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When we interview scientists and other authorities in behalf of our readers, we normally send them a list of questions. But Jacob Liberman wanted our talk simply to flow like a river, taking whatever direction it wanted to take. No list!

So I threw my list away, but I still asked him the first question: ''What was it that caused you to devote your life to color therapy?''

''It's not therapy,'' Jacob insisted. ''It's not about fixing anything. It's about learning how to embrace our lives more fully.'' Then he told me his story of how it all began:

In 1976, I had a profound healing experience. I was a practicing optometrist and had worn glasses for 9 to 10 years. Without them, I could not see the Big E on the charts.

Then one day, in one of my meditations, I had an out-of-body experience. I saw myself in the room, and what I was observing was absolutely crystal, crystal clear. But the most profound aspect was that I realized I was observing myself holographically – from every point in the room. I was ''seeing'' all aspects of myself at once.

And when I came out of the meditation and opened my eyes, my physical vision was just as clear as it had been in the out-of-body experience. Totally clear. I could see license plates, street signs, billboards.

So I went to my office and gave myself an eye examination, thinking my prescription must have lessened.

I was doing research at the time on a new technology, and in connection with this I had an automated projector that showed so many visual acuity charts, I could never have memorized them. And on all of them, I could see right down to the bottom of the chart.

So then I went through the procedure an optometrist uses to determine one's correct prescription — all the lens changes and so on. And when I was through, the prescription I came up with was the exact same one I had with my glasses. I asked myself, How could this be? And the answer came to me like a revelation.

First, let me add that I've never had a pair of glasses on my face since then, yet I recently had my eyes examined, and the prescription is still almost the same as it was twenty-five years ago.

The revelation I'd had was this: We don't see with our eyes.

I felt so expansive. I felt as though I had become the sky. It was the opening of the concert of my life.

The Concert of Life: A Little Light Music

Jacob Liberman went on to describe how his revelation affected him over the next years.

I began to see things that I hadn't even known existed. I saw auras around everything that had a life source in it, not just people, but mountains, trees, water.

And I started seeing this Light that seemed to surround and connect all entities that were breathing with Life. I spent the next years observing this Light, and I ''saw'' something I had never heard of before. Everybody says, ''The body gives off an aura,'' but I saw that it's the opposite. It is the aura that gives rise to the body. I saw that this subtle, energetic emanation was the very Web of Life, the physical body's interconnectedness with All Things.

I began to realize the relationship between Light and Life, and specifically within the human system. It's not just plants that take in light and ''digest it'' for nourishment through photosynthesis. This thing we call Light, I saw, has the same relationship with all Life as with plants. It is our own, formless Source.

How We Become De-Lighted

Jacob described how his experiences of seeing Light and auras eventually led to his work. ''I saw that this Light was sometimes very big, very bright,'' he said, ''and sometimes, it was small and dull. Sometimes it even seemed to disappear.''

I spent years sitting with people, quietly observing, and I saw that every time we ''think,'' this light diminishes to almost nothing. This light around us is our precognitive aspect, it tells us what is about to arrive. It is our in-touchness with Life. And as soon as we go into the intellect, it disappears.

So I got introduced to Syntonics, which is the therapeutic application of different frequencies of light by way of the eyes. My idea was to use this for diagnosis, then try to fix whatever was revealed. But after working with thousands of people, somewhere in my journey, my ideas dropped off. I stopped thinking I knew what people needed. Instead, I allowed them to share with me their experiences as they looked at colors.

What I discovered is that everyone sees something different. Color is not an objective thing, it is a subjective experience created within the consciousness.

So as people looked at colors, I would ask them how they felt. And everyone responded, but each response was individualized. With almost everyone, they were receptive to some colors, which seemed to give a pleasant feeling, and unreceptive or even allergic to others. With the allergic responses, people would recoil and show other signs of bodily stress. Subjectively, ''It doesn't feel good.''

Allergies and Addictions Come to Light

Jacob Liberman began using biofeedback equipment like that used in a lie detector test to monitor the body's responses. Using this instrumentation...

