iblindness.org Blog – Vision Improvement Tips and Ramblings

Back Spasm

This morning I sat on the floor to put my socks on and had a back spasm (at least I think that’s the right term). If you haven’t had one, it’s a sudden pain in a muscle that incapacitates you for a while because it hurts to move. So I laid on the floor for a while, considering what to do. Resting for several minutes didn’t seem to help at all. I tried rocking around, to try to get myself moving and try to work out whatever the pain was all about. No help there either. So finally I propped myself up into a painful position, breathed deeply, and relaxed my ab muscles and any other muscles I could. The pain melted away. I did that with a few more positions until I could stand up and go on about my day.

Embrace the Uncomfortable Step

In making a point. The idea of your vision improving suddenly, completely and permanently as a result of palming or any other exercise is a tempting one. The idea is promoted a lot throughout material on the Bates method, particularly with that one story repeated over and over of a single guy a hundred years ago who reported that he completely and permanently regained his vision after a long palming session of twenty hours. But look at what that idea really means by considering your motivations for adopting the idea. Are you trying to avoid the middle step of having to pay close attention to blurry details? Is that the step that is most uncomfortable to you? What happens when you start to pay attention to the smallest details you can perceive? You probably have a hard time with it because all the blur gives you confusion about what point you’re really looking at, right? If your eyes produce different levels of blur it makes it even more confusing. Are you avoiding this situation altogether by rationalizing that any such feeling you experience there is “strain” and you should therefore avoid the steps that got you into that situation, namely, considering the smallest details you can see?

When you avoid this situation, you remain with blurry vision and expect your vision to at some point by virtue of your commitment to relaxation (or whatever it is you’re doing) suddenly leap over that canyon of multiple images and blurry details, into the land of perfect vision. That way you don’t have to slog your way down into the canyon and through the swamp. This isn’t to say it’s impossible for people to do such a leap temporarily or permanently, but most people will find that they have issues with the way they use their eyes, particularly when their vision is inevitably a little blurry again (as everyone with perfect sight experiences now and then), and they are relying on their ability to do that leap each time.

So when you find yourself attempting to see details and fail completely, even where your vision becomes worse than when you started it a moment ago, remember that your success depends on several elements that need to be done right. You have to keep breathing deeply to supply your brain with the abundant oxygen it will need to relearn this process. You will need to blink.

But don’t use blinking or looking away as a means of massaging your eyes or “feeling” your eyes again to escape the process when things become confusing or mentally intense, similar to how a child under emotional distress runs to an adult for comfort and is soothed by the adult’s hug, the sense of touch distracting the child from his emotional distress and suppressing the emotion into what becomes a solidified part of his  personality/programming. The purpose of examining details and the way you’re looking at them is to deal with reality and work on your solution, not to find a means of escaping reality under the guise of “relaxing” and building yourself even more complex problems.

Example Solution

With my back spasm story, the solution was relaxation, but when I attempted to relax by simply lying on my back it didn’t work. I had to get into a painful situation and then relax while remaining there.  As it turned out, that was all that was needed. With vision, that isn’t the complete answer, although you can get some extremely positive feedback from doing so like temporarily better vision or a different feeling around your eyes, face or the rest of your body. You also have to use your attention right, which will drive how you use your eyes and brain together to create a clear image.

So take for example one issue you have to deal with in stepping into the mess of looking for details in a chaotic, blurry mess: You don’t know what point you’re looking at. This has been reported enough times by people that I think it may be significant. If you try to relax your eyes, you might find that you seem to widen your area of attention, while if you try to narrow your attention you tense up your eyes. So consider this logically. You have two tasks that seem to both be necessary but are butting up against each other as if they were opposites. If you have two cars that need to pass each other on a narrow one lane road with no shoulder, what do you do? You could come up with a lot of solutions involving a turnout, a crane or a ramp. The point is you’ll need something else to rectify the situation. With this vision problem you just use movement. You keep moving your point of attention around, scanning and exploring areas depending on what you most want to see or what captures your attention or what stands out as the clearest object that you might be able to see the best for a moment. So your question of “what point am I looking at?” is no longer relevant because it’s answered implicitly by what part of the image, and the size of that part, that you are most paying attention to from one fluid instant to the next. It’s ever-changing, so you never have to nail down what you’re looking at, because by the time you can answer the question your attention will have moved.

