Talk:Star Wars: The Last Jedi/@comment-26423071-20170813150611/@comment-24499270-20170819113540

Well, going off TFA's Visual Dictionary (actually Wookieepedia articles, I haven't found a copy), the Force was balanced for a time after Anakin finished off Palpatine, but something happened to it after the GCW and the Cosmic Force went kind of dormant for reasons I'm sure we'll learn about in TLJ. My guess is that's what got Snoke and Kylo Ren riled up sensing an awakening in the Force―Rey's slow discovery of her latent Force abilities began about the same time the Cosmic Force experienced some turbulence, and I guess the turbulence is what they were sensing when they discovered Rey in the Force.

Maybe the Cosmic Force going dormant is the off-balance Luke meant. The Cosmic and Living Force work in a circle―"All energy from the Living Force, from all things that have ever lived, feeds into the Cosmic Force, binding everything and communicating to us through the midi-chlorians," as explained by Qui-Gon's Force ghost in TCW―so if the Cosmic Force is out of whack, then maybe the Force as a whole is off-kilter a bit. All that energy from the Living Force is building and building with no Cosmic Force to bind it together, so you've got all this pent-up energy with nothing to even it out. Instead of a moral balance like the light and the dark sides, it's a power balance instead, and maybe Luke thought Ben would somehow bring that balance together, but since Ben can hardly even keep his temper in check, he couldn't handle it and snapped. And since Rey's Force abilities began awakening around the same time as the turbulence, maybe she's the key to bringing it all together instead and that's why Luke's afraid to train her, he doesn't want to risk another student getting hurt or going crazy over bringing the balance back.

It's a shot-in-the-dark idea; I'm probably way off-base and the real explanation's much simpler in the movie, but the whole Rey/Cosmic Force connection's been bouncing around in my head the past few months and the whole 'balance to the Force' thing spun this crazy theory of mine out. :)