When Berkley Bedell first created FAIM, he had a vision to help transform medicine by seeking and discovering innovative, effective and non-toxic cures for today’s diseases. He always challenges his collaborators to think scientifically but differently, to go outside-the-box and with a view to the future.

Guided by these principles, we have embarked into an adventure to imagine a humanity which is radically different from the actual state of the world. Medically, we are living in a kind of Dark Age, which is the way civilization in the future will look back at us. Today’s medicine, like many aspects of our society, is built upon doctrines that are obsolete. As Thomas Aksnes, one of those medical mavericks that FAIM shadows, says so succinctly: “It does not put emphasis on preventing illness, nor does it promote the intrinsic self-healing mechanism towards homeostasis; it is a sick-care rather than a health care, it focuses on reducing symptoms rather than solving the causes of diseases, it creates chronic patients rather than solving chronic illnesses; it is extremely costly but of poor quality, destroying national and private economies.”

It this effort to define a healthier and happier future for humanity, FAIM explores the minds of innovative thinkers in all fields, and identifies key ideas and viewpoints that specifically can help an evolution in medicine.

One of these sources of ideas is the International Light Association (ILA) which is an eclectic group of individuals focused on the therapeutic uses of light and color and their effects on our health and wellbeing. This group is comprised of not only health professionals, practitioners, scientists and educators, but also of artists, architects and designers.

ILA’s mission is to learn and share about the latest theories, techniques and technologies in light and color to promote health, enhance performance and learning, and raise consciousness.

ILA organizes a yearly conference to educate and disseminate information, knowledge and skills and to promote research. The 2018 edition of this fascinating event took place in Oslo, Norway.

One of the great divulgators of this very exciting field is Dr. Jacob Liberman, author of four remarkable books. Each one outlines his personal exploration of the cutting-edge knowledge and science around light and color as tools for healing and personal evolution. Dr. Liberman is much more than an eye doctor and a vision scientist: he is a luminary in the field of consciousness and the science of life. At the conference, he shared his personal transformation due to his daily contemplation on the nature of light. Dr. Liberman challenges all of us to try it for ourselves: he claims it has powerful effects on awareness and consciousness. More than a century ago, humanity was ushered into the modern age of science, due to the epiphany produced by the same kind of meditations on the nature of light by the young Einstein.

Dr. Liberman gave a presentation that slowly absorbed us into a world where the boundaries between science, philosophy and mysticism dissolved. He recounted how in 1976 he entered into deep meditation: a state of awareness that sees from no point of view and where the sense of duality disappeared. During this experience he had a spontaneous remission: his eyesight became completely clear and has never need glasses ever since.

Awareness is curative because your brain changes and rewires instantaneously. This transformation is an epiphany, which is a revelation that has nothing to do with time. Its impact is profound and permanent. It is not the product of repetitive exercises because, if it takes effort to achieve, it will take effort to maintain.

Dr. Liberman continued his lecture sharing many ideas from his explorations on light. He explained the Rule of Parsimony which is the principal that everything works with optimal efficiency and maximum potential. The whole universe is an example of optimal economy. The kind of relationship established between “Doctor and Patient” will determine the kind of change that is possible. The optimal possibility only happens at a level of equality.

The two most important things in love are timing and chemistry, he continued with a sermon-like smile, we can say the same for life. The software-update comes from light, which brings us into a state of oneness and health.

In Dr. Liberman’s recent book, Luminous Life: How the Science of Light Unlocks the Art of Living, he quotes Professor Fritz-Albert Popp, pioneer in biophotonic research: “We are still on the threshold of fully understanding the complex relationship between light and life, but we can now say emphatically that the function of our entire metabolism is dependent on light.”

Also, “routine exposure to sunlight reduces resting heart rate, respiratory rate, blood pressure, and blood sugar, while increasing energy, strength, endurance, stress tolerance, and the ability of the blood to absorb and carry energy.”

It is important to understand that “just as eating poorly results in malnutrition, not assimilating the full spectrum of light results in mal-illumination. When our receptivity to the full spectrum of sunlight is lessened, our ability to function in total health and wellness is profoundly diminished.”

Sharing insights from a perennial philosophy, he emphasized that timing is critical. In baseball the perfect hit is the one with congruence and coherence. This is another way of saying presence, which is a state of oneness. The opposite is a mismatch, just like in jetlag when one is in a time-zone and one’s biology in another. Dr. Liberman is an expert in Behavioral Optometry: “If, however, our eyes and our mind are not focused on the same place at the same time, it leads to incongruence and incoherence in our actions and a diminished capacity to perform.” Human beings are chemically jetlagged: we live our lives according to our ideas (=beliefs) which have nothing to do with what is natural. Chronic disease is most impacted by lifestyle, which is how much one is aligned with nature.

