Darth Vader dead: RIP James Earl Jones

Don't play with your blue saber! - You're not my Dad! - I am, and there goes the naughty hand!

(Binary Residue) What is the most famous line in Star Wars? Wrong! Well, right, but not anymore.

We knew it would come to this. I should have prepared more. How could I know?

"Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose," said the wise one.

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The Dharma of Star Wars

The impossible has happened. The Dark Side has come one step closer to losing the epic war in heaven between good and evil, between the Force (may it be with you) and the Dark Side (may you be spared).

The voice of Darth Vader, James Earl Jones, Luke Skywalker's dad (though in one video on the Mandela Effect, where Jones speaks of not believing the script as he read it and said "LUKE, I'M YOUR FATHER" not "NO, I'M YOUR FATHER"), has ceased to be and is no more.

And he will never be again but has already reappeared (been reborn) as someone else. Well, he is neither the same as who he was nor altogether someone else by the strange operation of radical impermanence (anicca).

The Zen of R2-D2 (Bortolin)

The radical form of impermanence the Buddha was pointing out was not the one visible to us all if we just pay attention. He was speaking at a much subtler level we are not yet capable of discerning. But with mental purification by stillness and mindfulness (calm and insight) we may yet see it.

It's not just that things will someday die. It's that all things at all times, at every sub-moment as they arise, turn, and pass away, are passing away. The very "constituents of being" (the Five Aggregates clung to as self) are turning, falling away, and hurtling towards destruction. What is there worth clinging to?

So it is with the being we identify as the great actor James Earl Jones. He appeared as the voice of the character Darth Vader (a scary echo of Dark Invader?)

The wisdom of George Lucas' Star Wars

He was 93 and leaves behind minions of grieving sci-fi fans, many of them Buddhists who have not yet realized the irony that even characters are passionately clung to. How much more the clingers who do the clinging? They themselves cling to notions of themselves.

• Everything can wait. Only seeking our spiritual liberation cannot wait. When Jones met Yama, the King of the Dead, he was asked a series of questions, according to the Buddha. We will all be asked these benign questions from kind Yama. Did we never think that as others were dying that we might die? Seeing the signs of old age, sickness, and death in others, did we never think that these messengers were talking to us, too?
• Clear the LightWorkers' Persecution Imprint (lwa.edwardmannix.com/dvyt)

Obituary (WP)

James Earl Jones dies at 93 (Chip East/Reuters)

James Earl Jones, an actor whose thundering Old Testament voice and commanding presence established him as one of his generation’s most indelible performers, whether in Shakespearean tragedies, the Star Wars franchise or a Disney animated classic, died today, September 9, 2024, at his home in Pawling, New York. He was 93.

His agent, Barry McPherson, confirmed the death but did not cite a cause. Jones’ personification of barrel-chested authority in Hollywood and on Broadway, augmented by his 6-foot-2 frame, was in jarring contrast with his stammer and extreme timidity in childhood.

How to commemorate him?

While being raised on a farm in Mississippi then Michigan, he spent eight years virtually mute to hide his stammer.

He discovered his love of performing in high school, when a teacher in an effort to draw him out, called on him to recite a few lines of poetry the young student had composed.

Jones, then 14, was shocked at the sudden confidence in his voice. “The written word is safe for the stutterer,” he later observed. “The script is a sanctuary.” More: James Earl Jones, commanding actor who voiced Darth Vader, dies at 93 (Washington Post via MSN)

(Shawna K.) Involved in yet another Mandela Effect or misremembering?