I saw that, even when they were not aware of it consciously, people were definitely receptive to some colors and ''allergic'' to others.

Now, here's where all this is leading. When we experience unreceptiveness, or body perturbation – when we encounter something in life that we have never fully assimilated – we avoid it by going into the intellect!

This behavior, I believe, is the cause of everything we refer to as ''addiction.'' Addictions are behaviors and substances we use to avoid having this ''it doesn't feel good'' experience.

But with color, we can relive the experiences subconsciously, Jacob explained to me, because color bypasses the conscious mind. The conscious mind has no defense for color, so it goes right to the heart of the matter.

People would look at certain colors that triggered these kinds of avoidance responses, and sometimes they would break out in a cold sweat, shaking. But if we introduced the colors slowly and gently, they could begin to have memories. Some of these memories were from earlier experiences in this life. Some were from past lives.

So I saw that the colors, or frequencies of energy, that people are unreceptive to possess the same energetic makeup as their unresolved past experiences.

How is this possible? Jacob says...

It's because the relationship between ourselves and what we call light is a mirror image of our own internal makeup.

When the physicist looks at a photon, he notices that it behaves as we have always described God: it is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent!

Quantum physics states that nothing exists without the observer, and the form of what is observed is dependent on the observer's point of view. In other words, our life experiences are a mirror image of our present view of the world.

So what we see, for example in another person or situation, is a mirror of our own makeup.

We are each other's homeopathic remedies. Continuously attracting into our lives an exact mirror image of what we are putting out. So Light is Nature's perfect homeopathic remedy, because it is the formless expression of what we experience as form.

As the renowned physicist Dr. David Boehm said: ''All matter is frozen light.''

Reliving the Movie of Your Life

In neurolinguistic programming there is a technique known as the Trauma Cure. Using this technique, the writer has watched scores of clients totally disappear phobic responses in as little as 10 minutes. The Trauma Cure is based upon having clients watch a movie of the original traumatic experience. They do this from what NLP refers to as ''double dissociation'' – imagining that they are watching themselves watching the movie. So it doesn't even matter if the conscious mind remembers the experience or not.

I have even found that the Trauma Cure, used over and over, is effective with post-traumatic stress syndrome in Vietnam veterans.

Jacobs approach is a similar – and much simpler – technique of ''watching the movie'':

When the intellect sees something it recognizes and fears, it runs. And where it runs to is wherever we have found that helps us to avoid the feared experience. We may run to overwork, alcohol, cigarettes, meaningless talking, anger – whatever it is that helps us avoid the fear.

When people re-experience unresolved events that are ''stuck'' in their energy fields, and they do this in a safe space, they feel as if it's for the first time. Because they are doing it in an environment that is safe and caring. So they gain an authentic security about their ability to survive the situation.

In Jacob's approach, instead of the movie, you view colors, energies.

And since some of these colors duplicate the energetic form of the experiences we have been running away from, the experiences we have failed to assimilate, our reaction to them is the same as though we were re-experiencing the original trauma – but with a difference. When we use color correctly, the conscious mind does not block out the experience. It does not need to run away.

So we use this application of color safely, gradually, building up slowly over time, until the habitual reactivity begins to dissipate, and dis-ease becomes ease.

If we can get comfortable with what used to make us uncomfortable, our whole life changes. And because color is non-invasive, it helps us to desensitize to the unresolved issues in our life.

Facilitation 101: How Can We Help?

The key to how desensitization works, Jacob said, is that although we are, in a sense, re-living the traumatic experiences that have become the limits of our personal growth, we are re-living them in a totally different space. We are not all alone, this time. We are not helpless this time. This time, there is no real danger. And in that safe space...

Our own inner Self knows how to heal us. The facilitator's job is not to heal, but to be. Just to be with the other person. For – by the very nature of reality – whatever our clients are going through is something we also need to experience.

