Life creates the Force, and makes it grow, creating an energy field that binds the galaxy together. All Force powers began with this simplest but most profound of realizations, one that lies at the core of a Jedi’s awareness and abilities.

The Force contains dualities – such as life and death, or light and dark – that it holds in balance while also transcending. For a Force-sensitive being at peace, this awareness could border on the ecstatic – a glimpse of a fundamental unity that underpins all of creation.

Beyond its dualities, the Jedi saw two complementary aspects of the Force. The living Force is generated by life, and masters such as Qui-Gon Jinn stressed the importance of being mindful of it, teaching Jedi to center themselves in the present instead of letting anxieties about the past or future cloud their awareness.

The energy of the living Force feeds into the Cosmic Force, which binds the galaxy together and has a will of its own. Jedi learned to understand that will by communing with midi-chlorians, microscopic lifeforms within living cells that act as symbiotes with organic beings and links between the living Force and the Cosmic Force.

Tapping into the Force gives Force-sensitive beings seemingly supernatural abilities – which some may not be aware they’re using. Anakin Skywalker became an ace pilot while still a child, but his lightning-fast reflexes were a product of subconsciously using the Force to see things before they happened.

Force users can sense things at a distance, particularly when events generate a disturbance in the Force or they have a strong connection to someone. Despite her lack of training, Leia Organa sensed Luke Skywalker’s plea for help as the Millennium Falcon fled Bespin.

Kylo Ren and Rey experienced a strange Force link that allowed them to interact despite being separated by many light-years. Before his death, Snoke claimed he had engineered this connection to test Kylo and trick Rey into revealing Luke’s location. Later, the two were revealed to be a rare and powerful dyad in the Force, perhaps explaining their bond – or at least its resilience and strength.

The Force can be used to influence the weak-minded. Such mind tricks can be used to avoid conflict – as Obi-Wan did at a Tatooine checkpoint – or to dominate others.

Kylo Ren and his master Snoke used the Force to extract information from people’s memories, though Kylo’s attempt to use this ability to rifle through Rey’s mind backfired. Kylo saw some of what he sought in Rey’s memories, but was unprepared for her own strength in the Force. Rey was also able to see into Kylo’s own mind and understand his deepest fears about himself.

Force-wielders can harness the Force to interact with objects, allowing them to do everything from lifting rocks to levitating starfighters. For someone with sufficient faith in the Force, size was immaterial, as an awestruck Luke learned on Dagobah.

The Force could also be used to injure or kill – as more than one Imperial officer discovered after failing to satisfy Darth Vader in his hunt for the rebels who’d destroyed the Death Star.

One of the most terrifying dark-side powers is the ability to generate Force lightning, blasts of energy that could be used to torture, disfigure, or kill an opponent. Count Dooku and Darth Sidious were masters of this dark art.

The Force could provide glimpses of the future, but the Jedi warned that such foreknowledge was unreliable and even dangerous – the future was always in motion, and fear of what might come could lure a Jedi to the dark side. Sometimes, those trying to prevent a possible future only ensured that it came to pass.

No Jedi prophecy would prove more fateful than that of the Chosen One who would bring balance to the Force. Qui-Gon Jinn identified Anakin Skywalker as the fulfillment of this prophecy, noting that the boy had been conceived without a father and insisting that he be trained as a Jedi. Anakin would indeed bring balance to the Force, but in a way that showed why the Jedi distrusted prophecy. Anakin destroyed the Jedi after embracing the dark side and becoming Darth Vader, then ended the Sith when Luke helped him return to the light.

In a galaxy with many Force-sensitive species and seekers of knowledge, the discovery of new powers is far from uncommon. Lothal’s Loth-wolves used the Force for hyper-tunneling, allowing them to access other realms and pass between distant points in the familiar world.

To save the beleaguered Resistance on Crait, Luke projected himself across space, taking on the form of his younger self to provoke and distract Kylo Ren. This extraordinary demonstration of Force ability took all of Luke’s strength to maintain, and the effort ultimately cost him his life.

