quickly, effortlessly, and instinctually, enabling the performer to embody complete aliveness, presence, clarity, and grace. In this book, Liberman provides one-minute meditations that help all of us enter “the zone” and live there. What a gift!
For all parts of the body to cooperate so perfectly some form of rapid cell-to-cell communication must be taking place. Light provides the perfect communication mechanism for high-speed physiological integration because it travels at the speed of light. Recently the new multidisciplinary study of biophotonics has emerged. Liberman’s research and insights into light and vision are vital to biophoton research.
Dr. Jacob Israel Liberman is a true pioneer and visionary. His work with vision has led to valuable insights about light and sight, uncovering new ways of seeing and living. I cannot imagine a more sacred and gratifying journey than helping people maintain what is their most precious gift: their sight. Some of Liberman’s discoveries were so remarkable that he was compelled to do careful scientific research to convince himself of their validity. The result has been a series of outstanding articles published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, establishing him as one of the world’s most creative and highly regarded vision scientists. In Luminous Life: How the Science of Light Unlocks the Art of Living, Liberman makes his extraordinary discoveries available to all of us. This is far more than a book to read and enjoy — it is a life-changing journey.
— James L. Oschman, PhD, author of
Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis
Forty years ago, while practicing as an optometrist, I experienced a sudden and very significant improvement in eyesight, with no measurable change in my eyeglass prescription. The effect of that miraculous event, which has now persisted for forty years, led me to the realization that while we look with our eyes, we do not “see” with them. This spurred me on a mission to discover the source of our true seeing: the connection between light, vision, and consciousness. Most importantly, it led me to ask, who am I, and who is truly the seer?
These questions drew me to study quantum physics and neuroscience, which inspired me to deeply explore the state of mind that led to my profound vision improvement. So I began a real-time experiment on the workings of my mind. My hope was to uncover a portal into the state of consciousness where profound healing occurs, which in turn would allow me to teach others how to replicate my experience. What I discovered over the years transformed my life and revealed some fundamental truths about light and vision. These insights allowed me to assist thousands of patients in restoring their natural eyesight without the use of glasses, forming the basis of my first two books, Light: Medicine of the Future and Take Off Your Glasses and See.
What followed over the next twenty-five years was a profound exploration into life, consciousness, and that elusive state we call presence. My discoveries, presented herein, helped me unravel how light continually guides our life. In addition, those breakthroughs were foundational to my development in 2006 of the first patented, clinically proven, and FDA-cleared medical device that significantly improved vision performance and contributed to my induction as president of the International Society for the Study of Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine (ISSSEEM) in 2010.
Light’s Guidance
To better understand my findings, let’s start with light and a broader understanding of it. Light is more than waves and particles. It is a purveyor of consciousness. Light is not just “out there,” something we need to find in order to see. Light seeks us out and guides us in the same way it seeks out and directs a plant to grow toward it. There is something inherently alive in it. And, astonishing as it might seem, light not only enters us through our eyes and skin but also emanates from within us. Consider how babies perceive the world around them. Light ignites their awareness — unobstructed by thought, belief, or worry — and it radiates back into the world as an expression of pure presence. That is why their eyes sparkle. As we grow from babies who exist in this unfettered state into adults who are taught to look for life, love, and work, we overlook the fact that our eyes and minds are not designed to look for light but to respond to it.
Pioneering experiments have confirmed that the eyes, which contain approximately one billion working parts, not only detect single photons of light before they take shape in form but also assimilate and distribute that information to our brains at unimaginable speeds. This entire process occurs before the conscious mind thinks about it and directs us toward what to look at. In addition, researchers have found cryptochrome, the chemical “sixth sense” that orients animals with the earth’s electromagnetic field, at highly concentrated levels in the human eye, calibrating us with the unseen “clock and compass” that guides group migrations of many species and even their reproductive cycles.
Looking for Presence
Despite popular belief, attaining presence is not about thinking or trying to be here now. Rather, it is a naturally occurring state that arises when our eyes and mind, triggered by light, focus on the same place at the same time. In response to light’s invitation and guidance, our eyes begin an intricate dance of aiming, focusing, tracking, and teaming. When light first “awakens” us, our eyes aim toward its emanation, initiating an all-encompassing presence. Though we often relate presence to attention, it has no tension associated with it. It is not a forced voluntary process of selecting one aspect of our environment to focus on while ignoring others. Presence is an involuntary response to an invitation by life’s intelligence pointing us toward our maximum potential.
Our degree of presence is directly related to how effortlessly and accurately our eyes are able to aim. When the eyes aim effectively, making eye contact with — and thus, acknowledging — what has called to them, we experience congruence. This is a state of coming together, the perfect alignment of our outer and inner worlds, where extraneous noise around us diminishes.
I discovered this during my career as an optometrist and vision scientist. When patients came to me with vision problems, I found that most of the time their eyes would look at one spot, but their mind would be elsewhere. This incongruity between what their eyes and their mind were seeing interfered with their natural ability to experience presence. In one of my research studies, published in 1976, I found that nearly 70 percent of the participants were not looking where they thought they were looking, a sign that their eyes and mind were not converged on the same point. In addition, more than half of the subjects were looking too hard, revealing a tendency to push rather than allow things to unfold before their eyes. I also observed that the more my patients worked at seeing or understanding something, the more they held their breath and the less they actually saw. However, when their natural breathing cycle was restored, they relaxed and their vision and learning ability significantly improved.
This is why presence is so rare. When our physical eyes (which receive 80 to 90 percent of our life experience) are not aligned with our “mind’s eye,” it is impossible to experience presence or oneness. If you are middle-aged or older and have taken to using reading glasses, then you likely know what it feels like to try to read the small print on the label of a supplement container at the pharmacy without your reading glasses. The harder you try, the more your eyes strain. Yet the text on the container still does not come into focus. The way to see the text more clearly lies in releasing your effort and softening your focus, allowing your mind and your eyes to naturally align themselves. You cannot force this, but you can learn how to allow it naturally with a simple one-minute vision exercise that I reveal later in this book.
Using just a string and a few beads, you can see my point and directly experience your eyes and mind aligning, not by forcing the process but by allowing it. Since awareness is curative, once you have experienced it, you will not go back to your old way of seeing or being.
Are You Allergic to Life?
Another reason why presence often eludes us is due to our emotional pain, or what I refer to