Luminous Life: How the Science of Light Unlocks the Art of Living
232
Luminous Life: How the Science of Light Unlocks the Art of Living
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Overview
Living in the light: We are all aware of the impact of sunlight on a plant’s growth and development. But few of us realize that a plant actually “sees” where light is emanating from and positions itself to be in optimal alignment with it. This phenomenon, however, is not just occurring in the plant kingdom — humans are also fundamentally directed by light.
The intersection of science and spirituality: In Luminous Life, Dr. Jacob Israel Liberman integrates scientific research, clinical practice, and direct experience to demonstrate how the luminous intelligence we call light effortlessly guides us toward health, contentment, and a life filled with purpose.
If you have read Barbara Brennan’s Hands of Light or Light Emerging, you’re going to love Jacob Liberman’s Luminous Life.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781608685172 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | New World Library |
| Publication date: | 02/13/2018 |
| Pages: | 232 |
| Sales rank: | 394,948 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Introduction
The most important things in life are our health and happiness. Yet most of us are neither healthy nor happy. We've become so driven by our ideas about life, that we have actually forgotten how to live. Our stress levels have risen, resulting in more disease and discontent than ever before. Is it possible that our way of life is actually preventing us from experiencing the things we cherish most?
Nowadays, we are told that the key to living a successful life is to 'be present'. This is considered one of the most important goals for attaining optimal health, peak performance and lasting happiness. Type this into Google, and you are met with headlines like "How to Be Present" or "5 Steps for Being Present." If you watched the women's eight rowing finals at the Rio Olympics, you heard the commentator say, "The women need to be present every stroke — their rhythm is in the moment — they're living in the moment — being the best they can be." So many people yearn to be present that entire retreats revolve around that concept.
There are millions of websites, books and motivational talks encouraging us to stay in the now. We're told to let go of our limiting beliefs, show up for each moment, and "create" the life we've always wanted.
We've heard it again and again. We've bought into it. We believe in being present. And yet, it continually eludes us because of a great misconception.
When our thoughts wander or we catch ourselves worrying, we attempt to refocus on the now, as if we lack the ability to be present without effort. Why does trying to be present feel like we're chasing our shadow—no matter how hard we try, it always outruns us? The truth is, we can't create presence, but we can receive it. Presence is not something we have to strive to attain; it is merely the result of merging with what life brings us in each moment, because receiving presence is how the intelligence of life guides all living beings.
Many self-help titles are based on the idea of "making things happen" or "manifesting." Based on these tomes, most people are under the impression that they have to work at finding and creating the life they want. In my experience, the idea that we have to search for something in life is a fallacy, and when we see this truth, everything changes for us. The struggle is over because we finally realize that something is always searching for us, guiding us toward our life's work and highest calling. It is called light. This is not the light we experience as brightness, but the invisible light of consciousness the Bible refers to as God and quantum physicists equate with the ground of reality. It's the intelligence of life.
More to Vision than Meets the Eye
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 and, most importantly, 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 of the first patented, clinically proven, and FDA-cleared medical device that significantly improved vision performance in 2006 and contributed to my induction as President of the International Society for the Study of Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine (ISSSEEM) in 2010.
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, but light seeks us out and guides usin 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; we literally have light emanating 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's why their eyes sparkle. As we grow from babies, who exist in this unfettered state to adults who are taught to look for life, look for love, look for work, we overlook the fact that our eyes and our minds are not designed to look for light, but to respond to light.
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. What's more, this entire process occurs before the conscious mind thinks about it and directs us toward what to look at. In addition, cryptochrome, the chemical "sixth sense," which orients animals with the earth's electromagnetic field, has recently been found at highly concentrated levels in our eyes, 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 isn't 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—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. There was a lack of congruence between what their eyes and their mind were seeing, interfering 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 80-90% 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 already know what it feels like when you are at the pharmacy without your reading glasses, and are trying to read the small print on the label of a supplement container. The harder you try, the more your eyes strain. Yet, the text on the container still doesn't 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 can't 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 such awareness is curative, once you've experienced it, you won't 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 as our allergies to life. It is very difficult to experience presence if you have learned to brace against it or attempt to escape what life presents or triggers in you. Presence isn't about picking and choosing your experience: Yes, I'll be present to this; No, I won't be present to that. The intelligence of life is constantly directing us toward presence. It's 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're 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 simultaneously able to experience greater presence with the life experiences that previously triggered them.
What's 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's 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 didn't let anything get by me; by Sunday, I was picking cigarette butts up 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 sense of spaciousness and ease that often eludes you, actualizes.
I now know that life is continually 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 develop a real sense of self-respect, knowing that whatever life brings, we will meet it 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 (1991) and Take Off Your Glasses And See (1995) shared revolutionary ideas, therapeutic modalities 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 scienceto 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 connectin between light, vision and consciousness and its inseparable impact on presence. In doing so, 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, and provides 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 up 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.
