“DEATH IS A NATURAL PART OF LIFE.”  – Yoda

The incredible Sci-Fi movie Star Wars offers profound spiritual lessons that are surprisingly in sync with spiritual lessons found in my book, They Serve Bagels In Heaven.

Star Wars’ Producer George Lucas actually planned to become a professional race-car driver in his late teen years. However, a terrible car accident just after his high school graduation ended that dream permanently, and changed George Lucas’ views on life. In an interview with Oprah, George Lucas said, “Maybe there’s a reason I survived this accident, that nobody should have survived…I was hit, broadsided, by a car that was going about 90 miles per hour. I should be dead… It did give me this perspective on life that said, you know, basically, I’m operating on extra credit… Let’s just go for it. I’m never afraid of dying. I feel like what I’m getting is bonus material.”

It appears that this experience took away George Lucas’ fears, especially his fear of death.

While in college, Lucas read a book by Joseph Campbell called The Hero With a Thousand Faces, about the ties between religion and myth. He read it again while writing his screenplay for Star Wars, which is a myth about the forces of good and evil set in a galaxy far away.

In the clip above, Yoda expresses his faith in using The Force for good. He counsels that Jedi who have passed on can still appear and guide the living. Can Yoda be talking about our deceased loved ones on the Other Side and how they are a force of love that never dies, that remains with us after their physical deaths?

Yoda also warns Anakin (before he becomes Darth Vader) about premonitions about pain, suffering and death to a loved one, because, he says, these premonitions can lead to a fear of loss, which provides an opening to “the dark side.”

That admonition reminds me of the amazing message I received, which served as a fateful premonition, two months before my husband Saul died next to me in a tragic car accident. I will never ever forget these words that reverberated inside my head, “Saul has to go. Many lessons will be learned by his death.”

Yoda tells Luke to rejoice for those who transform into The Force (when Obi One dies), and to train himself to let go of everything he fears to lose.

Can it be that Yoda is talking about the deceased crossing over into heaven? And how knowing that we do go on after our deaths helps us to let go of “the dark side,” our fear of death?

I have attended countless Galleries during which the deceased came through mediums to grieving loved ones. The messages received, in addition to undeniable proofs of survival, are often filled with love and forgiveness, counseling those on this side who are still suffering from losing their loved ones to ‘let it go.” I have even heard a deceased woman tell her widowed husband that she wanted him to let go of his pain and love again; therefore, she guided him to the woman who is now his new love.

“Death is a natural form of life,”  says Yoda.

“I saw how she would eventually blossom into a new life without me and how, at the end, I would be there to greet her in heaven,” said Saul.