Correct me if I'm wrong, but there seems to be a lot of debate over what it means to "bring balance to the Force:" whether it actually refers to the rise of the Sith, the defeat of the Sith, a balance of power, or what. So I thought I might throw my own two cents in.

I believe that "balance" is a . . . mistranslation, if you will, a misunderstanding: a concept expressed in a language with no words for it. There are certain concepts in Buddhism (the Eightfold Path) that sound, well, odd. It's because they use concepts for which no English word exists. People translate using "Proper" and "Right" and "Just," but because langauge is a function of culture and culture is a function of language, it doesn't work.

Now, let's flash back a minute, to when the prophecy was written. I'll assume it was the time before the founding of the Jedi Order. Let's say you are the person who will predict the chosen one. You're a pre-Jedi Force-sensitive mystic who's chilling on Tython or wherever with all your pre-Jedi Force-sensitive mystic buddies. You've spent your entire life searching for a belief system that can explain why you wake up some mornings remembering the following day, and you go through them pretty fast, because they're all wrong, and so you've got quite a few mystical, new-agey ideas floating around your brain.

You and one of your friends get together to do some serious communing. You go into a trance, seeking greater oneness or whatever, while your friend stays outside to write stuff down and defibrilate you if necessary.

And you get a vision. But not just one of your everyday "You will spill your cofee" visions, and not even a "wow look how many futures" visions. You get a huge one. There's a man who wears blue and then red and then black, with lighting in his hands, and immaculately concieved boy in tan becoming a man in black entering a black suit after a red place, and an awful lot of people hitting each other with glowsticks, and green midget and Samuel L. Jackson and a boy in front of two suns, and then the same boy loosing his hand but then he has another one, good as new, and he's cooking a stone and then popping it into some aluminum tubing, and then those stupid glowsticks again and then the guy in the black suit throwing the guy in the black robe down something deep and a big blue flash and suddenly everything's ok again.

And you pop out and your friend says "What did you see?" and you say, sort of adlibbing it, "One day there shall come a chosen one concieved of the [insert name for Force here] itself, to bring balance to the [insert name for Force here]," cause after all you're a mystic, and balance sounds cool. And you turn out to be wildly good at prophesing in your later years, but this one was special, so you make sure people write it down someplace very safe. And then the story of the prophecy gets lost, but not the prophecy itself, and BANG! we're at 32 BBY, and Mace is saying to Qui-gon: "You refer to the prophecy of the Chosen One, who will bring balance to the Force."

And all because of you, and because the Jedi picked up the word "balance" and ran with it, even though a better translation would have been goodfulness. Or maybe not. But balance, in the sense of two weights on opposite sides of a scale, was definitely not the right word.

Just my two cents.