to the brain’s visual cortex, enabling us to see. It travels along several different routes that involve the entire brain, significantly affecting all our life-sustaining functions as well as our emotions, balance, and coordination, to name a few. For example, light entering the eyes goes to the “brain’s brain,” the hypothalamus, which regulates the autonomic nervous system and the endocrine system, as well as our reaction and adaptation to stress. Using light-activated information, the hypothalamus communicates with the body’s true “master gland,” the pineal. The pineal is the same structure that allows humpback whales to use light during their annual migrations.
Referred to as the “third eye” by Indian mystics and the “seat of the soul” by seventeenth-century mathematician and philosopher Descartes, the pineal gland, the body’s “regulator of regulators,” shares information about environmental light changes and the earth’s electromagnetic field with every cell of the body at the same instance of time. In doing so, each cell effortlessly upgrades and synchronizes its function with Mother Nature, bringing us to our natural state of oneness with no effort or thinking required.
So when light contacts the body’s energy field, it resonates first with the pineal. The pineal, acting as the conductor of the endocrine symphony, then entrains the pituitary, thyroid, thymus, pancreas, gonads, and adrenals, translating light energy into electricity, magnetism, and eventually to chemical energy itself. It has now been confirmed that the order of endocrine entrainment in the human body correlates completely with ancient medical systems that describe the workings of the body’s major energy centers or chakras.
In addition to the visual and nonvisual effects of light by way of the eyes, light also guides the trillions of cells in our body via a process called photobiomodulation, catalyzing a cascade of events that stimulate and/or inhibit cellular activity down to the DNA. This process reveals that when the cell’s powerhouse, the mitochondria, absorbs light, it significantly impacts the production of adenosine triphosphate. This is the energy used by cells to power the metabolic processes that create DNA, ribonucleic acid, proteins, and enzymes, as well as other biological materials required to repair or regenerate cellular components, nurture cell division, and restore homeostasis.
All biological life is composed of, and dependent on, light. The term solar system means “of or derived from the sun.” In fact, 98 percent of the sun’s light enters the body through the eyes, and the other 2 percent enters by way of the skin. Thus, light is the primal nourishment for life. The body is a biological light receptor, the eyes are transparent biological windows designed to receive and emit light, and all physiological functions are light dependent. For example, routine exposure to sunlight reduces resting heart rate, respiratory rate, blood pressure, and blood sugar, while increasing energy, strength, endurance, stress tolerance, and the ability of the blood to absorb and carry oxygen.
After forty-five years of investigating light and its therapeutic applications, I have concluded that the intelligence of life summons us through light, guiding and illuminating our entire life’s journey. Light and life are inseparable.
Each one of you has a priceless treasure: there is light emanating from your eyes, which illuminates mountains, rivers, and the great earth.
— ZEN MASTER CHANGQING DA’AN
Our eyes not only absorb light, but they also reflect and emit it, causing our eyes to literally light up under certain conditions and appear dim under others. Think of the last time you interacted with a baby. Perhaps after you made some cooing sounds or funny faces, you focused on the baby’s eyes and noticed their sparkle. Yet when you look at someone who is in distress or is not feeling well, their eyes seem to have lost their luster. What’s behind this phenomenon? As is often attributed to Shakespeare, the eyes are the windows of the soul.
In chapter 1, we saw that many creatures take part in extraordinary journeys guided by something outside them that is inseparably aligned with something inside them. Our life journey is also guided in the same way by light. When this alignment happens, a state of oneness known as presence arises within us; our eyes light up and the next step of our journey becomes evident.
I first became aware of this phenomenon during my third year of optometric training, when prominent behavioral optometrist John W. Streff visited Southern College of Optometry. At the time, Streff was the director of vision research at the Gesell Institute of Child Development at Yale. He had become known for describing a constellation of visual symptoms that resulted from stress and that is now called the Streff syndrome. Shortly after he arrived, Streff was casually chatting with a group of students and a journalist in the student union when he asked, “Could I have a volunteer?” The journalist, a young man in his twenties, raised his hand.
Dr. Streff used a sophisticated piece of equipment called a retinoscope to shine light into the journalist’s eye so he could observe the reflection (or “reflex”) of light off the retina.
“I want you to imagine that you are playing tennis,” Dr. Streff said.
As the man imagined, Dr. Streff peered through the top of the retinoscope, his face about twenty inches from the man’s eyes. A few moments of quiet anticipation passed. Then Dr. Streff said, “You just hit the ball. . .there, you hit another one. . .and another one.”
He was joking, I thought. After all, how could Dr. Streff know when this journalist was imagining hitting a ball?
“There, you hit it. . .you hit it again,” Dr. Streff continued to announce.
The man began to laugh. We all began to laugh too, although we did not yet know why. Then the journalist exclaimed, “You told me what I was doing just before I did it in my mind!”
Although this may sound strange, in a recently published paper in the journal PLOS Biology, an international team of researchers suggests that a lag exists between seeing something and becoming aware of it. According to the new “time slice theory,” supported by previously published psychological and behavioral experiments, our brains process unconscious information in brief frames of time and then splice the frames together like a movie into what we perceive as a continuous flow of conscious information.
In essence, we do not experience stimuli when they actually occur but much later, relatively speaking, when we become conscious of them. Another way of saying this is that our eyes respond to light well before it is rendered into our conscious experience of life. As we become increasingly more aware of the “just noticeable differences” occurring within us and in the world around us, we respond to subtler and subtler aspects of life, eventually seeing what is invisible to others.
I did not realize it then, but Dr. Streff’s awareness was highly developed, allowing him to notice when the light emitted from his retinoscope fused with the light emitted from the journalist’s eyes, providing him insights the journalist was not yet aware of.
“Let’s do it again,” Dr. Streff said. The journalist continued to visualize a game of tennis.
“That was a forehand,” Dr. Streff said.
“Nice backhand,” he continued. “Oh, you just hit a lob,” and on the commentary went.
Blown away by the demonstration, we all started talking at once, asking question after question. That day it became clear to me that there was an aspect of vision that had nothing to do with eye exams or glasses. I had had many experiences during my life where I sensed something before it occurred. But I could not imagine, at the time, how by peering into someone’s eyes Dr. Streff seemed able to see what another person was imagining. I was so inspired that I offered to drive Dr. Streff everywhere he went during his visit so I could question him.
Soon