If you aren’t looking at the smallest details of what you can perceive in every fluid glance to the next, you are not actually looking at anything! All the time you spend not looking at details is time you are spending not really using your vision at all. When you start to do this more continuously throughout every day, you will find that your vision becomes intensely activated and you’ll wonder how you ever saw anything before at all when you weren’t even looking.

 

One of the first things you might notice in this picture is the man painting. Your attention moves to him. It doesn’t matter whether your attention was “drawn” to him or you were just glancing around the picture to find something worth looking at. You don’t notice only the fact he’s painting, but what he’s painting. It appears to be the scene in front of him.

So in the man’s painting, what details can you at least partially see? It’s important to note that it counts even if you just partially see something, or if you have a guess as to what might be there. People with blurry vision tend to glance at it and move on, studying it no further, and doing the same thing with pretty much anything else they look at. This is a huge mistake. There are at least a few possible reasons you do this:

• It seems like too much trouble for you to spend time on looking at details when you don’t expect to be able to see anything more by studying it for more than a glance. You have given up, because you’ve failed so many times. It’s hopeless.
• You have studied things in detail at other times and find that it’s uncomfortable to stare at a small thing, so you have a habit of avoiding it.
• You are avoiding the perception of clearer, smaller details because that kind of perception is too intense. You aren’t used to the sensation of your brain and visual system working hard, but correctly, and you feel overwhelmed when they begins to do so. It’s a bit different than when you wear glasses, because glasses provide artificially clear vision without your visual system having to do very much right (and the consequence of that is almost always worse and worse vision).
• You are anxious about looking at one area for too long. This might be complex. You might be afraid that you’ll miss something important. This may be due to a past situation where you are repeatedly surprised from the side, or where it was important for you to notice things going on all around you, and you adapted by trying to move your eyes too frequently. Situations might include a combat zone, a sports game, driving a car, or even just having blurry vision and looking around a lot to try to compensate for your bad vision. This can also be more consciously (but wrongly) developed in the belief that better vision requires that you move your eyes around more.

The first reason, that it’s hopeless, is something you need to intellectually overcome by means of practicing the right way to do it, which is what I really want to talk about. The second reason, that it’s uncomfortable, is because you’re not doing it right. The third reason, that it’s too intense, is overcome with time. The fourth reason, that you’re anxious about missing something, is out of the scope of this posting, but it’s worth thinking about and can also be the reason you fix your eyes in a stare to try to see everyone at once instead of moving your eyes to specific details.

I guess I just wanted to go over the above reasons behind what you’re doing, because it’s important to be able to be aware of what you’re doing, and your reasons behind it, while you’re working to adjust your pattern of looking.

So when you attempt to study an object in smaller detail than you are able to immediately perceive, it appears to be blurry. You can’t just let it go. You have to take control of your visual system by enforcing your will. Speaking affirmations in that respect helps align conflicting parts of yourself to your purpose. But your brain / visual system doesn’t directly hear such an order of “I want to see!” and respond. The language your brain understands and responds to is your mental refusal to accept the result that your brain is providing. It’s the same as telling an employee who has presented a poorly organized, incomplete report to you, “Tell me more. What about this? What are the possibilities?” You are requiring it to dig deeper and work harder in order to serve you to the best of its ability. As you perceive blur at a certain level of detail and can seemingly go no further, you have to guess what might be there. Is there any black? Any purple? Any green? What could the speck of white be? Look at the man’s painting in the portion of the picture below and consider such questions.

Notice what happened as you did it. Your gaze moved around the painting in a search. You were looking around to find such colors and make at least a little bit of sense out of it and actively engage yourself in perceiving, instead of just accepting the image your brain gave you and not considering what it isn’t giving you. You became interested. That’s what it takes.

