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Feb. 3, 2026 - Davis Aurini
52:13
Is Jediism a Superior Religion to Christianity?

What is it about Jediism that so captures us, and why? Is it just space wizards in a space-fantasy setting? Or is there a deeper reason for all of it? This is the book I quote from in the video: https://amzn.to/4a8YC7q My LinkTree; bookmark it so you can find me if I suddenly disappear from YouTube again: https://linktr.ee/SatW_Aurini

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Time Text
Why Jedi Became Real 00:03:37
Is Jediism a superior religion to Christianity?
Spoilers, no it isn't.
The Order of Jedi Knights is a fictitious religious order from a series that had four and a half good movies.
So no, it's not a superior religion to Christianity, or just about any other one.
And yet, it's a question that kind of bites in, doesn't it?
Now, maybe this is just my zillennial adult mind.
Granted, I don't think Star Wars is quite as popular as it used to be in the day.
And yet it still has some staying power.
Specifically what I'm thinking about, what kind of sparked the idea for this video, was an event that I'm way behind on, an event from 2001.
See, back then, in the very early days of the internet, there's this chain email going around, in Australia in particular, saying that if enough people claim on this year's census that their religion is Jedi, it will have to become an officially recognized religion.
And that wasn't actually true.
But as a consequence, about 1% of the population of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Scotland, all registered Jedi on their census forms.
It was also extremely popular in the Czech Republic as well, although there, a lot of people registered Sith.
It's still going strong there for some reason.
The fact of the matter is that the Jedi mythos of the Star Wars saga has really captured the minds.
And even after a lot of really bad movies and TV series, it still captures the minds.
2005 in Texas, the Temple of the Jedi Order gained tax-exempt status.
And in 2007 in Britain, a man by the name of Daniel Jones registered the Church of Jediism.
And unlike some other religions we aren't going to name because I don't want to get sued, like these aren't fake either.
they seem quite sincere in trying to take these jedi principles and apply them to a meaningful life path so why is it well Why are we living in a world where a fake religion that has about 12 lines of dialogue backing it up in the films, why is this so popular?
Why Jedi Religion Appeals 00:04:18
Why can I have an edgy title for a video like this one?
And the title, you don't immediately dismiss it.
You read the title and you say, I'll bet he's going to say something interesting about all of this.
Why is there something interesting to say?
I myself am...
Oh, God, how would...
I'm an esoteric Catholic syncretist who is highly heterodox.
I was baptized in the Catholic Church, what, almost 10 years ago.
Leo is my Christian name.
And I am quite sincere in my devotions, although I'm also somebody that has five planets in their ninth house, and if it were 500 years ago, I'm the sort of guy that have to worry about being burned at the stake.
These days, the current church just labels me a Nazian racist.
But that's okay.
I'm not much of a group person at the end of the day.
But the Catholic Church, in particular, and other Christian faiths, and other faiths as well.
The Catholic Church being the one I can speak to the best, does have a very rich and nuanced spiritual tradition.
It's not a sledgehammer.
It's not a series of rules.
It's not merely a series of rules.
There's so much more to it than that.
And yet, on the one hand, I've met some amazing priests with powerful graces who are not interested in using religion as a cudgel.
They're interested in having communion with you, a fellow soul, and helping you in your spiritual development.
I've also met priests that couldn't see past the Ten Commandments.
And I've known a lot of women that wound up being very harmed by their early religious upbringing.
No, not in that way, but in the way that, you know how, like, we've all grown up with zero tolerance policies in school.
And how these zero-tolerance policies, somehow, all the shipbirds got away with whatever mayhem they wanted, while all the good kids are the ones that got punished for breaking these rules.
I've known a lot of women who were good girls.
They were good girls walking on a good path instead of being encouraged where they were going.
Some priest, probably with a misogyny complex, absolutely nuked them from orbit when they were just entering womanhood.
And it caused a lot of psychic damage for these girls.
