On this most Star Wars of days, I feel compelled to disgorge my Jedi Thoughts, which have been building inside of me for a couple of years now, ever since I rewatched the whole series.
Now, all this is, I believe, explicitly anti-canonical. From what I understand, the history of the Jedi is pretty thoroughly explored and explained in various bits of current canon, and none of it looks like this, but this is my an extrapolation based on back-engineering what is presented in the core films, which I find very compelling. So:
THE FORCE: First up, my idea of the force. I personally see it as a flow of energy, constantly in motion. A river made up from billions interconnected currents of change and destiny. This flow is about both life and death, pain and joy, and too much of one without the other will cause the flow to stagnate. It has no actual moral core, and resists both the shackles of an oppressive dystopia, but also the crystalline stillness of a utopia. It is strongest in places like Endor or Tatooine, where life is hard and somewhat lawless, and is, in many ways, an anarchistic force that resists rigid order.
LIGHT SIDE/DARK SIDE: I see the light/dark side dichotomy as one that rests on how one uses the force. The light side is about moving with the force, following and channelling its flow, while the dark side is about harnessing it and making the force bend to your will. While there is technically nothing inherently evil about the dark side, violently making the very essence of life bend to your will is addictive, and obviously makes you far more comfortable with doing similar things to people. The light side is also more subtle, as in my interpretation of the Jedi mind trick, for instance, it is about guiding the force in someone towards a conclusion that they were already considering. The force choke, however, is always going to be dark side (even though it's actually no more harmful than chopping someone with a lightsaber) because the force is never naturally going to harm someone directly, so you are always wrenching it into a shape you want it.
EARLY JEDI: So, I don't see the force as having a conscious will, but it has a shape and a direction, and part of that is creating people to regulate itself. To deal with blockages or stagnation, and keep the force flowing. Like a massive magic pipe system instinctively birthing its own plumbers. This is what the early Jedi were. They almost certainly had basically no formal idea of their purpose, but would be guided by visions and the flow of the force, trusting that their path would lead them where they needed to be and surrendering themselves to it. I imagine a proto-Jedi as a vagabond figure of both hope and terror. If your planet is under a brutal fascist regime, one might turn up and fight their leader to the death, but a continent might burn in the process and they would do nothing to help rebuild in the ensuing chaos that followed. The flow of the Force, of life and death, was restored, and they were drifting onwards.
ATTACHMENTS: Now, a key part of fully surrendering yourself to the Force as the early Jedi would do is accepting death, including your own and that of those you care for. When the force moves towards your end you can have no hesitation in accepting it. Because of this, early Jedi avoided attachments as a natural extension of their actions and philosophy. A leaf cannot blow in the wind if it is still attached to the branch. Unfortunately in the later, more formal, Jedi order, this became codified into a forceable rejection of any feelings at all, as well as a contradiction, since you were meant to be part of the galactic community as (let’s be real) space cops, but also have no connection to it.
PADAWANS: One of the things about the Jedi order of the Republic that strikes me as a real holdover from the old ways is the padawan system. The one-on-one apprenticeship doesn't make much sense with the centralised temple and training school, but it makes absolute sense as part of the drifter Jedi way. You blow with the force, and when it guides a force-sensitive youth in your path, you take them with you. They leave their family (likely dead because the force be like that) and travel with you, learning the ways of a Jedi and eventually setting out on their own. Maybe when you die. And the cycle continues.
THE JEDI ORDER: Now, if you've been following my logic thus far, you can probably immediately see the original sin of the Jedi order that has an official role within the Galactic Republic. Not only do they ally themselves with a bureaucratic mega-government, but they begin to calcify and become static and stagnant. By the time of the prequels, they are actively gathering all the force-sensitive children in the galaxy to them as a matter of course. Now the rich, flowing tapestry of the force is all being deliberately directed through a single temple on Coruscant. The Jedi, who once worked to maintain the flow of the force and destroy what blocked it, have now become the biggest blockage there has ever been. And eventually the force does the only thing it can - it destroys them.
QUI-GON JINN: To my mind, Qui-Gon Jinn is the one Jedi from the Republic Era that is closest to the old ways. In fact, given that the council sees him as something of a radical, we might extrapolate he is one of the last proponents of it as a proper school of thought within the order. Watch how he interacts with people on Tatooine - he rarely pushes anything, always gently pressing to find out what direction the force wants him to go (I can't buy the hyperdrive? Ok, so what instead? Something to do with the boy? A pod race? Alright then.) Dude is constantly "Yes, and"ing the eternal flow of life energy. I guess my point is that he, like all the old Jedi, is basically an RPG PROTAGONIST!
Boom! That's my secret thesis! That the old Jedi operated like a fucking Fallout PC: constantly exploring dialogue trees and their locations, looking for the critical path the force (writer) has laid out for them. The force is, conveniently, also the flow of narrative.
Anyway, those are my thoughts on the force and the old Jedi. Thanks for reading this whole damn essay. I just really needed to get them out of my head.
BONUS THOUGHTS - DJ: Hey, remember Benicio Del Toro's character in The Last Jedi? I bet you didn't know his name was actually "DJ". Anyway, he is to my mind the closest we ever see to what an old Jedi might have looked like, which makes absolute sense in the Empire, where a powerful force sensitive might have grown up with no training or knowledge of what they were - just an instinctive sense of things working out when they "go with the flow". He wanders breezily through the world, always turning up at just the right time, holding no allegiance to anything or anyone, betraying his new friends when it seemed necessary in such a way that it (accidentally) leads to the resolution of several major storylines.
"They blow you up today, you blow them up tomorrow."
(Finn) "You're wrong."
"Maybe."
To me, this is such astounding force energy. I firmly believe DJ to be the most powerful Jedi that ever wasn't.
