| Wisdom from an Empty Mind The EDGE Interview with Jacob Liberman by Tim Miejan "Life is what happens to you While you're busy making other plans" -- John Lennon from "Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)" Originally trained as an optometrist, Jacob Liberman's life changed in 1976 when his poor eyesight instantly cleared during a profound meditative experience. From that moment on, he began questioning the standard beliefs and practices of vision and general health care. His search for a new model of healing led him to the field of light and color therapy -- and to the realization that light could be used not only to heal our bodies, but also to heal our lives. In 1991, Jacob's first book, Light: Medicine of the Future (Bear & Company) established him as an authority in the field of light and color therapy. His second book, Take Off Your Glasses and See (Crown, 1995) was inspired by the miraculous healing of his own eyesight, and offered a radically new approach to understanding and healing our vision. His newest book, Wisdom from an Empty Mind, is a compilation of one-page essays and accompanying quotes on topics ranging from awareness and healing to love, relationships and children. It marks Jacob's first collaboration with his son, Erik, and has garnered rave reviews from Neale Donald Walsch, Ram Dass, Louise Hay, Eckhart Tolle, Bonnie Raitt and James Redfield, among others. He spends his time exploring the everyday mysteries of life and sharing his teachings of practical wisdom and grounded spirituality in workshops around the world. The EDGE spoke with Jacob Liberman by phone from his home in Hawaii about the ideas in his book, Wisdom from an Empty Mind. Define what you mean by the phrase, an empty mind. Jacob Liberman: My life seems to be very much about taking care of whatever enters my awareness -- in other words, whatever comes in front of my face, in a very practical sense. I take care of it the moment that it comes in front of my face, whether it be the cleaning of a counter, the washing of a dish or the paying of a bill. I take care of things the moment they come up. What I've noticed in that practice of presence in my everyday life is that my life is full, but my mind is empty -- meaning, I am involved in responding to life rather than spending time trying to figure out what to do about life. The interesting thing I've noticed about that experience is that the mind -- the intellect, which we spend time thinking with -- becomes empty, becomes quieter. What I noticed after years of having this experience is that there is a differentiation between the thoughts that we have and the thoughts that have us. What I mean by that are things that my mind is thinking about and trying to do versus the continual stream of intuitive messages or guidance that each of us is receiving on a moment-by-moment basis. When I speak about that, I want you to know that I'm talking about very practical things, nothing esoteric. A plant is continually receiving information from the intelligence of life that, in some way, guides its growth pattern. Just as there's an intelligence of life that causes everything in nature to work very miraculously, even though we may not understand how it does that, we are also an aspect and expression of life itself. What I've noticed in my own life -- if I am present enough to actually become aware of it -- is that there are things continually entering my awareness that are guiding my every move. When I speak about wisdom from an empty mind, I'm not speaking about good ideas that I have or about how wise I am. It's not personal wisdom, but the wisdom of life itself that is continually present to all of us. We have become so conditioned with thought, because our entire life experience has been about thinking ahead and trying to figure things out and solving problems. What our elders didn't share with us, because they didn't have a direct experience, is that most, if not all, of the problems we encounter in life that we are trying to find solutions for are self-created problems, because we are not present with life. Through years of experimentation, and initially observation with patients when I used to be in the healing field -- mostly from being an ordinary human being and being almost 54, which I'll be this month -- I have gained some insight about an invisible aspect of life that is guiding everything. It's something most of us are unaware of, because it cannot be seen with your eyes, but it certainly is something you can experience quite profoundly. The very first essay in my book, called "How it all started," begins to mention how I began to live my life more spontaneously and tried to enter situations being very prepared, because I was very present rather than rehearsed, as each of us are taught to be. I found rehearsing and planning everything down to the minute actually got in the way of this intelligence from life coming through so I could have revelations on a new level. When I speak about wisdom from an empty mind, I'm speaking about the intelligence of life continually guiding everything in the universe. And there is a way for us, as sensitive human beings, to come into contact with that such that we discover that we don't have to think about anything, that we don't actually have to make decisions, that life already makes us aware of what is the most appropriate movement in the present moment. To give you an idea, in medical research for many years there was a lot of concern about the very best nutritional intake for infants. One thing they did was take a whole range of food, from nutritious foods to junk foods, and put them on the floor. Then they put a group of infants on the floor. They found that the infants were naturally guided to eat the exact food that would give their system the nutrition they were needing in that moment. What that says to me, from the research and from my own direct experience of living, is that there is a guidance system. If we can get hooked up to it or become aware