Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith

The Buddha's second truth is that suffering arises from craving, from the refusal to accept impermanence. Anakin's entire arc is a controlled demonstration of it. Yoda names the disease directly on Coruscant: "Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose." Anakin cannot. He has already lost his mother because he arrived too late, and he made a vow over her corpse never to be powerless again. That vow is the seed of Vader.

Watch how Palpatine weaponizes impermanence. He does not tempt Anakin with domination. He tells him the Sith found a way to stop people from dying, that death is the enemy and attachment is the cure. This is the exact inversion of the dharma. Where the teaching says release the beloved into change, the Sith says seize the beloved out of change by force. Anakin chooses the seizure. And the seizure produces the loss it was meant to prevent, on schedule, in the same room where he first turned. The dark side is not anger. The dark side is the belief that you can refuse impermanence and win.

Jung wrote that what we do not make conscious returns as fate. Anakin spends the prequels refusing his shadow. His fear, his rage at authority, his grief over his mother, his terror of loss: all of it is disowned, plastered over with the persona of the golden chosen one. The Jedi Council enables this by demanding he suppress emotion rather than integrate it. Suppression is not integration. What is buried does not die. It waits.

The Mustafar duel is the shadow made literal. Obi-Wan, the light father, stands on the high ground of consciousness. Anakin, consumed by the disowned material he never faced, leaps anyway and is dismembered by his own inflation. He is then sealed inside the suit, a persona so total it replaces the man. The mask is the perfect image of a psyche that let the shadow win by refusing ever to look at it. Vader is not Anakin corrupted. Vader is everything Anakin would not integrate, wearing him.