So when people are going through things, I close my eyes and just allow myself to be there, noticing what is going on inside me. Not interfering. When we truly succeed at just being Present, healing takes place by itself and we experience our own strength.

All of us are connected. Therefore, when a person in one of my workshops is touched, he or she becomes the light machine or remedy for the group.

I don't try to explain to people how this all works, why they are experiencing whatever they are experiencing. I prefer to let them tell me. In so doing, they experience the revelation that each of us is observing and experiencing something totally unique.

After experiencing the colors, people share, and the sharing goes wherever it needs to go. It's about ''seeing the Light'' – seeing something about ourselves. By embracing a spectrum of light we previously avoided, we find ourselves embracing more of Life.

Light Checks In, But It Also Checks Out

Everyone thinks that we see by virtue of light that enters our eyes. But just as the aura creates the body, and not the other way around, we create our visual experience by projecting light out of our eyes. ''It's true,'' Jacob said, ''that 98% of the light that enters our bodies goes in through the eyes. But the actual experience of vision is mostly projective.''

In his book Light: Medicine of the Future, Jacob shares his experiments demonstrating that light is emitted from the eyes, not just ingested by them.

He discovered that each person emits a signature of light from his or her eyes, little slivers of energy. He feels that the colors that are being emitted seem to have something to do with the experiences that person attracts into their life.

Here are two examples of what has just been said:

• If someone has been keeping something inside that needs to be said, you might see a lot of blue light coming out of their eyes. Blue is the color of the throat chakra, the color of ''speaking your piece.''
• Similarly, with someone who has spent a lot of time creating balance, and who is not avoiding things, you might see a soft, full-spectrum light coming from their eyes — a kind of pastel rainbow.

Liberman's Approach: The Nuts and Bolts

In his programs, Jacob said, people work in groups. He feels that this is extremely important, because it creates the ''safe space'' we talked about earlier. So people are experiencing what the colors bring up for them with the support of knowing that they are not alone in the world.

We show all the colors very briefly, one at a time, and then we do it over and over again, each time for a slightly longer duration per color. We go very slowly. I have found that this is the most important piece of the puzzle, to go slowly.

So basically, people come together once a week, to share this experience with color and and see where it takes them.

And the facilitator's job is just to be there, to allow. This is what creates the safety, the space for people to allow their own feelings to surface and dissipate. The heart of this work, of my work, is Presence and non-doing.

Life as Light Machine: Practicing Presence

A light machine that projects colors of a preset sequence and duration, such as the instruments Jacob Liberman uses in his work, can ''catalyze our experience of life,'' as he says.

But at a certain point, Life itself becomes our light machine. As we allow ourselves to be present with all of Life, self-healing occurs.

Light can assist us in developing this state of Presence so that eventually we embrace what we previously avoided, and in this experience Life becomes our healer.

We become our own Light, and subtle revelations start to happen. Mystical experiences. Just last night, I was out with my wife. We'd seen a movie, and I was sharing with her about the movie. And I had a sudden experience of realizing how much I love my present state. That no matter what happens, I can access this state in my life every day.

So light, color, is a beautiful tool, helping us to open up. But once we become more aware, awareness itself is curative.

Enlightenment and the Process of Growth

It's common knowledge now that a child who is physically abused may thrive, whereas a child who is not touched at all becomes stunted or even dies. When growth stops, Life stops. And to grow, we need perturbation, stimulation. If we think that we are enlightened, are we not simply saying that nothing touches us, nothing perturbs us? And all this means is that we are no longer growing. Life is growth. Experience is change.

As we have said, Jacob Liberman feels very strongly that the facilitator's job is simply to allow, to be present, to empower others to access the healer that lives within each of us.

The goal is not to become a guru, to become a being that people look up to because we are so enlightened. When we are truly clear, we have the humility to recognize that we are not ever ''enlightened.'' We have moments of clarity, moments of enlightenment. The goal is humility and ordinariness. The goal is to allow in the perturbation that causes our growth.

''Practice being Present with Life as it shows up,'' Jacob said, ''and Life itself becomes the healer.''