Newsletter #126 – Before the year closes

Seeing from Within

‘And there was Light’
- Jacques Lusseyran -

Jacques Lusseyran was eight years old when an accident left him completely blind. Yet soon after, he discovered that darkness was not the absence of light. In his extraordinary memoir And There Was Light, he describes realizing that when he stopped trying to “look” with his eyes and began to attend inwardly, light returned, steady, luminous, and alive. “I saw light and went on seeing it, though I was blind,” he writes.

What Lusseyran describes is not mystical poetry but a profound experience of perception freed from habit. He learns to “see” with his whole body, through the resonance of sounds, the vibrations of objects, the pressures of touch, and the atmosphere of emotions. From a young boy at school in Paris to a member of the Resistance during the war, a prisoner in Buchenwald, or a literature professor in Hawaï, Lusseyran teaches us that perception begins within, that seeing, like awareness, is an act of presence, not of the eyes.

For Feldenkrais students, Lusseyran’s story offers a vivid example of sensory plasticity and embodied attention. It reminds us that perception is not located in the eyes or ears, but in the nervous system’s capacity to organize experience. When one sense quiets, others awaken; when fear and effort dissolve, clarity appears.

In his blindness, Lusseyran rediscovers what Moshe Feldenkrais invited us to explore through movement: that awareness is a sensory-motor act, and that our ability to “see” ourselves anew depends not on sight, but on attention without strain.

Reading And There Was Light is like entering a lesson in perception, one taught by a man who found radiance where others would have seen only loss. It is a book not about blindness, but about vision.