Look again. Do you see the grey button on the man’s hat? Look carefully, without leaning closer.

If you didn’t, that’s because there isn’t one. But what did you see? You suddenly noticed the shades of darker colors on his hat as you searched for a spot of grey. You just improved your vision, because you saw something you didn’t notice at first. Don’t think of your quality of vision as just how blurry or sharp it is. Better vision is being able to see things you didn’t notice before. So every time you notice something new, because you’re looking directly at a new spot with curiosity of what else is there, you have improved your vision, and you should consider it another success. And your brain will respond, and your eyes will start to focus in response to your directing of your attention to smaller details.

So I hope I’m starting to make it clear that improving your vision is not a matter of doing certain things because you’re forced to do them if you want to see, but a matter of changing the way you go about perceiving details so that better vision is a completely natural result.

I want to make a point about following a method of vision improvement to the letter, and trusting that any one person, or even a group of people saying the same thing, have it right.

There’s this guy Hira Ratan Manek, going by HRM, who for years claimed (and maybe does again) to be able to live without food due to his sungazing practices. He’s got a method where you gradually adapt yourself to sungazing. The guy was outed at one point by someone catching him chowing down at a restaurant near a place he was speaking at about his fasting, and he came out and admitted it. And there seems to be nobody substantiating other things he has said, but the last time I looked into it was years ago. That being said, there’s also no evidence that sungazing for short periods of time in the morning or evening is harmful, even if it dazzles your vision for a minute.

I guess what I’m saying is people have a tendency to drop one doctrine for another, like dropping conventional views on eyesight to follow Dr. Bates’s words to the letter, or some modern person who has written a book or teaches classes. There certainly are people you can learn a lot from, but I wish people would hold back and be skeptical about everything, no matter which side of an issue it’s on, instead of deciding, “Wow that sounds so right, I’m going to believe everything else this guy says.”  Why this need to jump on a boat?

So when you read or hear or consider any little idea about vision or vision improvement, try to consider how it could be right or wrong, and how to test a specific point as well as you can. It’s not hard. You don’t need a lab. It just takes some self-honesty about what you really know and what you’re just going to believe because it’s easier. There are so few people out there who look at issues with this level of skepticism and self-honesty, so yes, unfortunately you probably do need to test everything yourself in the small world of natural vision improvement unless humans can get to a point where they can be trusted to look at issues objectively.

It does take longer to learn anything this way, but really you’re not learning anything when you just latch onto bogus information.

I bring this up because there are a number of things in Dr. Bates’s material that is either wrong or misleading. No disrespect to him – all geniuses are wrong about some things, and he made huge contributions to changing the way we look at vision. But unfortunately some folks who want to improve their vision put a lot of energy into reading and understanding what Bates said and in the process they accept it all as the whole truth, as if the entire truth about obtaining and maintaining good vision is in Bates’s material. For a small number of people it seems to be enough. For most, however, it isn’t, and they stagnate with a handful of those old ideas that are not working for them or are not specific enough to be have practical value. Even if you take everything Bates wrote at face value, there is far too much guesswork in the specifics that you are forced to do. So what happens is different people come up with countless different interpretations of how Bates’s ideas or instructions should be applied, and what’s the most important part.

I have written in past posts about the specifics of shifting your eyes and what is really involved in doing so and what kind of pattern you follow, including suggestions about timing and distance of shifts. And there’s a lot more to say. And I’m not necessarily right about everything. But I hope I have gotten a few people to open their eyes to the fact that issues like this are just not being addressed in enough detail to make it completely clear how you have to use your eyes in all aspects to result in better and better vision, so what you have instead are very vague instructions that can be followed easily enough but which you can sabotage in so many ways that aren’t being addressed. I don’t know if anyone out there teaching vision improvement is addressing issues like this. And it isn’t easy to figure out, because we all do things right, whether it’s vision-related or with other parts of our body, that we aren’t conscious of, but ironing out the specifics of this is possible and has to be done.

