I get what George is trying to say about attachment, but it bugs me that he considers emotional connection to your own mother, or simply the act of falling in love with someone, as something problematic. Anakin falling for Padme is portrayed as a dangerous thing, like it’s a “sin,” but Anakin’s behavior towards Padme doesn’t become overtly possessive until RotS. It’s hard to gauge what Lucas considers to be crossing the line from “good” love to “bad/possessive” love.
I understand the resistance to the ideas about attachments but that’s really something to take up with Buddhism/Hinduism more than Lucas who is being a pretty loyal messenger to the eastern view on such things, rather than misinterpreting or inventing.
The idea behind attachments, I think, is a good idea poorly executed. The Force gives mere humans immense power, and humans are fallible and make rash decisions based on emotion, greed, and self-interest. Trying to eliminate any potential motivation to slip away from righteousness is probably a good idea. The distinction between “good” love and “possessive” love needed to be way more clear, but if the PT leaned further into this idea, the distinction becomes more clear. Anakin’s love for Padmé isn’t healthy because of what it motivates him to do. Simply, it clouds his judgment. He isn’t making rational decisions because he’s afraid to lose her.
If I were to do the PT, I’d lean way further into the no attachments rule than George did. I’d even keep the idea that the Jedi are separated from their parents. The emotional connection to your own mother isn’t evil in and of itself, but humans are animals and the emotional connection to your family, especially between parent and child, is extremely strong and on a preconscious level. It comes from the id, and the id can be very difficult to reason with.
Imagine a Jedi in a trolley problem where they have to pick between allowing their mother to die, or allowing three other people’s mothers to die. A clear mind would see that there’s nothing special about your own mother, and that the three other people would be just as devastated as you would be if your mother died. But the whole point the trolley problem was originally meant to bring up is that people generally don’t make rational moral decisions based off of which of their options causes the least amount of harm. The Jedi would at least have an extremely difficult time weighing their options. Better to nip the problem in the bud and not have to cross your fingers and hope they don’t kill 3 people out of selfishness.
The problem with this, though, is that no human is capable of living a life without sin. George Lucas is a Buddhist Christian, and if heaven is where the righteous come to live with God in the afterlife, and sin is antithetical to God’s very being, heaven should be entirely unpopulated. An infinite being has infinite moral standards, and no human is perfect. Drinking soda is a sin. Driving a car is a sin. And those are just baby examples, there’s so much worse stuff that everybody contributes to simply for existing, it’s just that maybe it isn’t tone appropriate to bring that up on a Star Wars forum. Even being associated with anything like this, though, makes you partially morally responsible for great harm.
There’s some Hindu story IIRC about a guy who lived a perfectly sinless life, except for one time where he accidentally stepped on a bug, which is what sends him to hell. These kinds of stories were the action movies of their day so he fights his way out of hell, but you get the point. Even though it was a bug, a bug is a holy creation no different from a person. Even though it was a mistake, his carelessness still caused a death.
Maybe this would be resolved in the ST by whatever comes next focusing less on the unattainable goal of teaching people how to totally avoid the dark side of the Force, and more about teaching people how not to let it cloud their judgment. You could then ease up on the high restriction the Jedi put on the Force, allowing for the democratization of the Force which is a popular idea for the ST.
The Novelization of the Force Awakens said:
First comes the day
Then comes the night.
After the darkness
Shines through the light.
The difference, they say,
Is only made right
By the resolving of gray
Through refined Jedi sight.