So I can understand why this fascination with the Jedi religion exists.
And it's because of these failures that I've mentioned before with Ken Wilbur's book, The Religion of the Future, which As I've said, spoiler, the religion of the future is the ones we have right now.
Piscean Era Systems 00:15:25
Those are the religions of the future.
But they're going to be so much better than they are right now.
And a lot of the Western religions are very much mired in the Bronze Age.
This is the reason Jediism is so popular.
Latently, if not literally, it's because we are dealing with the hangover from the age of Pisces.
So, Christianity in particular, I mean all of our modern religions, are Piscean artifacts.
Pisces is the mystic.
Okay, the past 2,000 years of the Piscean Age have been when mysticism took hold of humanity.
Prior to that, we had the age of Aries, where heroism took over humanity.
Prior to that, the Age of Taurus.
These ages have characters.
And the character of the mystic Pisces was to start getting humanity to ascend spiritually.
And it definitely did that.
In the East, they ascended through states of consciousness without advancing their stages of consciousness.
They became amazing meditators, but they stayed locked in at a patriarchal, parochial version of society.
Meanwhile, in the West, institutions took over the church.
And so the religion that had been written down and theologized during the Bronze Age became the literal religion, while the stages of moral thought became more complex.
And so to explore this, I'm going to be talking about four of Ken Wilber's stages.
You've got stage four, which is the rules and responsibilities.
Actually, let's start with stage three.
Stage three is power seeking.
Right?
It's the independent stage of a child growing up.
It's where they're trying to gain control over their environment, where they start saying no a lot.
Power seeking.
And then the subject becomes the object of the new subject.
Elevate and integrate.
So what used to be you now becomes the thing that you observe and control.
So the power stage gives into the roles and responsibility stages.
Everybody can't just wildly seek power.
They have to seek power in their proper roles.
This in the Bronze Age was very abusive.
This is when slavery was invented.
This is when the tyrannical king gods, you know, Son of Marduk dictates life for everybody.
And why do you follow the rules?
Because he said so.
Not because he's an enlightened monarch, because he said so, and he's literally the son of Marduk.
That's stage four.
Age of Pisces saw this very toxic form of stage four turn into a more enlightened form of stage four.
The enlightened form of stage four being that the system should work for everybody.
That if a slave is being a good slave, then they should be treated well.
a bad slave master is a shame unto himself.
Early Christianity preached radical egalitarianism in that sense, but not the radical egalitarianism that we have now.
It was a very different, it was an egality of slave and master without dissolving the roles of slave and master.
Around 500 AD, Christianity went mainstream.
Those in power saw the use for Christianity.
And this is when the stage five began taking on, eventually culminating in the 15th century.
So the leaders of Christianity and the leaders of the nations started becoming very rational, very tactical in their thinking.
By the 15th century, by the Middle Ages, the Black Death destroyed the previous system, the feudal system of everybody has their place and they better stay in it, a very stage four system that got destroyed by the Black Death.
All of a sudden, labor was at a premium.
There were two popes.
There's opportunities everywhere.
The nobility recognizes that they need to pay tribute to the church, but they also see opportunity.
The game series Kingdom Come Deliverance is really about living in the midst of this four to five transition.
A lot of the level five, a lot of the mercenary work, well, there's two catchphrases to Kingdom Come Deliverance 2.
Adentas Fortuna Ivat.
Fortune favors the bold, and war is a messy business.
This level 5 opportunism was in its ugly phase, where there were no rules of war, where sometimes villages got burnt down.
Now everybody was still stage 4.
Everybody still had complete faith in Christ and the saints and the Virgin Mary.
But the church as an institution, eh, you know, they took a more realistic power assessment, a capitalist assessment of what was going on.
And so all of that great heroism and villainy that you get in the Middle Ages following the Black Death, it stems from the fact that people realize there is a power game here.
There's a game for money and recognition by the church and authority, and we got to play the game smart.
And we didn't yet have rules for warfare.