Qui-Gon learned how to preserve his consciousness after death and communicate with those he had left behind. He returned to share this wisdom with Yoda, who passed it on to Obi-Wan. Yoda and Obi-Wan’s physical bodies vanished when they died, and through the Force, they were able to manifest as “spirits” and commune with the living. After sacrificing himself to bring balance to the Force, Anakin Skywalker also manifested as a spirit.

While some beings had innate Force abilities, most learned to use the Force through instruction as part of an established tradition. No tradition was more closely identified with the Force than the Jedi Order, servants of the light side of the Force who safeguarded the Republic for generations as peacekeepers and negotiators.

Jedi seekers identified Force-sensitive beings as infants and brought them to Jedi temples to be instructed as younglings. Those who showed promise could become Padawan learners, Jedi Knights, and eventually Jedi Masters.

The Jedi taught initiates to clear their minds of conflict and avoid emotional attachments, which they believed left them vulnerable to the lures of the dark side of the Force. These teachings were instituted as part of the Jedi code. But some Jedi saw a disconnect between forbidding emotional attachments and having compassion for others – and some, like Anakin, embraced relationships and risked expulsion from the Order.

Over the centuries, Jedi lore became doctrine and the Order a hierarchy, with temples across the galaxy overseen by the 12-member Jedi Council at the main Jedi Temple on Coruscant. Located within sight of the Galactic Senate, the temple was the pinnacle of the Jedi faith.

The Sith survived by following the Rule of Two instituted by Darth Bane: instead of armies of dark-side warriors, their ranks would be limited to a single master and apprentice who kept the order strong by continually testing each other. But other dark-side adepts did exist. Dooku trained Asajj Ventress in the ways of the dark side, while the Emperor corrupted Jedi survivors into Inquisitors tasked with hunting their former colleagues.

Decades later, Snoke used his dark-side powers and knowledge of Force lore to help lure Ben Solo away from the light and become Kylo Ren. As Supreme Leader of the First Order, Snoke sought to destroy the New Republic and find and destroy Luke Skywalker.

The Force is a power too vast for the philosophies of either Jedi or Sith to completely describe, and other Force traditions saw themselves as separate from both. Dathomir’s Nightsisters channeled dark-side sorcery, the Lasat were able to access the cosmic power they called the Ashla, and the Frangawl Cult applied its dark arts to bringing about prophecies.

One could follow the Force without being a Jedi or Sith. Bendu was an ancient being who refused to take sides in the ancient conflict, preferring to remain “the one in the middle.” Maz Kanata was a Force-sensitive collector of Jedi artifacts, including the lightsaber Luke lost on Cloud City. After leaving the Jedi Order, Ahsoka Tano followed her own path, wielding a lightsaber with a white energy blade. Leia Organa subconsciously called on the Force to hone her skills as a diplomat before training with her brother Luke. And Lor San Tekka was a master of Force lore, helping Luke gather knowledge lost in the Jedi purge.

The Guardians of the Whills were an ancient order devoted to protecting the Temple of the Kyber in Jedha’s Holy City. While not typically Force-sensitive, the Guardians believed in the Force and followed its tenets to become disciplined, deadly warriors.

The Church of the Force was made up of worshippers who believed in Jedi ideals. The Empire outlawed the faith and drove it underground, but failed to extinguish it. After the Emperor’s death the church emerged once again, with some believers forming ascetic communities such as Tuanul village, which was Lor San Tekka’s home on Jakku until the First Order found him.

Both Jedi and Sith used lightsabers, laser swords that could cut through nearly anything. Lightsabers were not just weapons but focuses for meditation, training, and discipline – a philosophy summed up by Obi-Wan’s admonition to Anakin that “this weapon is your life.”

Constructing a lightsaber was a critical rite of passage for Jedi younglings, who sought out Force-attuned kyber crystals to place at the heart of newly-constructed lightsabers. Most kyber crystals used by Jedi were blue or green in color; Sith powered their lightsabers with crystals they had corrupted until they “bled,” giving them a red cast. Kyber crystals could serve as focusing lens for other weapons as well: they powered ancient Sith superweapons and the laser dishes of the Empire’s Death Star battle stations.