As it is now, people migrate to whatever specific method most interests them, such as palming, and this is almost always based on the fact that they find the method simple and easy to understand. This also means that it’s pretty much worthless the way they’re doing it, because when it’s easy to do  and they don’t struggle with confusion about it then they aren’t learning anything! So people get stuck in whatever feels nice or feels as if they’re doing something or is easy to do while thinking about their day, which isn’t much better for their vision than wearing glasses and forgetting the whole thing. Real vision improvement is uncomfortable, because it forces some level of disruption in your programming/personality, because it has to do with the way you interact with the world in every moment. So people avoid what ever is uncomfortable or confusing in how they use their eyes, justifying their actions with the idea of “relaxation” being the key to good vision, implying that anything that feels bad or disruptive is “strain”. And they cling to vague ideas or broad principles that are not specific, or in other words they’re blurry. And they won’t let go of those comfortable, soft, blurry ideas. So consider that your own avoidance of brutally examining issues in this amount of detail reflects the way your use your eyes in not understanding the necessity of literally looking with your eyes at small enough details in order to really see anything clearly.

People with normal vision have moments when their vision fails. At that point if they are able to adjust how they look at things they will quickly get back on track.

People with blurry vision who pursue vision improvement often notice moments of clear vision lasting several seconds or longer, so this isn’t a matter of building up your ability steadily but more so a process of becoming accustomed to looking at things in a different manner ALL THE TIME until it becomes second nature. You will not change the way you look at things all the time until you are convinced of it. So I’m working on getting things together to comprehensively and completely shred, piece by piece, every wrong idea about vision that people have, in a logical way that leaves it obvious what the only solution can be. I’m not totally clear on everything myself, but I’m working it out and have some pretty good ideas.

If you’re nearsighted, look at your hand up close at a distance you can see it best, to illustrate something. Your gaze naturally moves around the details of your hand. There isn’t any difference between the way you should look at something up close and far away except that in this case (if you’re nearsighted) you can see your hand clearly up close and nothing clearly farther away and the blur disrupts your ability to use your vision as correctly because you do not have the assistance of clear details that are essential to the process. So in a sense it’s true that if you don’t wear your glasses your vision may very well get worse, and you may feel the negative effects of abusing your eyes after some time looking at blurry things. The thing that most eye doctors don’t know, however, is that you have control over the situation. It is possible to address the situation by looking at blurry objects in a way that promotes clearer vision, and the clearer vision itself makes it easier to get even better vision, and you continue all the way to re-establishing perfect vision.

 

Some Eye Chart Work

Pick a letter on the eye chart shown here that is blurry, one that you can barely read or can’t quite read. Let’s say it’s the P on line 4. For the moment you will be working with the P, the E next to it, and the O and C above it. Three letters.

Look at the P, then O, then E, and back to P. So you’re moving around a triangle. Now only glance at each letter before moving to the next. Spend less than a second on each letter. You are capable of moving your eyes very quickly. See how quickly you can move around them, without tensing your eyes (more). There’s no need to slow down your process of perception. You will be tempted to stop on each letter for longer than a second in order to try to see it better. Don’t.

Now as you move between the letters, you’re going to add an extra step on E. When you look at the E, pick any spot on the E, and then see if you can distinguish a second spot on it. So for example, say you pick the bottom of the letter, and then move your attention to the top of the letter. Two opposite sides of a letter work well. It’s just like how you were moving your attention between the three letters, only on a smaller scale. If the E is too blurry for you, you will have trouble finding a second spot on the E because the blur will all overlap and maybe with double images and you won’t be sure where you’re looking. But the E also doesn’t need to be clear. This is not about seeing either of the two spots on the E clearly. This is about acknowledging the movement of your attention between opposite sides of the letter. If you can merely distinguish that the E has a top and a bottom, you can move your attention between them. Don’t expect the image itself to change as you do so. This is about learning to pay attention to a different point in turn despite the fact that the two points are close enough together that you can see them both at the same time.