So sometimes the Christian monarch would burn down a village full of peasants.
That's the moral ambiguity explored in the Kingdom Come Deliverance series.
In the Middle Ages, it was exceptional people thinking at stage five.
Right, like the top 1%.
Most people were still at stage 4.
By 1750, if stage 5, the incipient stage 5, was the Renaissance, stage 5 went mainstream with the Enlightenment.
This is when everybody became mercantile.
Everybody became a capitalist.
And we started instituting some reasonable and pragmatic rules.
Rules of war, rules of trade, basic contracts between merchant and customer, between citizen and monarch.
All the stuff started becoming pretty mainstream.
We actually had the reasoning man's society.
Stage five, the achieved, the capitalist, the reasoning man.
And this is also when the bleeding edge of stage six started coming online.
Stage 6 is the stage where you recognize that everybody's got like their own opinion, man.
Stage six is when the scientific method starts being developed.
Stage six requires that you understand that somebody else's point of view comes from their environment, their childhood, where they grew up, etc., etc., etc.
And so if we're going to have some system of rules that we can agree upon, it can't just be the king telling us what to do because he's the king and because the pope tossed holy water on him.
There needs to be some sort of objective system to which everybody can show fealty to.
And that's what the scientific method is.
It's a system of independent testing that it doesn't matter.
As long as you're not completely insane, we can all agree that, oh, if you step outside and you get wet, it's because it's raining.
Independent, objective verification.
That's what stage six is all about.
And really started bleeding in in the period of the Enlightenment, 1750.
And then it went from 1% to about 10% of the population by 1950.
Now what was happening with religion during this time, in the 500s, religion started hitting a mature form where it wasn't just you seeking power by serving the gods, but you seeking social harmony.
seeking a system where the new gods of the Piscean era.
All of the religions, and Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Talmudic Judaism.
Judaism was invented in the age of Pisces.
It was based upon previous, probably polytheistic Middle Eastern religions.
The works of Plato and Aristotle.
All of these things, these are Piscean religions that emphasize the universality of man.
In the Middle Ages, you start getting more power-seeking because everybody was of a universalist faith by that point.
Even if there's a few different universalist faiths, everybody's a universalist at that point.
Now we start playing the power game, the strategy game, the achievement game.
But the church is still stuck in the Bronze Ages.
Stage 6, independent verification, independent personality starts kicking off in the Enlightenment.
And what are they doing?
They're starting to scientifically investigate the Bible.
And we run into a big problem here.
It turns out that scientific investigation, the first stages of scientific investigation, wind up contradicting a lot of the things in the Bible.
This wouldn't have been a problem in the East.
Buddhism is not tied to its physical claims.
It's tied to its spiritual claims.
And so if hypothetically you did some archaeological research to prove that actually there wasn't one Buddha, there were like three guys, it was kind of like a Plato, Socrates, Aristotle sort of situation, and that modern Buddhist teachings are a combination of these three individuals that are mythologized as Guatama Buddha.
Spiritual Claims Over Physical 00:06:56
For the most part, that wouldn't really upset the Buddhists all that much.
They're about achieving the higher states of consciousness as opposed to creating a doctrine which is true because it literally came down from on high from golden tablets.
But as I said, in the East, they didn't have the stage advancement.
They had the state advancement.
We had stage advancement in the West.
And the stage advancement eventually led to the crisis of faith where we could no longer pretend that the Bible and the scientific method are literally saying the same thing.
And so by the 1960s, when it was just the intellectuals doing this, when it was just the Albert Einsteins trying to grapple with the problem of quantum physics and whether or not God plays dice with the universe, When it's just Albert Einstein doing that, like, we're okay.
We're okay.
Everybody else still believed in religion 100%.
Judaism, Christianity, Islam, everybody still believed in it.
Einstein had a very peculiar form of Judaistic belief.
But it's okay if your bleeding-edge intellectuals are like that.
Then the 1960s happen, and stage six goes mainstream.
