This isn't a mind trick: Real-life Jedi master says philosophical lessons can be found in The Force

When Alethea Thompson tells people she's a Jedi, she gets a lot of questions she's heard before.

"'There's no way that's really the truth.' 'Oh, so you worship Yoda?' (We don't.) 'Oh, can you turn off this light with your mind?' That one's my favourite," she told Day 6 host Brent Bambury.

To Thompson and thousands of others, the Jedi are much more than the fictional, lightsaber-wielding characters seen in the Star Wars movies, TV shows and extended entertainment empire.

The South Carolina-based adherent is a Jedi master of The Force Academy, an online community of people who adhere to Jediism as a kind of spiritual or philosophical belief system.

Their site offers a discussion forum for members, training lessons on techniques like meditation, anger management and exploring how traditional faiths like Christianity can inform their own Jedi's path.

When Thompson had a crisis of faith as a teenager, her friend introduced her to real-life Jediism as a possible solution.

"I'm staring at her and I say, 'You know I don't like Star Wars, right? I have to deal with my brother singing the song every so often,'" she recalled.

"She's like, 'No. Just trust me.'"

By putting her trust in her friend, she may have passed the first test on the path to enlightenment.

"I personally do not view it as a religion; it's my philosophy. But I do support those who view it as a religion," she said.

"What the Jedi path really taught me [was] how to look at things not from just the spiritual aspect, but how everything fits together. And if you want to help people, you have to do it with a heightened awareness of what your actions are."

Census prank

Casual Star Wars fans may have first heard about real-life Jediism in 2001, when several online communities urged people to register it as their religion in their national census, essentially as a prank.

Nearly 400,000 people officially declared themselves as Jedi in the United Kingdom. More than 70,000 Australians did the same.

Canada once had about 20,000 Jedi adherents, though that number fell to about 9,000 in the 2011 National Household Survey.

Thompson, however, notes that online discussion groups existed as far back as the 1990s.

"Those people who started the prank to get one up on the man in Australia didn't realize that we were actually an online community going strong back then," she said.

While Jedi communities around the world are a loosely based collective, Thompson says nearly everyone follows the Jedi Compass — a kind of guiding constitution formed in 2013 — to some extent, which outlines the main ethical principles and virtues all aspiring and confirmed Jedi must adhere to.

"Those core ethics are loyalty to the Jedi code, duty to all in the world — then the universe, actually — respect [for] the law, defence, and action," said Thompson.

She added that it also stresses five virtues: tolerance, responsibility, discipline, fortitude, integrity and objectivity.

Lessons for COVID-19, and even real-world war

Those guiding principles helped Thompson persevere through arguably one of the greatest tests of faith possible: a real-life war.

"The most growth was when I was in Iraq and I was applying what I was learning from Force Academy to that," she said.

Thompson spent 16 months in Iraq, primarily keeping watch over detained insurgents.

"You'll hear people say that these people [the insurgents] are horrible, they are just out to get us because of their belief system. But I saw that a lot of them were doing it because they had no choice. This was how they were paying for things to get their family survival. It was horrible over there," she explained.

"I came back with so much compassion for these people that when ISIS came up ... my greatest fear was that some of the detainees I had were working for ISIS because they had no choice."

Today, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Thompson sees lessons in the Jedi code that can figuratively bring people together, even as most of us are staying apart due to quarantine and physical distancing orders.

"We have been given an opportunity to think about how we can impact the world around us. What we teach with The Force is that we're all connected and every action we take is going to impact somebody else," she said.

Written by Jonathan Ore. Produced by Pedro Sanchez.

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