So continue around the circle, only glancing quickly at each letter as before, and each time you reach the E, take that extra step of looking at a second spot on the E. It doesn’t have to be the same spots every time. Just any spots you can acknowledge as separate from each other.

After a moment of doing this, try doing it with one of the other letters too. Unless you are able to look at a second point on the letter in less than a second, move on to the next letter. Don’t struggle with finding a point. Just move on.

Remember to blink at a normal pace, every several seconds or so.

If things become clearer, don’t stop. Your mind will search for a reason to take a break right at the point where a change is starting to happen. Try moving down the chart a little, shifting your attention between letters in another triangle.

If suddenly the four letters you’re working with become so blurry that you have trouble even finding the E in the first step, what do you do? Apply the same principle. If you can’t look at something close by, look at something farther away, like the F on line 2. Then look back toward any smudge in the area where the E should be. Then try looking at one of the four letters again, and if you can’t, look back up at the F. So you always are able to revert to a backup plan of looking at something farther away.

The same if you start perceiving multiple images. Multiple images instead of fuzzy blur is a good thing. Optically I suspect there’s no difference and it’s about how your brain is perceiving things. So when your brain is perceiving multiple images it means it’s orienting itself towards perceiving details. It’s just another step, and one that you might repeat many times.

If your vision becomes darker, it may just be your pupils narrowing. I’m not sure what this means, but I tend to see it as a good sign, a change away from the wide-pupiled “fight or flight” mode.

If your eyes start stinging a little, just keep doing what you’re doing and blinking at a normal pace.

So here’s what you’re learning. When you glance at a point and you don’t see it clearly, it will be beneficial to look at another point. If you can look at another point very close by, then it will be beneficial to do so. If you are not able to distinguish a nearby point because of the confusion of it being too close to the first point, then it will be beneficial to instead look at a point farther away, and then back to the first point again. That’s the gist of it. You have a solution, no matter what happens.

 

A Small List of Don’ts

Don’t try to glide your eyes smoothly over an area. Your eyes are meant to move in quick jumps, small and large. To glide your eyes smoothly requires that you tense your eye muscles and suppress the speed of movements that is necessary for your eyes to work in harmony with your attention.

Don’t try to feel each movement of your eyes, or try to count the movements, or make a sound in your mind for each movement. Seeing has to be done from a mental starting point of wanting to effortlessly see and perceive. Counting eye movements or being too slow with the movements defeats the purpose, because doing so means you are not involved in perception enough. Treat this as moving your eyes as softly as you can, without being able to feel the movements.

Don’t settle into a routine of bouncing your eyes around at random spots just for the sake of moving your eyes around. This is not about moving your eyes. This is about moving your visual attention, which does require that you move your eyes, but it doesn’t do any good if you don’t pay attention to each spot you look at.

Don’t stop on a blurry point. Move on after less than a second.

Don’t lock your gaze and try to see something. Your process of seeing has to be about moving between points. If you want to see something, you have to keep looking at points as described, on and around the object.

Don’t slow down. Larger movements should be less than a second. When you are able to make smaller movements, over a smaller area, the movements will be quicker.

 

Bates’s Method

Two quotes by Bates directly back up the instructions above:

“It is impossible for the eye to fix a point longer than a fraction of a second. If it tries to do so, it begins to strain and the vision is lowered. This can readily be demonstrated by trying to hold one part of a letter for an appreciable length of time. No matter how good the sight, it will begin to blur, or even disappear, very quickly, and sometimes the effort to hold it will produce pain.”- Perfect Sight Without Glasses, Ch 20

“The shorter the shift the greater the benefit; but even a very long shift – as much as three feet or more – is a help to those who cannot accomplish a shorter one. When the patient is capable of a short shift, on the contrary, the long shift lowers the vision.” – Perfect Sight Without Glasses, Ch 15

Dr. Bates described something along the lines of what I described here, and variations of it, but he included only two points. With two points it’s too easy for you to eventually start oscillating your eyes back and forth without really paying attention to what you’re looking at with each movement. With three points or more, you have to put a little more attention into it to locate each letter, and the act of moving your eyes in three different directions or more helps avoid getting stuck in a mentally vacant routine of oscillating your eyes.

