A couple of years ago, we landed at London Heathrow airport to shoot several interviews for The Mindfulness Movie and as I stepped through customs I was surprisingly greeted by a giant Yoda which gave me the idea for this series. Now, let’s explore the undiscovered pearls of wisdom from our most beloved of pop icons, Master Yoda.
This is the third part in a series about discovering The Ten Paradoxes in the famous quotes and sayings of very important icons of our time. In two previous blogs, titled, Eckhart Tolle’s teachings and The Ten Paradoxes and Steve Jobs and The Ten Paradoxes, I summarized how Tolle and Jobs consistently had the paradoxes come up in their writings and speeches.
A little Yoda background from the book, The Tao of Yoda: Based Upon the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu. Kreger says, “Historians, philosophers, and professors of ancient literature may tell you that the philosopher named Lao Tzu, who lived in China 25 centuries ago, wrote the following passages. What they do not tell you, because they do not know, is that there is a mysterious connection between this ancient work and the modern day mythology of Star Wars. According to history, Lao Tzu was a philosopher and a teacher of the famous Chinese philosopher Confucius. And, according to legend, it was Lao Tzu who produced the two books, one named Tao, and one named Te. Together they are known as the Tao Te Ching.
In Chinese, Te means literally an upright heart in action. This often is thought of as goodness, but there’s another meaning. An older and less well-known definition of virtue means an effective force, a potency or a power, as in “this medicine has the virtue of reducing fevers.” Now here’s the really weird part. When you take this ancient and not well known definition of virtue meaning “force” and plug it into what we now know is the original title of the Tao Te Ching, the meaning in English becomes ‘The Way of the Force’. And, George Lucas had no way of knowing this back in the 1970’ s when he wrote it.”