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
