“The Disobedient Prophet” by Benjamin West, 1793 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)

Cards Drawn: Flexible, Ignore Responsibility and Take Charge

I drew these cards last Wednesday and there were a few stories I considered writing on.  But this morning I had something happen that called my attention to a story in 1 Kings 13.

The story goes, that an Unnamed Prophet is sent to King Jeroboam in order to get him to turn away from his evils and turn his face towards God.  To ensure that the king gets the message, the Unnamed Prophet declares that the incense altar will split.  As the King points to the Unnamed Prophet screaming "ARREST HIM!", the kings hand withers and the altar splits in half spilling all of the ashes to the ground.

Seeing that this is clearly not just a threat, the King asks the Unnamed Prophet to pray that God will restore his hand.  After doing so, the king offers the Unnamed Prophet food and drink.  But the Unnamed Prophet declares “..it was commanded me by the word of the Lord , saying, ‘You shall not eat bread, nor drink water, nor return by the same way you came.’” (1 Kings 13:9).  The Unnamed Prophet left after this.

Then the story turns to an Old Prophet who’s sons come to tell him what the Unnamed Prophet had done.  The Old Prophet determines that he will go out and find the Unnamed Prophet and offer him a meal.  When he comes upon the Unnamed Prophet and gives offers him a meal, the Unnamed Prophet refuses and reaffirms what God commanded of him.  But the Old Prophet wasn’t giving up (Flexible & Taking Charge), and said “I too am a prophet as you are, and an angel spoke to me by the word of the Lord , saying, ‘Bring him back with you to your house, that he may eat bread and drink water.’” (1 King 18).  But the Old Prophet had lied about this.

Giving in, the Unnamed Prophet returns to the man’s home and eats.  This angers God and when the Unnamed Prophet leaves, God sends a lion to kill him.  When word gets back to the Old Prophet what has transpired, and that the lion will not leave or eat the Unnamed Prophet, he realizes what he has brought upon Samaria by his actions (Ignoring his Responsibility to the people as a Man of God himself).  The Old Prophet retrieves the body of the Unnamed Prophet and buries him.  When he is finished burying him, the Old Prophet “spoke to his sons, saying, ‘When I am dead, then bury me in the tomb where the man of God is buried; lay my bones beside his bones. For the saying which he cried out by the word of the Lord against the altar in Bethel, and against all the shrines on the high places which are in the cities of Samaria, will surely come to pass.’” (1 Kings 13:31-32)

He wasn’t wrong, King Jeroboam didn’t turn from the evils he committed against God.

More than just the cards it relates to, this story has some really good lessons we can parallel to the Jedi Compass.

Because of the Old Prophet’s lack of integrity as a Man of God, he caused the Unnamed Prophet to go against God’s wishes.  Had the Old Prophet had any integrity, he would have seen the situation for what it was, and instead encouraged the Unnamed Prophet to continue on.  Or even asked the Unnamed Prophet what he could do to help the situation in Samaria.

But the Unnamed Prophet isn’t an innocent either, he lacked discipline and objectivity.  When given an opportunity to ask God about the truth of the Old Prophet’s visit from an Angel, he took the Old Prophet at this word and gave into his hunger.

Both were Reckless.  The Old Prophet recognized his own recklessness upon hearing of the Unnamed Prophet’s Death.  But it’s a curiosity as to whether or not the Unnamed Prophet knew the stumblingblock he had created by returning to the Old Prophet’s home.  That is, after declaring before King Jeroboam that he was commanded by God to neither drink, nor eat in Samaria, nor go back the way he came, the moment that the king discovered that the Unnamed Prophet was doing exactly those things at an Old Prophet’s home, the prophecy would be “dead in the water” so-to-speak.  But if he left, then the message has weight.

This morning I saw this same kind of recklessness from someone who wrote me out of the blue (read, I’ve never met him online or off).  He approached me as a Christian and said something that seemed a bit out of place for someone who has only just met you.  Having recently inquired something from God myself, I asked the individual if he could clarify what he meant and explained that I was asking to see if him reaching out to me might be an answer to my prayer.  Explaining that the details of his comment were important to determine if this was true, he sought instead to encourage me by saying “Yes, this is an answer to you from God.”

This is something I see, not just in the Christian Community, but also the Jedi Community.  Amongst the Jedi it is taught that everything is connected and that everything happens for a reason.  To be fair, this isn’t unique to Jedi, it’s a very common thing amongst many theological and philosophical schools of thought.  In either case, this teaching has become taken so far to it’s extreme that we interpret many chance situations as being opportunities we are meant to take, rather than weighing out whether or not involving ourselves in something may become a problem for ourselves or others down the road.

In your own life, can you think of something that you did thinking it would help, but in the end it did more damage than you could have even calculated?

I am here to talk to you about the Dark Side of the Force, and everything it means, to me, to be a Jedi working with it in the real world.

When people ask why they should turn to the Dark Side, there is the obvious reason: Power. There is plenty about that here. Power to act, power to get the things you want, do the things you want to do, make your ideas and plans triumph over other ideas and plans. But before we get to that, there is one first and necessary step to becoming a Dark Jedi:

You must figure out what you want to do. And to do that effectively, you must get your own shit together.

I hear you…. but Satelle, I don't need this self-help bullshit, I'm here to be a Dark Jedi Badass. I came seeking this dark knowledge to wield it in my life.

I will tell you, quite bluntly, that unless you work out what it is you want to spend your time and effort on doing in life, you will end up spending your valuable time and effort doing what other people and other Wills decide for you. You may actually realize it's that way now and resent it. You may reject it, but that is an impotent existence; rejection of the norm without replacing it with your own way is just useless yelling at the void. And, like so many revolutions, your yelling will become the next version of the norm because you didn't define anything revolutionary beyond rejecting what others told you. That is a situation that sets you up to be manipulated by others who actually do have an agenda. If you are at all interested in doing something different and assertive with yourself, you must have something in hand.