It’s fascinating how the seeing process gets disrupted enough to come crashing down piece by piece, a whole series of mistakes. Here’s one way I think it happens.

One of the most basic ideas of blurry vision is the idea that we have to freeze our eyes and try to keep the image still so that we can see everything as well as possible and see everything at once. The freezing stops your eyes from moving, and the movement is necessary for a normal seeing process, so effectively you adopt a diffused stare where your attention isn’t on anything small. This isn’t how vision is meant to work, so the eye muscles stay tense from the abuse.

When it comes time you have to look specifically at smaller details, the freezing of the eyes is intensified. This is because you’re looking directly at something and can notice its apparent movement more readily, and you make an effort to keep it still in the center of your vision. So you avoid looking at details all the time, because it’s so uncomfortable.

Vision is a significant part of your attention and consciousness, and abuse to your vision has dramatic effects. You experience a chain reaction in the form of worse vision, headaches, dizziness, mental fatigue, chronic tension in surrounding areas such as your face, neck and shoulders, etc. Seeing has become uncomfortable no matter if you’re really looking at anything or not.  You cope with these symptoms by moving your attention to your mind and away from your physical body so that you do not have to be conscious of the uncomfortable sensations. Even if you’re into physical sports or fitness, you remain more so in your mind and only minimally aware of your physical body as demanded by the activity.

Physically relaxing your mind and body can help somewhat. You may find that massaging your neck, palming, or doing any other number of things improves your vision for a moment, due to the chain of programming within you being disrupted. But merely temporarily disrupting the programming you have created isn’t sufficient. You have to remove the programming’s point of origin by identifying the nature of the point, releasing it, and replacing it with the right way to see. So it’s important that you pay close attention and consider many aspects to what you’re doing as you try to see anything. Consider possibilities of different ways to look at things, and which is correct, and see how well you can justify it. Take some time to write out all your thoughts and questions if you can, and consider them. You don’t learn much if you only try to follow instructions by me or anyone else. You have to consider why you weren’t doing things that way before, because there are reasons you’re doing things the way you are, and those reasons don’t go away until you’ve clearly determined for yourself that they are always wrong and you can completely drop them.

Continuing on the instructions of my last post, How to look at stuff.

When you look for the smallest detail in anything you’re looking at, you should only be looking at a detail you can already see. The important thing is to keep reminding yourself to consider what the smallest detail you can perceive is in what you’re looking at. It’s fine if it’s blurry. Even within a mess of blur, the smallest detail you can perceive is smaller than you may think, and you don’t know until you consider looking for it.

Let’s look again at the same photo we looked at before.

This time I made it blurry. No matter how blurry it is, the same principles apply.Look at the large rock on the bottom left. The fact that we can’t see sharp details on the rock makes no difference. We still look at it by the same method. Look at one of the large dark spots on the rock. The spots aren’t entirely black. They contain varying shades of color, and each spot of a different shade is another detail. The dark spot on the right actually contains an area of lighter color. And that lighter color contains shades too, as it fades towards the darker color. So there are a lot of different colors there. If you were to divide the dark spot into individual pixels, each pixel being one color only, how many pixels would there be?

So you have determined the size of the smallest detail of a single color you can perceive. But when you look at such a small piece, you have a hard time seeing it. It starts to disappear as soon as you try to look directly at it. That is something that people with normal vision deal with too. The difference is you struggle against such a result by trying to lock your eyes into place and keep that one detail. The fact is that you can only see such a detail for an instant before it begins fading. The right way to deal with this problem is to look at another nearby detail of the same size, or perhaps smaller. And so you continue looking at details that elude you almost as soon as you look at them.

