Читать книгу Luminous Life - Jacob Israel Liberman - Страница 10

INTRODUCTION

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 as our allergies to life. Presence is difficult to experience if 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.