Understanding yourself and deciding what you want to do is a process of introspection and creation, but it's right within your head. You are deciding what you want to do with yourself and your life, and by doing so, you throw into sharp relief the external influences simply by having something to compare to. This is you deciding between two options and making conscious decisions between them. But the fresh set of alternatives must come from you. Your Will. Your manifestation of reluctance and frustration with life. To do anything else is to not only be controlled by others, but to be miserable all the while. Put in the effort on fixing up your own house, mental and physical.

Once you know what you want to do and how to do it, we get to the second more interesting step: Gaining Control.

If you put in the time and effort in figuring yourself out, you can much more easily see the differences between Current State and Future State. You will be able to see things that you are already happy with, and those serve as foundational positions of strength to shore up other areas. You will be able to see what needs work and form goals that are suited to you. And better yet, you will have a path that you can believe in, instead of something born from other people's motives, expectations, and codes.

That last point cannot be stressed enough. For those of you who were trying to be something in life that you weren't and realized it later, that is why I feel so strongly about gaining a foundation before leaping forward. The mind is very complex. If you try to be that Dark Jedi Badass by simply plastering the image over who you are, in the hope that it "sticks", the cognitive dissonance will catch up with you with one hell of a hangover, or even… not, since once you've invested in the mistake for a while, it become harder to course correct. It's kind of like racking up a hundred thousand dollars of student debt on a degree in something you weren't actually interested in; don't you wish you would have realized that closer to the start? Don't you wish you had told people you didn't want to do what they expected you to do? Don't you wish you had made your own choices?

Yes. Yes.

The final stage of being a Dark Jedi in the real world is action on those plans and beyond: Doing It. You took aim, you drew back the arrow, and now you're going to hit the target. You actually know what the targets are now, and you have the power and the right arrows to be a warrior. You know technique and timing, and a slew of other small skills that combine to help hit that target. And you knew you had a weak arm and worked on it, so now you can hit targets for days on end. Any activity driven thus, born out of awareness and control, has a much higher chance of succeeding. And, I dare say, in the end, you will be happier doing what you want to do.

So that's it, that is the deceptively simple formula for Dark Jedi in my Dynasty. It is a formula I have lived, myself, and found to be immeasurably valuable. I recognize that in the course of each of our journeys along this Dark path, what we each want to apply ourselves to will differ. Our lives will differ. We are different people. We will decide we want different things out of the world, and do different things with our power. We may be in opposition with what we decide to do with our power, and well…. I have never claimed that this is a conflict-free path. It is also a difficult path, if taken seriously. But at the core, the practice of gaining power and living powerful lives will be the same, and I am glad to help you as I can.

As the Force Academy has changed over the years, we have not particularly changed to take advantage of the new technologies in internet websites and social media. Last year, we decided to make the year 2020 a year of improvements in the services and features we have available to our Force community.

The Community Surveys and extensive feedback from the FA members have guided the development of FA2020, a new main website developed in the popular content management system Joomla. We are still in the evaluation and tweaking phase of that site, but once it passes muster it will replace the WordPress site you see when you go directly to www.forceacademy.us.

This process is nearing the time when users will start noticing some disruption, most notably a password reset for Academy users. Those users have been notified to expect this coming. The reason for the reset is not based on any security problem. It is part of the synchronization process between the Academy software and the FA2020 software; this will result in our members only having to remember one username and password across the site.

I know, right?

Aside from this golden era of not having to login separately to the Academy and the forums and such, we are very excited by the coming changes. Some of the new features are:

• Seamless integration between the Academy and the rest of the site. Register on the main site and you are in the Academy and can register for courses if you like.
• Academy course information seamlessly in your Force Academy site experience.
• New special interest groups designed like popular social media sites like Facebook. Post on your wall, comment on others, upload and enjoy photos and videos, be notified of events you can join into, and more.
• A better library of Force writings by our community integrated into the site. We intend to make it easier for people who write their thoughts on the Force to be added to a growing corpus of writings.
• Improved discussion forums. Still the same concept, but no separate login. Also better viewing on mobile devices. More on the forum migration in a later post.

There may be some bumps in the road, but we’re working hard and cautiously to reduce those. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to hop into our Discord and ask in the #fa2020 channel, or email me at satelle ATremoveAT gmail.com. Thank you for your patience as we undergo this project.

I wanted to share an interesting free text input from the ongoing Force Community Survey 2020 that really resonated with me. My thanks to whoever made it. The comment was:

“A focus on improving content rather than improving format.“

I took this to mean that the survey taker felt that we should just be doing content, rather than worrying about the form of content. There is a lot of truth to that and I agree totally. I’m guilty of this in a major way, worrying about how things should be done well, when the solution may just be to Do It.

To that end, the message will be taken to heart, and I will be devoting February to writing content for the Dark Aspect. Plain, old text, without worrying about if it’ll be a book or an audio book or whatever.

Writing new content is, I think, the harder part of running any website that expects new stuff on a regular basis. My own Aspect has a lot of waiting content that has been looming, and I’ve always been busy with something or another. I believe the training course has suffered for skipping the writing of content, and we’d already taken actions to correct that.

For those who are also in positions of responsibility for content, this should be a lesson as well. There are more people in our community that want to read than want to write. If you have taken on a role to contribute content to your preferred site, consider a writing habit for 2020. Spend time each day sitting down and writing, and post that where it can be read. It takes time, it’s hard, it’s risky to throw yourself out there, but it’s the core of what we do.