan, pretty much asking, “Why did you tell me that Darth Vader killed my father when in fact Darth Vader IS my father!” That’s where you get this quote.

Obi-Wan goes on to explain: when Anakin chose to align himself with the dark side to then become Darth Vader, in a real sense Darth Vader kills Anakin. Anakin no longer exist. For me that is everything he’s talking about in this quote. When he saying, “the truths we cling to depend greatly on our point of view,” Obi-Wan not only justified to Luke why he lied, but I think more than anything he’s justifying it to himself. Creating this truth for himself to make it easier and more palatable to live with the fact that he’s lost his best friend, his brother, and his Padawan to the Dark Side.

We can really talk about it in a sense that that Obi-Wan is justifying his own failure as a teacher, as a master, as a friend, and a brother. And that’s why he shares the story with Luke the way he does – that Darth Vader killed his father.

What we see by the end of the movie is that Darth Vader is in fact not irredeemable. At end Anakin still actually is alive so Luke’s point of view wins out in the end. And arguably, this is why people call Luke the New Hope in the galaxy. On this example, Obi-Wan is saying truth is not absolute, belief systems are not absolute. They can very greatly from prospective to prospective, person to person.

Now before we go on, I want to distinguish between two things. I want to be very clear about this. There is a clear difference between truth and fact. Fact exist. It exists in the material realm and it exists in the mathematical, in the information realm. There IS fact. Truth, I think is more the meanings we assign to fact and the belief systems created as a result of those meetings. So you can see that because of perspective, truth can vary from person to person because all of us are are perceiving life and the world around us in completely unique and different ways.

Each of our truths can be vastly different.

Now one thing that really stands out to me about this quote is the word “cling”. Obi-Wan says that many of the truths we “cling” to depend greatly on our point of view. To me the word “cling” connotes active choice. Obi-Wan essentially is saying that in the beliefs we have or the truth that we hold on to we’re holding on to by choice. And that we don’t have to necessarily hold on to them.

As we mentioned earlier that the truth that Darth Vader killed Luke’s father is a truth that Obi-Wan has chosen to believe. In the real world we see this playing out in all aspects of life. Let’s just look at fandom for example and Star Wars fandom in particular. One person’s truth about a particular film or series or even character can vastly differ from one person to the next person. With every new property Star Wars and Lucas Films releases, you can have an infinite number of different truths that people experience. And really it’s just differences in opinion.

Opinion is the meaning they’ve assigned to fact and that meaning becomes their truth. “This particular movie is bad, definitively. That is my truth because I don’t like it.” And that’s completely different from fact. I think you can give insightful critical analysis objectively separate and outside of however you feel about any particular thing subjectively.

Things go terribly awry when you go from “I don’t like a particular thing” to “that thing is bad and wrong.” Here then lies risk. Truth, once it becomes really anchored in, becomes belief systems and people will defend belief systems even if it means risking their own destruction.

This is exactly what happened with the Jedi Order. The Jedi adhere to a certain set of teachings and philosophies. Overtime those teachings and philosophies, or at least the interpretations of those things solidified himself into truth. Then truth over time becomes rules, becomes dogma which then becomes rigid fundamentalism. It’s that rigid fundamentalism, that strict adherence to truth, or at least what the Jedi Order believed was truth, that resulted in their downfall. It resulted in their destruction, it resulted in Palpatine and the Dark Side being able to manipulate circumstances around them to causing the fall of the Jedi Order.

So, not understanding that Truth is a matter of perspective can be very dangerous. Case in point – and this is a very extreme example – I just watched a video this morning of an individual on an airplane who, as a result of his truth being violated, demanded to be let off the plane. Now the crazy thing about the situation is the plane was still in the air. But this individual was so convinced of the rightness, and perhaps righteousness of his truth that he wasn’t hearing or seeing or understanding the factual reality of the world around him – that plane was still in fact in the air.

I know this is an extreme example, but it’s an example none the less. And when you multiply this by the factor of entire societies – or let’s just even take a look at the entire Jedi Order – that strict adherence can dangerously lead to self destruction.

And here’s where it gets even more insidious – sometimes the truth is that we cling to aren’t even truths that we came up with on our own. Sometimes the truths that we cling to are truths that were fed to us by other people. Case in point: Luke’s truth that Darth Vader killed his father wasn’t his own. It was given to him by Ben Kenobi. Thankfully Luke heard another perspective and in this case it was from his own father. It was Darth Vader who shared this information with him and he took that information and formed his own opinion. He formed his own truth.

Arguably we can say that in doing so Luke not only saves his father and helps his father redeem himself but he saves the entire galaxy from the tyranny of the emperor. We have to be careful of the strict adherence to what we think or believe is true because as Obi-Wan said, the truth that we cling to depend greatly on our point of view.

I think the most important thing that Obi-Wan has learned from this, albeit posthumously, is that on the other side of the truths that we cling on to – the truths that we defend, that we validate, that we rationalize and justify – is another human being who like us is just trying to navigate their way through this crazy thing called life.

And there you have it! That is it for this episode. I’m sure there are going to be many perspectives about our topic today so please share those with me. Let me know what you think. Write or send an MP3 to info@pathofthejedi.com. I would love to read your thoughts, read your comments here on the next episode or play your mp3. We want to hear your voice too and we want to hear your perspective and your truth about this episode.

Also if you’re not already following us on Facebook, don’t forget to follow us. It’s facebook.com/potjpodcast

One last thing, if there’s anybody that you’d like to give a shout out to here on the show, I would love to do that for you. Email us at info@pathoftheJedi.com and let us know who want the shout out to go to and what you’d like to say to them.

And that’s it for today thank you again for tuning in to Episode 4 of Path of the Jedi. We will catch you again next week with a whole new fresh episode. Until then, be safe, be well, and may the Force be with you.

Learn more about Into the Dark by Claudia Gray and the other books in the new Star Wars: High Republic series. CLICK HERE* to your own copy and read it today!

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