In the Forward to Jacob Liberman’s book, Light – Medicine of the Future, John Ott, a pioneer in the field of photobiology, asks the question, "Are we to totally discount our own abilities to see, hear and feel our everyday experience, trusting only the findings of others who differ from us in their view of reality?" 1 The "real" is often hidden beneath the exceptional. The optical illusions researched by Goethe were accurate illustrations of the behavior of light. We must be open to new insights. Present day scientific methods are not eternal. They do not have the final answer and so cannot be allowed to be an absolute norm for what is scientific.

Jacob Liberman is an Optometrist and also holds a Ph.D. in vision science that he received for his pioneering work in phototherapy. He worked out of the Aspen Center for Energy Medicine in Aspen, Colorado, where he was president of the College of Syntonic Optometry, and also of Universal Light Technologies Limited, a company that researched and developed photo therapeutic devices for healing. As the year 2008 begins he lives in Hawaii and continues to do extensive personal consultations.

His approach integrates scientific research, clinical experience, and his own intuitive insights. The college that he led has advocated the use of light therapy by way of the eyes since its inception in the 1930’s. His own painful life experiences led him to a number of insights. First of all, he states that most of what life reveals to us comes when we are not looking for anything specific. In fact when we are too specific, too narrow in terms of what we are looking for, we tend to miss everything we were not looking for. "People are meant to see passively not actively….our eyes are meant to see for us, if we let them…vision is meant to be effortless." (xx) As a result of this insight he stopped wearing glasses and began to actively experiment with the workings of his mind, especially with the integration of mind and eyes, the relationship between the inner and the outer light.

In 1977 he learned of a specific form of light therapy called Syntonics that "therapeutically utilizes different portions of the visible light spectrum to treat, by way of the eyes, an array of bodily conditions." (xxi) He attended a course at the College of Syntonic Optometry and thus began his life’s work. Liberman concludes the Preface to his book with a concise statement of the basic assumptions upon which his book is written: "Our task is to take in and utilize light so that we may merge with our true selves and our destiny, thus facilitating the healing of our planet. As each of us becomes whole we radiate light – light from within – unimpeded by our self-imposed emotional and physical blocks. The medicine of the future is light. We are healing ourselves with that which is our essence." (xxii)

His book is all about the science of light, a science that synthesizes scientific knowledge, intuitive knowing, health and personal evolution. Liberman uses the term "science" in its original Latin derivation, that is, "knowledge" and he includes induction, deduction, and intuition as all equal and reliable ways of knowing. He appears to rely most heavily on intuition as the beginning of the scientific process. That is not an unusual stance. In the late nineteenth century, the great philosopher and educator, John Dewey, wrote that all knowing, all science, begins with a hunch, a felt need, an intuition. Further thought and refinement of that hunch results in one or more hypotheses which are then experimentally affirmed or rejected by means of the remaining steps of the scientific method. Liberman maintains that the synthesized nature of the science of light provides a new paradigm in healing. He writes that light is at the core of the new "energy medicine" (healing light energy) of the late twentieth century.

…"light is the basic component from which all life originates, develops, heals, evolves…we are about to see a new marriage between the ‘intuitive’ and the ‘rational’ sciences – a marriage that is bonded by light…Miracle after miracle has convinced me that this science of the future is an investigation of inner space rather than outer space." (xxv) We are seeing this new marriage in 2008.

Endnote

1 Jacob Liberman, Light-Medicine of the Future (Santa Fe, New Mexico: Bear and Company, 1991) p. xxv.

This and subsequent direct references from this work are reprinted by permission of Inner Traditions International, Rochester, Vermont.