Luminous Life. Jacob Israel Liberman

you have learned to brace against it or attempt to escape what life presents or triggers in you. Presence is not about picking and choosing your experience: yes, I will be present to this; no, I will not be present to that. The intelligence of life is constantly directing us toward presence. It is our opportunity to experience how life guides us in each and every moment, allowing us to breathe easily. Yet early-life traumas along with our emotional predispositions cause us to automatically recoil from particular people and situations. We are usually not aware of why this is happening. All we see are people and experiences that feel scary, uncomfortable, or overwhelming to us.

      This is where the science of light and life magically unite, because we tend to respond to color in the same way we respond to life. Throughout my career I found that my patients were allergic to the colors that, on a vibrational level, corresponded to the life experiences they found difficult to process. So when they viewed those colors, they had reactions that affected them physically and emotionally, filling their minds and blocking their connection to presence. Once they used “color homeopathy,” which I will explain and demonstrate later in the book, and were able to embrace the colors that previously had caused reactions, they were able to experience greater presence with the life experiences that previously triggered them.

      What Is Catching Your Eye?

      I learned a great deal from observing my children when they were very young. Like most children, they often played with toys, leaving them out when they were finished. I repeatedly asked them to put their toys away, which only seemed to work when I insisted. I then had a strong feeling that if I see it, it is my responsibility. I began wondering what would happen if I started responding to everything that caught my eye. So I began an around-the-clock practice that went like this: anything that entered my awareness became my responsibility, anything that was my responsibility I would attend to, and anything I attended to I would complete. I did this practice for a week and did not let anything get by me; by Sunday, I was picking up cigarette butts off the street.

      After that week I was a more contented person. I realized how much time I had spent worrying about my circumstances, hoping they would change. But whenever I tried to decide what to do next, there was never any clarity. During this experiment, however, clarity emerged on its own, as whatever called to me became the next logical thing to do. This practice in presence — a kind of moving meditation — made me feel that I no longer needed to prioritize my schedule because life had already done that, drawing my awareness to whatever required its attention. In addition, my presence — and in turn, my vision — deepened as I stopped ignoring what I was seeing. I had the sense then that ignoring what we see might actually be at the root of much of the vision loss I saw in my practice. In this book you will be encouraged to perform an exercise to “see” for yourself just how life-changing something so simple can be. In no time at all, a renewed sense of spaciousness and ease emerges.

      I now know that life is continuously serving us our curriculum, and if we naturally respond moment by moment to what is calling us, we not only will experience an amazing state of grace and presence, but we will also develop a real sense of self-respect, knowing that we will meet whatever life brings head-on. By living choicelessly we benefit from the guiding compass of the universe, experiencing less stress and more joy, inspiration, love, and gratitude.

      Merging with Life

      My first two books, Light: Medicine of the Future and Take Off Your Glasses and See, shared revolutionary ideas, therapeutic treatments, and a directory of practitioners who offered these modalities. Luminous Life: How the Science of Light Unlocks the Art of Living combines forty-five years of clinical research and direct experience with contemporary science to create a new philosophy of life that can be implemented and integrated by you at home, resulting in transformation that is rapid, significant, and permanent.

      Luminous Life explores the connection between light, vision, and consciousness, and its inseparable impact on presence. It brings you to the intersection of science and spirituality, quantum physics and mysticism, and neuroscience and Eastern philosophy. Grounded in science, supported by research and personal experience, it reformulates two millennia of spiritual wisdom into a practical philosophy along with the tools to help you finally experience that elusive and profound state we call presence.

      When we “work” at being present, we remain locked in a pattern of excessive effort and thinking. Rather than responding to light’s invitation to full awareness, we remain lost in thought, plans, and anxiety, and we see the world through the tunnel vision created by those concerns. Those thoughts lock our reality into place, freezing light into matter.

      If we stop trying to be present and instead tap into our breath, align our eyes and mind congruently, and respond to life’s invitations, presence finds us. Presence is what arises when we embrace all that life (and light) has to offer. When we stop searching, we start finding. By looking less, we see more. When we allow the light within us to merge with the light that guides us, we experience oneness. Without any effort, we relax into a state where we have no decisions to make. There is no confusion, second-guessing, thinking, or searching for answers. There is just beingness — an acceptance of life as it is.

      With presence, life becomes magical. We not only feel better, but our stress dissipates and our bodies heal. We respond to life more fluidly, developing an ability to be with whatever arises, flowing in response to life in the same way that children do. Infants and children do not look for anything; they simply respond to whatever calls their attention. When we reawaken this innate ability in ourselves, our lives transform radically. We enter a state that some call “the zone,” “the flow,” or even “genius consciousness,” in which “we” disappear and our knowledge is no longer limited to information received from the five senses. We become more empathetic toward ourselves and others, and more intuitive. Rather than reacting to one situation after another, we start flowing with life and, over time, we become increasingly aware of experiences just before they occur and can now “welcome” them. It is a miraculous state of being.

      What you might call the “divine inspiration” encoded in light moves us in a direction that is expansive, infusing us with a deep desire — beyond the wish for anything personal or material — to embrace our most potent longing for oneness with the vision we have been given. There remains only a witness who is present, spacious, and imperturbable. Everything appears clear and seems to scintillate. The resulting sense of peace is so blissful that it may bring tears to our eyes.

      No matter how many miracles we experience, each new wonder is always astounding, inviting in more such experiences and reminding us that all of life is literally beyond belief. Over the past twenty-five years I have been transformed from an eye doctor and vision scientist to an “I” doctor fascinated by consciousness and the science of life. Barely a day goes by that I am not in awe of this marvelous world we live in and the people I encounter. I am excited to share what I have learned because it has transformed my life, and I believe it can transform yours as well.

       CHAPTER ONE

       How Light Guides Us

       Whether in the intellectual pursuits of science or in the mystical pursuits of the spirit, the light beckons ahead, and the purpose surging in our nature responds.

       — ARTHUR STANLEY EDDINGTON

      At daybreak in a large lake on the island of Palau in the Philippine Sea, a dance begins. Millions of golden jellyfish, each the size of a teacup, race east toward the light of the rising sun. Once they reach the sun’s early morning rays, they halt. Then slowly, as the sun makes its way east to west, the jellies follow its arc. As dusk falls these unique invertebrates come to rest on the lake’s western shore. The following morning, the dance begins again.

      These jellies are just one of countless species whose life journeys are guided