How Light Guides Us - Thrive Global

In this very moment, light is guiding your eyes to these words, illuminating meaning and creating a connection between you and this book. That connection is called presence. Without light you would not be able to see these words. They simply would not appear to your eyes. Light literally brings the words to you, creating a sense of inseparability between perception and meaning. The light that brings you the words you read also brings “to light” the people, situations, and opportunities required to spur your evolution. It takes you by the hand and leads you where you need to be and when you need to be there. And light’s guidance has no side effects. However, we must remember how to recognize it.

It is the same with everything we see. Light — from the sun, from lamps, from fire — reflects off objects and interacts with our eyes, releasing energy and information about those objects, which are then magically transformed into an image that appears full of light. But, it is not actually light. It is just a mental interpretation that we experience as brightness.

Many people think of the eyes as two cameras mounted on the face, but in reality they are elaborate and complex extensions of the brain, and each of these extensions is designed to both absorb and emit light. Each eye contains 126 million photoreceptors. Approximately 95 percent of these receptors (called rods) are distributed spaciously throughout the retina. The other 5 percent (called cones) are primarily compacted into a tiny area called the macula. Rods are extremely sensitive, functioning under low-level light conditions and responding to motion. Cones are less sensitive, adapted to color perception and high-resolution vision.

Based on their design, rods seem to be able to sense things before our conscious mind registers their form. In fact, researchers from Rockefeller University and the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Austria recently demonstrated that the human eye can detect a single photon of light. Since a photon is the smallest undividable unit of energy, this discovery clearly confirms that our eyes are designed to operate at the quantum level of reality, and our vision has been honed by evolution to function at its maximum potential.

Yet photons are technically invisible. They do not create an image that the brain can see, yet this minute amount of light still “calls” the eye, giving new meaning to eighteenth-century essayist Jonathan Swift’s statement, “Real vision is the ability to see the invisible.” In response to this infinitesimally subtle invitation, the eye reflexively moves toward that which is calling it, and it does this without our conscious awareness. According to Alipasha Vaziri, the study’s lead researcher, “The most amazing thing is that it’s not like seeing light. It’s almost a feeling, at the threshold of imagination.”

Cones inspect things carefully when the situation demands it but require significantly brighter light to do so. So when your optometrist asks you which is better, number one or number two, your cones allow you to know the difference. As you can see, vision is primarily a global process that continuously aligns us with the greater whole and zeros in on details only when necessary. Our life experiences are primarily the result of the ongoing interaction that links our eyes with light.

The process of vision — our response to what we see — begins within a few quadrillionths of a second after light enters the eye, enabling the information encoded in light to be transmitted to, and interpreted by, the brain and all systems connected to it at light speed. We might think, “Look at that car.” In reality, light bounced off the car, attracted our eye, entered our brain, and sent signals down various nerve endings long before the thought “Look at that” surfaced.

Hence the wisdom behind the expression “It caught my eye.” Yet rarely do we ask what the “it” is to which we are referring. My sense is that this “it” is the same light the Bible refers to as “God,” and quantum physicists describe as the formless bedrock of consciousness guiding every step of our lives — the intelligence of life.

Dr. Jacob Israel Liberman’s discoveries in the fields of light, vision, and consciousness, have been enthusiastically endorsed by luminaries in the fields of health, science, and spirituality, including Deepak Chopra, Bruce Lipton, and Eckhart Tolle. He is the author of Light: Medicine Of The Future, Take Off Your Glasses And See and Wisdom From An Empty Mind. His newest book, Luminous Life: How the Science of Light Unlocks the Art of Living, reveals how light guides our every step, so we may fulfill our reason for being.

Written by Jacob Israel Liberman