Every time you shift your attention to a nearby spot, look closely for a couple seconds so that you can satisfy yourself that you know how small a single piece of color is that you can perceive in that spot. Doing so is just a matter of noticing. Just making a mental note of it. What you’ll notice is that in looking for a small detail is you’re actually shifting your gaze slightly as you sift through the blur. So really there is no rule about any number of seconds you should spend on each spot to keep from locking your gaze, because when you do this as described, you don’t have an opportunity to lock your gaze. Spending a couple seconds on each spot is just a suggestion to give yourself a bit of time to deliberately and consciously note what you can see every time.

This is going to be slow and deliberate at first. Your visual system likes to have a single tiny piece of color as the “main” point while it processes the entire visual field. As you get used to it, you will become able to more quickly find the smallest point you can see and thereby more quickly move to the next spot. This is what people with normal vision do. When they look at something, they are able to quickly look for the smallest detail before moving on.

Don’t try to figure out where your center of vision is or try to place a small invisible point at what you look at as if to “frame” a small point. People make this mistake when trying to practice “central fixation”, a concept of the Bates method that is often misunderstood. Don’t make this about moving your eyes around either, as if that it’s somehow good just to keep your eyes moving. Your actions in looking at details have to be solely about the actual details you can perceive.

Be Here

Blurry vision is well-known to be associated with intellectualism. But the way I see it, it has to do with a preference towards abstract ideas instead of being physically present. By being physically present, I mean being aware of the movement of your body, the feeling of your body, your breath, and the world immediately around you right now. It’s a matter of how much time you spend at either, or how often you take breaks to “ground” yourself when doing mentally intensive tasks on your computer or at your desk, or how much you stay physically present even while doing the mentally intensive tasks.

The most basic way of being present with what you’re doing is by focusing on something you already do anyway. You always have to breathe. So take one full minute, before you start this, to focus entirely on your breathing: the sound, rhythm, and feeling of your breath. Don’t think about anything else. Avoid thinking with any words and see if you can continue doing this for a full minute. Not so easy, is it? If you’re like most people, you’re used to living in your thoughts. While you focus on breathing for this long, do you find yourself trying to remember the experience of yourself a few moments ago, as if marveling that you could still exist without thinking?

If breathing itself isn’t enough to occupy you, you can also focus on your hands and what you’re touching with them, even if your fingers are touching nothing but the palms. Your hands help ground you physically in the same way as breathing grounds you. Your sense of touch is quite raw, or basic. It isn’t dressed up in fancy justifications and patterns. It’s real, unlike your thoughts.

The issue here is that your thoughts represent your programming repeating itself incessantly, affirming itself, and mixed up in your programming is your vision problems. By stopping your thoughts, for even just a moment, you stop your programming, and from that perspective you can better see what is really going on with yourself when you try to see. When your mind is silent, you see yourself better. So everything you do you notice for what it is. So you establish yourself as breath and as your hands. This is important because what you think of as “who you are” is a personality all wrapped up as part of your programming and vision problems. You’re rebuilding your programming in order to have a functional visual system (it isn’t as hard as it sounds), so you have to step outside of it a little, devalue it, and in your firm grounding in your breath be willing to toss away a little bit what you thought of as “who you are” if it isn’t congruent to the way your visual system is supposed to work.

Drive Yourself

So let’s get going.

In your attempt to see in a more natural way that leads to good vision, you may ironically be actually practicing a more mechanical and unnatural way of using your eyes than ever before. Some material on the Bates method tells you to shift between details, or trace outlines. But be careful about following an outline of an object, as if you’re drawing it with your eyes as the pencil. That isn’t how people with good vision see.

Remember that during this process you can spend time at things that do indirectly help your vision, such as palming, improving your back/neck posture, or conscious breathing. But when it comes to how to look at things, you don’t need to be practicing anything in your way of using your eyes that people with good vision don’t already do. And what they do is not hard. This process is really about backing up and understanding how simple seeing is supposed to be. You’ll beat yourself up when you finally realize that what you’ve been avoiding doing is the very key to seeing clearly.