of it, our life becomes much easier. We come to a place where we realize that we don't have to look for things. In fact, life is always looking for us. The things that enter our lives are the aspects of life that are looking for us -- the next step in our journey. This is the way I have been living my life for quite a long time. I've come to discover so many things that are so different from my professional training. I was a scientist, an optometrist, a psychotherapist. The things I am learning from my everyday, practical, ordinary life are so different from what I was taught. And you never could have planned for this to occur. Liberman: I couldn't have planned it. What I keep seeing is that most of us are perceiving life and observing life through the filters of our ideas. There's an ancient Hebrew text that says we do not see things as they are, but we see them as we are. Life is a direct projection of our ideas about life. I have found that to be very true, not only from that statement from the Hebrew writing known as the Talmud, but in clinical study, in a laboratory, I found that when I looked at people's vision, I was about to measure energy, what you would call light, being emitted from their eyes, as if their eyes were projectors of light, as well as receivers of light. This is a concept no one speaks about. Everyone says light from the external world enters our eyes, but no one talks about us projecting out the movie of our ideas about life. What was interesting in my observation of a group of individuals was that, under the exact same lighting conditions -- same day, same time -- every single person had a very different projection of light out of their eyes. You could say that is their energetic fingerprint. The reason I mention this in response to your question is that we are constantly experiencing life out of our ideas. When we are able to experience life directly, without those filters, something very different occurs. We see in a way we've never seen. We hear and feel and smell and taste and touch and beyond in ways that we never have. And it's very profound. We could never think of such profoundness. It's the same type of profoundness that an infant experiences in its everyday relationship with life. Every time something enters its awareness, it's something new. And the child is excited and responds to it. Their eyes, if you will, light up. And what I have found is when I am not thinking about life, but rather, living life, my experience is very miraculous. I don't know how to appropriately describe that in words. But there are smells and sensation that so often slip below my awareness so that I'm not aware of them. All of a sudden, they're there and they are alive, and something very brand new occurs. Through living in this way, I have learned so much about the process of living. I wish I could say it in a more profound way. We have become so conditioned to become successful at this and become successful at that, measuring it by how much money and material possessions we have, or just becoming someone, whatever it is. So few of us are actually successful in our everyday relationship with life, the relationships with our lovers, the relationship with our children, the relationship with our co-workers -- the relationship with all of nature. We have lost some regard for that. I, like everyone else, spent my life in pursuit of those things, and all of a sudden, in the last 25 years I come to realize that, gee, I never found that that ever worked. If you can find a way of being a rich man without making a lot of money, that's quite an amazing feat. The whole world seems to be so fixed on making money, and many people I know have huge amounts of financial wealth, but they're not happy. If only we can become successful at living, such that we truly are living in a state of gratefulness. For example, now I am looking out my window. A bee is getting pollen from a flower. When we can become awed by these simple, everyday miracles -- and just be grateful for them -- then we feel very prosperous in life. That has been a very profound thing for me. I just finished a book tour, half of which I was with my daughter and the other half I was with my son. When I returned home, everyone asked, "Was it successful?" And I said, "What do you mean?" "Well, did you sell a lot of books? Were there a lot of people?" I said, "I don't know if I sold a lot of books. And sometimes there were more people, and sometimes less. But it was an incredibly wonderful experience." They said, "What do you mean?" I said, "I gained such a beautiful experience from showing up, being there on time, sharing with people in an ordinary way, whether it was 3 people or 300 people. At each talk and booksigning I did, I really felt, in my heart of hearts, felt that something really important was happening. It was almost like I was sharing something important about life, and we were all experiencing it in such a way that it would become part of us. And in that way, maybe it would become contagious in the world. And then I could say, "Wow, I've done my work in this world. I'm doing my life's work." These are little important things that, for me, are the cornerstone of my life. They're the foundation of my everyday joy. These are things I feel moved to speak about with people, to share with people and share their experiences. I feel, more than ever right now, that it's a time when we need to look at the way we are relating to ourselves, to each other, to the world, in a very different way. What has been reflected to us, over the last couple of months, is that our relationships with each other, on so many levels, are not working. I want to share with you that I don't have anyone in my life with whom I have unfinished business. There's something about that that feels so comforting in my heart. It allows me to be totally ready to live -- and totally ready if it's my time to go. For whatever reason, these experiences during the past 25 years have blessed my life. Those things are