With any idea, with any paradigm-shifting idea, when the idea hits 10% of the population, the idea goes mainstream.
The whole red pill game PUA stuff, that went mainstream in 2016.
Even the left believes in that now.
All of their insults are based upon the stuff they used to say didn't exist.
It's gone mainstream.
It hit that 10%.
And the 1960s, this universalist, hippie, scientific perspective on reality, that everybody has their own unique perspective and we should respect those perspectives, that hit mainstream.
And despite two centuries of effort, it turns out that the scientific perspective upon reality does not agree with the literalist Bronze Age biblical account.
And while we've always had a few mystics, we've always had a few shamans, a few spiritualists, a few people that really are at the higher levels.
even if they're part of a religion mired in the Bronze Age.
It's one thing when those people are unique individuals, when they're an Albert Einstein, when they're a St. Teresa.
But when you've got a whole damn generation of kids clicking into this stuff, well, we didn't have enough priests to go around.
And thus, Geragism.
A brief aside, I need to touch on this, by the way.
I'm really oversimplifying the 60s.
There were tons of hippies that didn't join degenerate communes where they all became sex criminals.
There were tons of hippies that tried to walk the talk, tried to be ecologists, tried to live in harmony, and actually did a pretty darn good job.
There were a lot of right-wing level six individuals.
The past 50 years, at the same time as we got all of these people ascending to the scientific ecology individualistic philosophy, we also developed a lot of really powerful mind control technologies, MKUltra,
operation mockingbird we have instead of giving these people priests to guide and initiate them into wisdom we gave them federal agents to subvert them and drive them insane and operate them as if they're a weapon to use against foreign forces you It's been an absolute mess.
So it's not just the fact that the church did not have enough high-level priests to guide people.
Okay, we've also had CIA agents subverting every single thing that happens.
So the past 50 years have been absolutely wild.
Let's not ignore that fact.
A lot of decent hippies got really subverted.
Okay, so don't be too harsh on these guys.
It's like the hippies that survived either learned to hide or they got driven insane and we only got the worst of the hippies that were allowed to continue.
The hippies were a major spiritual advancement, but the best and brightest were getting sabotaged the entire time.
So, enter Jediism.
Luke Proves Wrong 00:13:10
In Return of the Jedi, that's the third of the original trilogy, Luke Skywalker is a healthy, idealized stage six.
Now, we mostly see the bad, degenerate stage six.
We see the stage six that wants to give money to criminals because that will, oh, they just, they were deprived of opportunity.
Everybody's equal.
You know, we should have Down Syndrome lawyers.
The depraved stage four invented slavery.
The depraved stage five would burn down peasant villages in the name of Christ.
The depraved stage six elevates the perverse, the ugly, and the maimed.
We're awash in the depraved stage six in the name of equality.
Well, what Luke Skywalker represented was an idealized stage six that could always see things from everybody else's perspective.
The third film starts off with him staging a rescue mission for Han Solo from a gangster, Jabba the Hut.
But he doesn't go in guns blazing.
In fact, he sets up a spider's web.
And all Jabba has to do is be a good person.
Jabba, you've got the option.
I don't want to fight you, man.
Just give me Han Solo.
And the whole thing is a web.
It's a trap that Luke has made.
And the only way that Jabba can get out alive is to be a good person.
Luke is respecting his individuality.
Luke respects everybody's individuality in the film.
He fights against the Imperial forces.
He fights against stormtroopers.
But he doesn't hate them.
He doesn't have malice in his heart.
Even though, like a healthy man, he's perfectly willing to kill somebody in a duel.
This is healthy stage six.
This is healthy hippie.
This is what hippies were supposed to be.
And the other thing that really stands out, I really want to do a full review of Return of the Jedi at some point, but the other thing that stands out is that there's some Star Wars conspiracy theory videos about how Obi-Wan and Yoda were actually cranking up Luke to be a self-destruct weapon against Vader.
