Advice from a Jedi master.
"Stretch out with your feelings." As I think happened fairly regularly with the original three Star Wars films, George stumbled, sprawled, took a table and several small children with him, and landed face first into a pile of transcendent truth (or, applicability, if you will) with this line. It could be taken as a compact bit of character development/background information-- Ah, I get it, Jedi are sort of psychic. But the idea of reversing the usual literalist flow chart of perception-- human beings as protoplasm, jittering after one bit of stimulus after another, while somehow experiencing an accidental emergent phenomenon known as "consciousness"-- has profound potential to alter consciousness without herbal or pharmaceutical aid. Spend a day actively taking note of everything beautiful. The usual things might pop out more forcefully-- clouds, trees, happy dumb dogs, that sort of thing. But the surprising thing, for me, is how this practice erodes the conventional categories of beauty in favor of something more immediate, and seemingly just beyond grasp. I saw a dead rat lying beneath the tracks today, and was fairly flabbergasted to discover that there was something poignant about the image-- its fur, its little mouth, the repose of it, the imagined movements of its body in another time. The last struck me as particularly significant. Seeing with better eyes means breaking down not only the blinding prism of the expected and the perfunctory, but the idea of time as linear, absolute, and utterly confining. Thinking of ourselves as "luminous beings" may not endow us with super powers, but it can make both the immediate and the continuing experience of existence seem much broader, richer, stuffed with possibility and meaning. Whether one wishes to attach a particular religious or spiritual point of view to this sort of devotional activity is, to me, beside the point. Think of it as applied whimsy for the purpose of artful living, if you prefer. Or, hell, say that there's a core of inconceivable joy behind everything. That'll show 'em. My main point (if you can call it that-- perhaps my cudgel knob, but that sounds unduly suggestive) is that every act of perception seems to include an act of will; we must be prepared and emotionally available either to see a thing, or to fully absorb the surprise that accompanies the truly unexpected. For me, this means deciding to see a great deal more of the world around me, but also of what is a half step to the left and two seconds ago. It means listening when the gods or my active imagination speak, and also arguing and telling them to fuck off when they're not nice. It means treating the act of perception like an act, and deciding whether it's a good one, or boring, or overly hammy. It means going just a little crazy, in order not to join the world's sizeable coalition of the totally insane.
I really think that the blast shield on Luke Skywalker's head (in star wars, when he's practicing with the remote) has a lot in common with Plato's cave, or with the Witch's underground lair in The Silver Chair, or any other stifling suggestion of flatness. We're talking about the land of "merely," "just," and "only," all the killing words that say, nothing beyond my expectations is of any importance. Do a collage and see how everything can connect. Share a dream with someone a thousand miles away. Or get yourself a lightsaber that says "Bad Motherfucker" (it's the purple one). Get medieval on the ass of non-seeing.
But these are the ruminations of a sleepy/dopey dwarf-person (not really a dwarf).