part of what I am here to share in my life with others. Perhaps that's the purpose of why we are having this conversation today. How can we raise our children to maintain that connection with the present moment in their lives, rather than to think and overanalyze everything they do? Liberman: Very simply, always tell them the truth -- whatever the truth is for you. Secondly, children don't need to be taught anything. They are the next generation. They already have within their blueprint pretty much everything we have learned. And just like plants, if the soil is rich and has nourishment, and the water or whatever it is fertilizing that plant, it naturally grows. And it is always reaching for the light, whether it be the light of the sun, or the light of day, or the light of our wisdom that's built into us. From my experience, the only thing we can teach our children is what we think is the way the world works. And the truth is, nobody really knows how it really works. That's why we find ourselves in the position we frequently find ourselves. The other thing is, when our life is really flowing, from my experience, there is no movement in me to have to teach anyone anything. I'm so involved in my life that my actions speak much louder than my words. My sense, and I say this from a direct experience of having helped to bring two children into the world -- they're now grown-ups -- and for many years being both Mommy and Daddy, is that the way we live our lives is the way children model their lives. They don't model it by what we say; they model it by what we do. If they see us being honest in the world, they will develop a sense of integrity. They may not develop it at the moment. All young people are in the process of discovering, as we all are. I can tell you as a man of almost 54, with a father who's 91 and a mother who's 88, that the aspects of me who really describe who Jacob Liberman is, I see those exact same characteristics in my Mom and Dad. Another nature of development is that we have to individuate, to get our own rooting in the soul of earth, of life. Sometimes that individuation comes in a form that looks like rebellion. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, as they say. Now I look at my life, and I have a deep gratitude and appreciation for who my parents are -- not necessarily what they said, but the way they lived had such an imprint upon me. We need to share with our children what's really going on. Now, they always know what's going on. Our sharing is only an example of our congruency. When a child experiences Mom or Dad in a certain way, and Mom and Dad say, "Oh no, that's not going on my life. Everything's fine." The message of what the child is receiving is that what's going on in the inside and what's happening on the outside are two different things. Then we develop a separation between ourselves and life, between ourselves and this guidance system, this intelligence of life that we first spoke about. Let's say Mom and Dad are having an argument with each other. The child says, "What's happening?" When the child is told the truth -- not in a name-calling way -- that Mom and Dad have a little bit of a disagreement and we're just discussing it. "Why were you upset?" "Well, something sensitive in me got touched. I don't know exactly what it was." By telling the truth, kids learn that this sometimes happens in life. That way, when it happens to them, they don't have to get freaked out and sweep it under the rug and go into some kind of behavior that we call addiction, as a way of changing the subject. Sometimes we do get upset or get triggered by everyday things in life. It's normal. It's OK for that to happen. Our whole conditioning has been to always smile, and make everything fine, even though things may not feel that way. That is reflected to our children, and their experience of that is, "I cannot trust what I feel. I cannot trust what other people say." What happens is, we model that behavior. We try to keep everything together, and that disturbs everything in our life -- especially the works in our body. We can't get away with anything. Every move we make in life makes an imprint, like a fingerprint, on the energetic vibration of what life is. That imprint is either resonant with the heartbeat of life, or it creates an odd kind of chord. Both of those have very different effects. One sends a signal into the web of life, that flows with the heartbeat of life, and one sends a signal that is against life, and creates a disturbance. There is no question that we are all connected. Not because the quantum physicists say we're all connected. Or because Chief Seattle said we're all connected. My direct experience of life is that everything I do, everything I think, has an effect on life. It just does. Here we are dropping large bombs on Afghanistan, and it came to me one day that we're speaking about bombing the enemy. Has anyone considered the effect of dropping huge explosives on The Earth? We live in Maui, Hawaii, and my wife was talking about the volcanic eruptions on the Hawaiian islands. All of a sudden, what came to me was, "I wonder how creating such a disturbance on the other side of the Earth, merely through the physical dropping of these 3, 4, 5,000-pound bombs on the Earth, affects the inner workings of the Earth." We know what happens when we use a very strong medicine on the body. It affects parts of us we're not even trying to affect. Penicillin might be something you'd use for an infection, but it also knocks out some of the good organisms. There are side-effects. And I ask myself, "What side-effects are being caused by our bombing in Afghanistan?" What I have found that does not interfere with the natural development of a child is for us to be with the child, living our lives so the child can reflect and model from the way we live our lives, of how to be in the world. And, that we live our lives by interfering as little as possible with their lives. That interference factor is extremely