Right?
Like they were winding up Anakin's own son to go murder him.
And that's not totally fair.
That's not a totally fair analysis, but it's got some truth to it, doesn't it?
They are convinced that Vader is irredeemable.
And yet Luke proves them wrong.
And so, did they excommunicate him from the Jedi Order?
Do they denounce him?
Do they attack him?
No, they worry about him.
And then when Luke proves them wrong, Anakin is a forest ghost next to them.
They're happy that he proved them wrong.
They are not slaves to doctrine.
Obi-Wan and Yoda were in the wrong.
And this is the whole stage six thing.
There is no doctrine, there is no theology that can perfectly protect us.
And so all of these stage six hippie kids, everybody that's been born after 1960, who's run into an authoritarian mentor that always says we're wrong because we broke this or that rule.
That's what Jediism is an answer to.
Jediism respects the traditions, it respects mentorships, it overcomes and integrates.
It's not rebelling against stage three.
Luke wants to be powerful.
It's not rebelling against stage four.
Luke is happy to serve his role.
It's not rebelling against stage five.
Luke is seeking his destiny.
There's no rebellion in Luke Skywalker.
Even when in the Empire Strikes Back, when he walks away from Yoda and Ben and Yoda are trying to warn him against what he's doing, you're not ready for this struggle, man.
Like the Darth Vader will defeat you.
We're worried he's going to turn you.
They warn, they worry, they don't condemn.
And those girls I mentioned earlier that got damaged by probably misogynistic priests, those girls got condemned for being women.
And I dare say a lot of us have been condemned for being boys.
Our Western religions, although there is a place in the tradition for stage six, and there always has been, we've always had mystics.
There haven't been enough priests to induct the sudden swell of people at stage six.
And that's what Star Wars is.
That's what Jediism is done properly.
It's a stage six individualist religion that integrates all the lower levels.
It's not a rebellious tear-down society religion.
It's integrate and elevate religion.
This is something that Disney Star Wars completely fails to understand.
Now, the following is this is a little bit of an aside, but I don't know when I'll ever have a chance to say this again.
And I ran into a quote by the writer Manly P. Hall, who I can't call him a Christian esotericist.
He's more of a syncretist.
But I've been reading a lot of this guy's stuff, and I have so much respect for him, not only as a scholar, but as a moralist.
This guy's based, man.
And the following quote is from his work, Magic, a Treatise on Natural Occultism.
And I read this, and it immediately struck me.
I was reminded of that scene in The Mandalorian, Season 3, when Groku, when Baby Yoda finds the...
Please bear with me.
When he finds the Jedi monument, and all of these magical lights start swirling around.
I saw that, and it struck me like this is something from Harry Potter.
This is not Jedi.
This is not what the Force is all about.
This is from the chapter, Warning on Dark Magic.
Manly P. Hall writes, Do not experiment.
In spiritual things, experimentation is usually fatal, and unnumbered students have gone to untimely graves and lunatic asylums or have become obsessed while they were trying something.
Keep away from phenomenalism.
Phenomenalism means like flashy stuff.
There is nothing in it for the true student.
He is not seeking to gain salvation through his eyes, but through his soul.
Phenomenalism never appeals to the higher side of the nature, but at most satisfies only inquisitiveness.
As of old, so today, the cry is seldom save souls, but it's usually show us miracles.
I would be really surprised to find out that George Lucas read this.
I just think he has good instincts.
But you'll notice, oh, I just knocked over Admiral Akbar.
You'll notice that all of the showiest effects of the Force in the Star Wars series, they're always by the Sith.
the sith are the ones that wield magic powers the jedi does not crave glory
Well, the Harry Potter magic nonsense, and I'm sorry if you like Harry Potter, but Harry Potter is a power fantasy for people that don't want to upset the Longhouse matriarchy.
Yes, you get to have all sorts of flashy powers, as long as you don't offend anybody.
Being a Jedi is the exact opposite of that.
