Watching “Star Wars” again today, Yoda explained that the Force “surrounds us and penetrates us.” Another way of saying it is that the Force is omnipresent, therefore within us. Such a description makes it sound quite similar to what we in the West call God, what Chinese call Tao, and what those in India call Brahman.

In India, people have contacted Brahman and have come to live in harmony and conscious connection with It through yoga and meditation. Having practiced both since the age of 17, I’ve seen first-hand how powerful and effective the latter is as a tool to expand consciousness and connect the meditator to the Source. In India, that source is the higher Self. The meditation that I practiced from my teen years and taught for more than 30 years, until 2010, was Transcendental Meditation (TM) and, since then, the Higher Self Healing Meditation that I founded as a way to make an effortless style of mantra meditation more affordable for the average person than the enormous fees that the TM organization has historically charged Yoda told Luke he’d know the Force when his mind was calm and at peace. Qui-Gon Jinn told Anakin to “learn to quiet your mind,” and Obi-Wan Kenobi told Luke to “let go of thoughts to hear the Force.” Meditation effectively quiets the mind and relaxes the body, so that one can truly be deeply calm and at peace.

Physiological research on Transcendental Meditation, for example, has shown that the technique produces a level of rest that´s qualitatively twice as deep as the deepest point in a night´s sleep, while the mind is even more alert than it is in normal wakefulness, as measured by EEG equipment. This restful alertness is a fourth state of consciousness, distinct from the changing waking, dreaming, and deep sleep. I use the word "changing" deliberately because this fourth state is non-changing.

What´s so interesting about both Transcendental Meditation and Higher Self Healing Meditation, techniques that I’ve taught to so many hundreds of people, is that both are practiced in an absolutely effortless manner. In other words, no concentration or control of the mind is used; there’s no individual effort employed to direct the outcome of the experience. So what makes these methods so effective if it’s not the efforts of the practitioners?

To understand this we need to understand two major phenomena in our lives that we notice every single day. The first is the transitions between the changing states of waking, dreaming, and deep sleep.

The second is what motivates the mind itself.

Effortless Transitions

When you go to sleep at night, you set up an initial condition, consisting of turning off the light, and laying prone on a bed. No amount of trying will enable you to fall asleep; in fact, any trying keeps you awake longer.

It is not within your ability to speed up the process of going from waking to sleeping because falling asleep is the domain of a higher power. That power goes by many names, but in a galaxy far, far away it’s called the Force.

The Force also shifts you from sleeping to dreaming, and, if you don’t use an alarm, an iPhone, a significant other, a child, or a pet or grandchild, you´ll get you up naturally. In other words, Nature will get you up. And Nature is another name for the Force.

The Motivation of Happiness

At the depths of the mind of Luke Skywalker, you and me, is a field of deep peace, calmness and happiness. One day years back in Woodstock, New York, I gave a talk on Transcendental Meditation standing in my living room, in front of sliding glass doors, which looked out onto a deck; beyond that deck was a backyard area and, beyond that, woods. I explained to the people in front of me that every mind moves to greater happiness, if given the chance, without any effort whatsoever.

As I said that, several folks suddenly got up to look behind me. So I turned around, curious to see what they were looking at. A mother deer and her baby fawns had just emerged from the woods and were gamboling across the field. No effort was needed for these people to switch their attention from listening to me talking about the nature of the mind to spontaneously shift to greater happiness, to watching these deer. The reason, of course, is because watching deer is more enjoyable than listening to a lecture.

Both of the meditation techniques I’ve taught for decades give the minds of the many hundreds of people who I taught the opportunity to move towards the greater happiness that exists at the depths of their minds, in the Transcendent area beyond change. You don’t need to believe in gravity to fall into a swimming pool, if you lean in far enough. You don’t have to be British like Isaac Newton who formulated the Law of Gravitation, and you don’t have to be from India like the yogis who brought effortless meditation into the world, to experience the happiness deep within your mind, if you practice Transcendental Meditation or Higher Self Healing Meditation. What you do need, though, is a mantra that best suits your nervous system, and then the effortless manner of using it, so the Force can move your consciousness from waking to the fourth state known as pure consciousness.

The Force is always moving you toward greater happiness, towards the expanded consciousness of the fourth state, and to the enlightened state of Self-Realization, the fifth state of human consciousness.