important, because I find that the most profound healing that occurs in human beings is when we don't interfere with what their experience is. So often in the healing field, and in our personal lives, we're always trying to fix each other. The reason we're always trying to fix each other when someone has a disturbance going on or is upset about something is that if we haven't moved through that same part of our own lives, then their upsetness homeopathically awakens our upsetness. Then we try to get them to feel better so we're more at ease. But we don't see that going on. Only by working with many thousands of individuals and growing up as a human being myself have I learned that the deepest level of healing and transformation that seems to occur when we are just there with them, meaning we are just loving them from our presence. We do not interfere with them, unless they ask for something. What practical steps can people take to begin realizing their wisdom from an empty mind? Liberman: Practical things. Take care of exactly what's in front of you -- when it comes up. If you feel something, share it -- in the moment. Don't try to figure out the best way to say it. Just say it when it's innocent, whatever you are feeling inside. Another important thing: Don't prioritize anything. Life, in its wisdom, has already prioritized everything. And the priority has to do with when it enters our awareness, when we see something. So when you see the trashcan is full, don't say, "I'll do it later." Take it out that moment. And when we do that, things don't get backed up in our lives. We are always current. And we leave life in better shape than when we encountered it. For me, that's a very important thing. If you feel trepidation about doing something new, do it anyway. Move into your discomfort and you will find out that life is not like a pool with cold water. It's actually lukewarm and very inviting. When we don't take care of things when they come up, or when we don't say things that we feel in the moment, they become a big deal. But when we share them in the moment, no big deal. They slip by. What we gain by taking care of things as they arrive is an authentic security about our ability to take care of everything in life as it arises. And that's perhaps the best gift we can gain. Just knowing that whatever arises in life, we're with it in the best way we know how. I like the passage in your book where you write, "Our lives are complex today, because we've lost sight of what's essential." Liberman: What's essential is such an important piece. I just spoke at a healing conference in San Diego during the last stop on my book tour. I walked into the area where they have hundreds of booths displaying all types of things for health and wellness. Some of them talked about the application of magnets for healing, or the importance of juicing, and there were lots of manufacturers of supplements. What I saw with every booth was that everyone was claiming with their advertisement that if you did this, this would change your life. And as I began sharing with this group, I said, "You know, we actually think that if we take vitamins, that'll change our lives. Or if we meditate, that'll change our lives. Or if we do this or this or this. All of those things are valuable, but the only thing I have found that profoundly affected my life was living. Just plain, ordinary living. Make your bed in the morning. Wash your dishes. Don't leave things in your life undone. Just take care of things as they arise. That's what is truly essential. In so doing, our lives are profoundly changed. What's interesting is, as we get more profoundly connected with life, with the essentialness of each moment, then we naturally become more aware of the value of having some quiet time. But we don't have to call it meditation. We just take a little time for ourselves. It can be while we drive, take a walk or wash a dish. We become very connected with how things feel as they enter our body. We gain a greater awareness about nutrition, just by noticing how things feel as we eat them, or even before we eat them, because we are present with what we are doing. For me, what's truly essential is to just take care of things in the moment. Then there's less disturbance in our lives. When we are able to be with life, more and more to a greater degree regardless of what arises, whether it be something that is joy-filled or something that is particularly perturbing, the process of embracing aspects of life that used to be uncomfortable transforms them into new comforts. And when we get comfortable with what used to be uncomfortable, everything in our life changes. Our health is profoundly affected. Our relationships are profoundly affected. We gain a deep, heart-felt respect for our lives, the miracle of life, for each other, for the simple things of just sharing a cup of coffee or tea with each other. Just sharing that you love someone with them, just because you feel it. Thanking a waiter or waitress at a restaurant whose kindness is not just about asking you what you want, but really being there. You can thank them with a tip, but if you really feel that this person is so caring, then share that with them. So often, we're so busy that we don't share with each other how grateful we are for each other. I have to tell you, that's really what makes our life flow. Loving each other. By moving so quickly that we don't allow the everyday love of life to enter our lives, we create every disease, on a physical level, and every dis-ease, on every level. And we don't allow the love of life that we feel to be expressed. There is a stagnancy in the movement of energy, in the movement of life, if in any way we are stopping love from coming or stopping love from flowing out. For more on Jacob Liberman, go to his website at www.jacobliberman.com Tim Miejan is editor of The EDGE. Contact him at (651) 578-8969 or e-mail editor@edgenews.com Copyright © 2001 Tim Miejan |
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