Originally posted by: ShiftyEyes
I always took it as him using the force to make him "spry" and "feisty" during battle.

I don't know about Obi Jeewhyen, but I've never been all that comfortable with things being explained away by the Force. I realise that ShiftyEyes is bringing up exactly what, I think, the PT is saying when we see Yoda leap into action. But I can't shake the feeling that this is a lazy approach to the Force, making it some kind of get-out clause for all kinds of things in the PT. Taking the lines from ANH, saying that the Force controls your actions and obeys your commands, to mean that the Force somehow controls people to do its "will", thus explaining how Lil' Orphan Annie destroys the battleship in TPM.

I prefer to think of the Force, an energy field created by all living things which surrounds us and penetrates us and binds the galaxy together, as being like an ocean. The ocean ebbs and flows. Like a ship on that ocean, an individual is moved by the currents. The difference with a Jedi Knight, or a Sith Lord, is that they can read the currents and also create currents in the ocean around them, influencing the movement of their own ships and those of others.

The Sith Lords use their baser emotions to create violent storms - very destructive but chaotic, tending to affect everyone and everything nearby.

The Jedi Knights learn to quiet themselves, knowing that only by first creating calm can you produce the most devastating power.

An ocean has no will of its own. It is entirely influenced by the forces acting upon it.

It can't prolong life and, The Force not being a physical thing itself, it can't alter the physical form of living things or objects.

Like an ocean, it demands respect.

Yoda says: "Luminous beings are we, not this... crude matter!"

If the real Yoda behaved as we see him in the PT, his body would have been broken by the Force acting upon it. The real Yoda acted through the Force, not his physical form.

My ongoing thoughts about The Force...