Just watched The Last Jedi. Now I have to watch the Star Wars episodes I’m missed, which I know was the last two, and reactivate my love of Star Wars. I remember quite well the first Star Wars and the beyond wonder of the movie epic that has been the mythological frame for generation X, my children being members of that tribe. They saw Star Wars when they were pre teens, and now in their 40s the continue the epic journey of the Jedi Knights and the keepers of the Force.

I connect to dots of Star Wars with Buddhism and Taoism, which is now Zen Buddhism. So my little mythological mind is jumping like a monkey all over the place because this epic is so rich an ancient mythology and eastern religion, all packaged with popcorn for the modern mind.

You enter the theater (it has been some time since I was last in a movie theater) and strap in, as if it is a space ship, and the new world will appear on the screen in front of you. You leave your mind and body behind—unless you are eating popcorn and passing it around—and become the movie as if it were your personal dream.

In the dream, even though you are the creator of the dream we see the dreams as a movie like Alice in Wonderland. It’s magical and ambiguous. Movies are collective dreams, but just like our personal dreams, they are rich in unconscious content, symbols and metaphors. Is the Force just in the movie, or is it in me?

Is the Evil Empire just in the movie, or is it the world I reenter when I leave the theater? Is the spark of the Force in the movie or in me? Is the Jedi Knight just in the movie or am I a Jedi Knight?

I don’t know which is real? The world outside the movie after the lights go on and the credit go off, of the life of me that was in the movie: which is real? I don’t know. If the movie is real, then I might dress up like Star War’s characters and walk around with a light saber.

If the world is real and the movie is unreal, then I will forget the movie, but wait with expectation for the next release, where again I’ll drop my worldly clothes and for a few h ours be a Jedi Knight.

Is there a reality in which both are real? Can I be a Jedi Knight and be in the world at the same time? Can I practice the Dharma (Force) like a Jedi Knight while going to Walmart? What is it in me that feels that the Star Wars movie is more real than Walmart, where I go after the movie. Two different worlds? Or are there two different worlds? How can there be two different worlds, two different realities? Isn’t that Schizophrenia. There is only one reality, but here it seems to be two. I would rather. be in a new Star Wars movie than in Walmart anyway. Wouldn’t you? Walmart is so flat. So empty. So meaningless. It is a world of ITS…where in Star Wars I am a Jedi Knight. Is there not a way to bring these two worlds together so I can live in One World…and be whole.

All of our movie myths, most of them, tell us we are greater than we think we are. In the movies we are, but then the lights come on and we return to the busy street and wonder where our car is. What a come down. Movies are our dreams to wake up by. All the gurus, Jedi Masters, and Buddhas are gone in the modern world. The eraser of rationalism has wiped the board of reality clean of heroic myths and teachings, except in the movies. The last hold out of the Resistance against the Evil Empire.