After the age of 40 the pineal gland starts calcifying, which makes it difficult to distinguish what is true health, happiness and contentment. To create a model which is applicable to everyone does not make sense. So much of our life is putting labels on things. In an emotional moment, Dr. Liberman remembered his mother who cured herself of a cancer but could not cure herself of the diagnosis (the label).

Dr. Liberman gave special mention to child-development author Joseph Chilton Pearce. Infants reside in a place of oceanic bliss. He said that the basis of mother-child bonding is the synchronization of the heart-beats. Infants are born in a state of oneness and through conditioning, learn to leave that and have a point-of-view. The baby-state is seeing things in an unconditional way. He quotes Dr. Dean Ornish from the book Love and Survival: The Scientific Basis for the Healing Power of Intimacy: “I am not aware of any other factor in medicine – not diet, not smoking, not exercise, not stress, not genetics, not drugs, not surgery – that has a greater impact on our quality of life, incidence of illness, and premature death from all causes than love and intimacy.”

Dr. Liberman slowly led us into a zone where we needed to make an effort to let go of our ideas and prejudices. I thought of Max Planck, when he was chief editor of Annalen der Physik, after starting to read the first articles from an unknown patent clerk in Bern. Through simple reasoning and exercises of imagination on light, he realized that paradigms had been shattered and the world would never be the same again. While listening to Dr. Liberman speak, I am sure that I was not the only one having that same sensation.

In a style reminiscent of the sermons of Meister Eckhart, he admonished that we do not know anybody else’s journey. Invoking a sense of compassion, he helped us understand that what we see today is the end result of a tremendous amount of difficulty. What happens when our natural impulses are confronted with what society believes is normal? We end up living life through our ideas. We end up rehearsing all our lives: it is the opposite of doing something “live,” which is the expression of freedom. To hold what one likes against what one does not like is thinking.

Dr. Liberman, quoting Emerson, says “we are not to do, but to let do.” In other words, “each time we interact with the mind seeking meaning, understanding and control of our lives, we rob ourselves of the opportunity to experience profound peace…”

Helping us jump down into the rabbit hole, Dr. Liberman’s recent book gives us an overview of these exciting philosophical challenges to creating a happier world. He quotes from the classic Wholeness and the Implicate Order by physicist David Bohm: “The widespread and pervasive distinction between people… which are now preventing mankind from working together for the common good, and indeed, even for survival, have one of the key factors of their origin in a kind of thought that treats things as inherently divided.”

Dr. Liberman is interested in helping people gain wholeness and plant the seeds of goodness. He proposes a new kind of doctor-patient relationship which is a type of mentoring process to explore together things that are important in one’s life. Most people have been labeled all their life and believe they need fixing. One must start with the premise that “there is nothing wrong with me.” Definitions, diagnostics and labels violate our personal life. We have all felt in our lives pain, depression and anxiety “according to psychologist and author Rollo May, one does not become fully human painlessly.” In his sharp sense of humor: “we cannot even wash our clothes without agitation.” He quotes the Talmud, a central text of Rabbinic Judaism: “We do not see things as they are; we see them as we are.” Fundamentally, “our beliefs about life have even more impact on our health and happiness than the actual experiences themselves.” A belief, he continues, is the antonym of truth. Therefore, the key is to become aware: to see things in a new way. Quoting Einstein again: “The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, and the solution comes to you and you do not know how or why.”

Dr. Liberman has developed powerful therapeutic tools using color which he calls color homeopathy. Each color represents a chakra each corresponding to the body’s major endocrine glands. There is a correspondence between the frequencies of light and the frequencies of life. Dr. Liberman asks us to contemplate and meditate around each color separately. Depending on the sensations each color produces, one can build an interpretation of traumas that influence our health.

When we feel uncomfortable with a color, we are leaving a chakra in the dark by depriving some of the energies to come in. Quoting Rumi: “The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”

Similarly, in the dynamics we call life, everyone we meet is a homeopathic remedy towards our evolution. We are continually attracting into our lives someone or something to teach and bring us into awareness on what one needs to learn. As an example, Dr. Liberman gave us his own experience: “I married my father dressed as a woman.”

Every time you dedicate time to share a moment with someone, no matter how short, you ought to be creating good will.

One leaves this conference with many jewels, both in new ideas and new friends. Undoubtedly, in the years to come, the conference will attract more people and help generate transformation.

Back home, I felt awe looking up at all that light that fills the night sky; that wondrous majesty of the Milky Way that is evidence of other worlds and possibly other civilizations. I reflected again on Dr. Liberman’s core message: “The key to our awakening, freedom, contentment, and highest potential is all the same. Do what you love, love what you do, and the world will come to you. This is because doing what you love is the same as following your guidance, creating a foundation of authentic trust, unconditional love, absolute integrity, and unquestionable respect for the wisdom of life and your own sense of knowing.”