Force knowledge was often encoded in holocrons, created by both the Jedi and Sith as repositories of lore and training techniques. As such knowledge could be dangerous to those still learning the ways of the Force, many holocrons came with safeguards – they could only be opened by using the Force, or with an encoded memory crystal. Some particularly valuable or dangerous holocrons were kept in a vault within the Jedi archives, accessible only to members of the Jedi Council.

Holocrons weren’t the only repositories of Force lore – different traditions recorded their wisdom on everything from papyri to data-cards. After the destruction of the Sith, Luke became the guardian of the Jedi Order’s sacred texts, housed in an ancient tree on Ahch-To. Luke decided to burn the texts to break what he saw as a destructive cycle, but couldn’t bring himself to do so. Unbeknownst to him, Rey took the ancient texts with her when she left Luke’s hermitage.

Jedi scholars spoke of “vergences” in the Force, nexus points of power that could amplify the energy field and its effects. A vergence could be a person – Qui-Gon believed Anakin to be one – but was more often a place. Mortis was a legendary realm that was home to the Ones – a Father, Daughter and Son – who embodied the Force’s light side, dark side, and the balance between the two.

Yoda’s understanding of the Force fundamentally changed when Qui-Gon’s spirit led him to a mystical world believed to be the birthplace of the midi-chlorians. There, the Jedi Grandmaster was tested by a quintet of Force priestesses, ancient entities that bridged the living Force and the Cosmic Force. As part of the Force priestesses’ tests, Yoda traveled to Moraband, the ancient homeworld of the Sith. His spiritual journey required him to contend with visions of the galaxy’s future and confront the spirit of Darth Bane.

The site of an ancient battle between the Jedi and Sith, Malachor was a bleak planet, home to a Sith temple and seemingly haunted by the spirits of the lost. The Jedi erased references to Malachor in hopes that the planet’s secrets would remain inviolate, but the lonely world attracted artifact hunters as well as spiritual seekers. Many would end up regretting the journey.

The Force could also heal, with a Force user letting life energy pass into the body of another being to erase injuries and restore vitality.

This power was not without risk, as it left a Force wielder weakened. Ben Solo used the Force to restore Rey to life after her confrontation with the reborn Emperor Palpatine, but this noble sacrifice came at the cost of his own life.

Sacred to the Jedi Order, icy Ilum was rich in kyber crystals. Its ancient Jedi temple was the site of the ritual known as the Gathering, in which younglings found the crystals that would power their lightsabers. The Empire’s rise meant the end of Ilum’s days as a sanctuary, with Palpatine and those who followed him seeking to use the planet for their own ends. The First Order defiled and transformed Ilum, reworking the planet into a massive superweapon, Starkiller Base.

Dagobah was one of the purest places in the galaxy, with its abundant life making it strong in the Force. Yoda visited the planet as part of his spiritual awakening during the Clone Wars, and made it his hermitage after the Jedi purge. After years of living simply and communing with the Force, Yoda’s exile was interrupted by the arrival of Luke, seeking a teacher.

The legendary planet Exegol lay deep in the Unknown Regions, a Sith redoubt that was home to cultists obsessed with the dark side and the Sith traditions. Here, Darth Sidious was reborn and plotted his return to power, working in secret to guide the First Order and foil efforts to rebuild both the Jedi Order and the Republic.

In a showdown with Rey, the granddaughter who’d eluded his grasp years before, Sidious sought to use Sith sorcery to let his spirit merge with hers. When that failed, the two confronted each other, with Sidious’s dreadful power augmented by that of all the Sith that had come before. But Rey had allies of her own – the spirits of the departed Jedi lent her their power for this climactic confrontation.

One of the strangest nexuses of Force power was the realm known as the world between worlds, a plane of existence seemingly outside of both space and time. Ezra Bridger used this realm’s unique properties to rescue Ahsoka from her confrontation with Vader, then succeeded in denying Sidious access to its almost unimaginable powers. As with so many of its aspects, the existence of the world between worlds was a reminder that the Force was deeper, richer and stranger than what any scholar or tradition could know.