On the other hand, if we stop trying to be present, but 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 there are no decisions and no choices to make. There's no confusion, second-guessing, effort, thinking, or searching for answers. There is just beingness: an acceptance of life as it is.
And this is when life becomes magical. We not only feel better, but 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, something profound happens: we become increasingly aware of experiences just before they occur and can now "welcome" them. It's 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've learned because it has transformed my life, and I believe it can transform yours as well.
Table of Contents
IntroductionChapter One: How Light Guides Us
Chapter Two: The Light within Us
Chapter Three: Living on Light
Chapter Four: The Intelligence of Life
Chapter Five: The Light in Our Dreams
Chapter Six: Escaping the Mind Field
Chapter Seven: Discovering the Genius within Us
Chapter Eight: Awareness is Curative
Chapter Nine: What Takes Your Breath Away
Chapter Ten: The True Law of Attraction
Chapter Eleven: Full Spectrum Life
Chapter Twelve: Living in a World of Technology
Chapter Thirteen: Looking Less, Seeing More
Chapter Fourteen: What's Catching Your Eye
EpilogueWhat People are Saying About This
Praise for Luminous Life“A brilliant synthesis of modern science and philosophical wisdom. Jacob Liberman has managed to unravel the secrets of light and offer them to the world as a source of profound transformation and healing.”
— Bruce H. Lipton, PhD, cell biologist and bestselling author of The Biology of Belief
“After reading Luminous Life, you will truly see more than you ever imagined.”
— Larry Dossey, MD, author of One Mind
“Luminous Life is an exploration into light and consciousness and helps us to see their impact on every aspect of our humanity.”
— Deepak Chopra, MD, author of You Are the Universe
“There are many paths to explore consciousness. Dr. Liberman’s path — the path of light and vision — is beautifully explored in Luminous Life. I highly recommend this book!”
— Amit Goswami, PhD, quantum physicist and author of The Self-Aware Universe
“Luminous Life is a 20/20 lens through which we are able to see — perhaps for the very first time — the luminous nature of existence, of presence, of Self.” Praise for Dr. Jacob Israel Liberman’s Work
— Michael Bernard Beckwith, author of Spiritual Liberation
— Eckhart Tolle, author of The Power of Now“Jacob Liberman is one of my favorite teachers!”
— Louise Hay, author of You Can Heal Your Life“The ideas that Jacob shares . . . reflect the emerging understanding . . . that awareness changes all experience without exception.”
— Gary Zukav, author of The Seat of the Soul“I love this book [Wisdom from an Empty Mind]!”
— Neale Donald Walsch, author of Conversations with God“Profound and deceptively simple insights.”
— Bonnie Raitt
“It was as if I was hearing my own voice.”
— Ram Dass, author of Be Here Now“Jacob Liberman . . . guides us into a powerfully new view of ourselves, our relationships and our inner and outer vision.”
— John Gray, PhD, author of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus“The sensitivity, deep humanity, and exquisite insight contained in Dr. Liberman’s wonderful work make it a manual for a whole new order of being.”
— Jean Houston, author of The Possible Human“Dr. Jacob Liberman is at the cutting edge of enlightened technology, blending physics and metaphysics to their best advantage. He is one of the rare breed of people in eclectic fields who have tapped in to deep wisdom principles and applied their insights and research to provide revolutionary ‘new’ understanding for all who ‘have the eyes to see.’ ”
— Dan Millman, author of Way of the Peaceful Warrior“Jacob Liberman’s pioneer thinking takes the wonder of light and light therapy to a new level of insight by blending it with deeper health wisdom and spiritual understanding.”
— Gabriel Cousens, MD, author of Spiritual Nutrition“Dr. Liberman’s book [Light: Medicine of the Future] is a milestone forward concerning the therapeutic effect of light via the eyes.”
— Fritz Hollwich, MD, author of The Influence of Ocular Light Perception on Metabolism in Man and in Animal“Light is one of the critical environmental factors for total health; indeed, ‘the eyes are the windows of the soul.’ [Light: Medicine of the Future] helps provide one of those windows.”
— Norman Shealy, MD, founding president of the American Holistic Medical Association
“Combining his many years of personal and clinical experience with the frequently amazing results achieved by his patients, Dr. Jacob Liberman has developed a foundational model for a new medical paradigm.”
— Dr. John Ott, pioneer in the field of photobiology and author of Health and Light“In Luminous Life, Dr. Jacob Liberman articulates truths that enhance your natural brilliance and allow the intelligence of the universe to expand your lens on life.”
— Donald M. Epstein, author of The 12 Stages of Healing and founder of EpiEnergetics
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