Being a Jedi, you offend your teachers.
But you stay away from the flashy powers.
Magic isn't about showing off.
It's about accomplishing righteous ends.
So, the core concept I'm trying to get across here is Jediism.
Christianity lacked sufficient priests, lacked sufficiently aware priests to transit us from level 6 to level 7.
Stage 7 Integrationalist 00:06:52
level seven is the one at one percent right now It's the one ready to hit foom level and go to 10%.
And it's the one that really changes everything.
Level 7 is the integrationalist stage.
Thus Ken Wilbur calling it integral theory.
Level 7 is where you finally realize that you have all the stages inside of yourself.
That you were at stage 3 and then 4 and 5 and 6.
And as soon as you can see all of those stages, that you see yourself as a tree blossoming through time.
That's stage 7.
And you also see everybody else as these trees blossoming through time.
Luke Skywalker is not a stage seven hero.
Luke Skywalker sees the good that still exists in Darth Vader, but he doesn't see Darth Vader as a growth process.
He still sees Darth Vader as right or wrong.
He still sees everything as right or wrong.
Stage sevens, it's more like you see how wrong leads to growth.
And sometimes right leads to stagnation.
This second tier thinking.
Because stage seven is the first time you realize there's other stages.
Every single stage up until then has a universalist approach to things.
They demand everybody else live up to their standards.
This is the problem with a stage 4 Bronze Age priest.
They'll answer all the questions correct on the exam and then constantly chastise people for not being as primitive as them.
There's not a lot of priests like that, but they do exist.
And it's really frustrating when you're trying to talk to one of them.
But stage seven is the first time you can see all the other stages, that you can start integrating all of them.
You see everybody as part of this organic growing whole.
And if you're healthy, stage seven, you won't be afraid of trimming some of the bushes that need to be trimmed as well.
Jediism is the cultural stopgap.
It's the...
Religion wasn't going to do it.
Christianity can get to level 7 readily.
Jediism appeared.
And it's a, it's a very powerful egregore.
The fact they're still making movies and video games, even though most of them are terrible, but they keep trying to make them, is because people need that stage 6.
They need that leap in between the Bronze Age religion and the stage 7 integrated Christianity of the future of the age of Aquarius.
The Age of Aquarius is going to be an end to Astral Pyramids.
The Astral Pyramid, the effect of the Age of Pisces, was that we had multiple...
What do you want to call them?
Bodhisattvas?
We had these spiritual geniuses.
You know, I ran into a good video analyzing Christ as a fictional character.
And the guy was taking the approach about badly written smart characters versus good smart characters.
Christ is an extremely well-written smart character.
The guy outsmarts his way out of so many theological traps.
And he also exemplifies a high level of spiritual, a very high level of spiritual development.
Kind of hard to fake that character.
I'll tell you, no modern Hollywood writer could write a Christ.
Reads as legit, is what I'm saying.
And yet we took these really profound individuals and we started building pyramidal cults off of them.
Multi-level marketing schemes.
We came up with a prosaic interpretation of what they said, and now if we can just force everybody on the planet to believe the same damn thing, then we'll, I don't know, second coming or something.
That's not actually how it works.
Need for Integrationalist Phase 00:01:49
Now, we need to get people to the integrationalist phase.
And Jediism.
I'm not saying that we promote Jediism.
I'm not saying you need to join a Jedi temple.
I'm saying that we recognize that this Jediism, or if it's there's other ways you can go about this.
It's just that Jedi is really, really common.
If you recognize it as the stage six, the beginning of individuation, of not just following a religion, but internalizing the religion, becoming your own avatar of the religion, while respecting all of the traditions.
Luke Skywalker isn't a rebel, despite being part of the Rebel Alliance.
He only hates the Empire before he becomes a Jedi.
He doesn't hate it after he joins.
He does his duty, and he seeks to reform his father.
Embrace that energy.
Recognize why it's there.
And ultimately, bring our religions to the next level.
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