In today’s world we are rather disgusted to see an animal being butchered. It seems barbaric and strange. For people who lack refinement. Mayne country bumpkins who live off the land do such things but we prefer our meet in a delicate salad.
But someone had to kill that chicken. Someone had to raise that chicken for the purpose of being killed and eaten. Someone had to deal with the emotional toil of birthing, raising, and killing animals for the sole purpose of eating them.
Blood was spilt. Be sure. But it is blood few of us will ever see. We are carefully distanced from the process so almost to dis-believe its reality. Now certainly there are more ethical farms and more humane ways of farming, but blood is blood.
We can rightly and confidently say (us meat-eaters at least) that in order for us to eat, blood must be spilled. It’s simply the truth. Life comes out of death. This is concept very familiar to any culture that lives more directly off the land.
As we move from this concept of food necessary coming from death, we enter into another foreign concept to “modern” people: sacrifices. Animal sacrifices were and still are in some parts a normal part of life and culture.
The concept of life in the blood is transferred from sustenance to forgiveness. In other words, there is a due penalty for our transgressions. There is a terrible sense of immanent justice due, not perceived but divinely mandated.
These are strong justice cultures. These are cultures that find the idea of forgiveness rather disturbing. They believe strongly in a moral code that demands a punishment when something wrong is done. The code can not be undone. It just is.
So either we die for our transgressions or something else dies in our place. Again, this was not in anyway a new or foreign concept. It was (and is) a reality for many civilizations. My wrongs set off a negative energy throughout the universe.
In the Star Wars Jedi world they were aware of this justice (sometimes called karma). The Jedi’s were held to a code of forgetting or transcending certain normal needs so as to avoid necessary entanglements in the system of love and justice.
The philosophy was simple. Attachments (love) would lead to fear (portrayed in Annekin missing his mother), fear of losing. Fear would lead to anger. “Why did I have to lose her?” Anger would lead to hate. “I hate who took her away.”
And ultimately hate would lead to suffering. But not the redemptive kind. The kind where joys were not permitted and where strings were always attached. This internal turmoil would lead to a giving over to the power of the dark side. [Not the Sun]
Remember: Jedi’s were keepers of justice and peace. But if that mission is built on suffering it is misplaced. Annekin probably should not have become a Jedi. Or he should have changed the Jedi code not to marry. Instead he internalized.