We see lots of things to look at in the above photo. What’s the first thing you looked at? The house? Why? Maybe because at your first glance you decided it was the most significant thing there, or potentially the most interesting. The white color really stands out among the greens too.  For our purposes it doesn’t matter why you looked at it. The thing to notice is the fact that your attention was drawn to it. And what’s something that people with good vision do. They look at what their attention is drawn to, or what is the most interesting thing at the moment.

I’m going over this in such small steps because blurry vision disorders are, in my opinion, caused by an attention disorder. You don’t spend enough time paying attention to what you’re looking at in the right way. To put it simplistically, I believe your eyes and your brain’s visual center aren’t working in unison, and your eyes can’t work well without your brain. And your own will has to be the starting point. You need a sincere desire to see something and find out more about it and devote your attention to it, or you’re just uselessly going through the motions. Your brain has to get involved and get fired up and stay that way.

So let’s say you looked at the house. Why? Because for whatever reason you wanted to see it better. Now that we’re looking at the house, what’s the first part of the house you looked at? Nice railing on the porch. Is there anybody on the porch? What’s that on the door? I don’t see anybody on the porch, but what’s that sign in front of house? Beware of Dog? Parking in Rear? Can we see anything at all on the sign?

I’m only suggesting where you might look. I’m not telling you where to look, and you aren’t planning out where to look. So don’t get in the habit, when you’re practicing “shifting”, to just bounce around between points for the sake of keeping your eyes moving. The whole point of your eyes moving is it it signifies that your attention was moving and is driving your eyes to move as a consequence of you wanting to look more closely at different things.

What You Already See

With each object, look at the smallest details that you already can see. On the face of the sign, what’s the smallest piece of color you can perceive? And surely there are other spots elsewhere on the sign of the same size, so look around to notice some of them as well. Ok, so you’ve noticed what you can, and nothing else is apparent there, so you can look away from the sign and at the next most interesting thing. Easy, right? Makes sense that you have to do this to really see what you are already capable of seeing right now, right? And yet you don’t already do this, do you.

Don’t try to do anything to “bring out” the details that you think are there. You are simply using your vision, as it is in this moment, to its fullest extent, by looking at things the way you’re meant to. The more often you take a few seconds to hit your limit in the details you can see, the harder your brain works. When you keep looking for the smallest piece of color, occasionally you’ll notice even smaller pieces. Your brain will get the message loud and clear, and it will help you change your programming to perform this task all the time. Because it works. And it’s then that your programming serves you, and you are no longer at the mercy of what appears to be a dysfunctional system.

This is subtle stuff. Once you begin practicing this, you should notice that you have some trouble with it. Just make note of what you find yourself doing. Do you have a hard time becoming interested in seeing something else such that your attention is drawn to look at the smallest piece that you see? Do you find yourself looking away, closing your eyes, or otherwise taking a break to think for a moment about anything? This is your programming fighting against being disrupted. Do your best to keep yourself on track. You will fail countless times. And in the next moment you start over again. It’s a constant process of starting over. But each time you start over it means you never really failed.

I’m buried in paperwork for a tax deadline in a few days, but I don’t want a whole month to go by without a blog entry, so here we go.

My idea for a blog post usually comes from something I read on the forum, something I don’t agree with and want to explain. This one is no exception.

Clear vision is the result of using your eyes in the easiest way possible. People learning this may do things very well for a few seconds, but inevitably they then feel compelled to do something weird with their eyes and abandon the easy way without giving it enough of a chance. If you’ve worked at vision improvement at all, you’ve found that your quality of vision varies. At one end of the scale is the best flashes of clear vision. At the other end of the scale is your extremely blurry vision where things aren’t just typically bad but even blurrier, and you might even see double or multiple images. Like clear flashes, the worst vision won’t last for more than a moment and you can get rid of it pretty quickly by doing just about anything. Do you try to get rid of your worst vision by doing something, such as blinking quickly several times, or tensing your eyes in some way, or “stretching” your eyes by looking far up or to the side? Instead of doing that, you should be treating it as the best opportunity you’ve gotten all day.

Here’s why. Bear with me.

We are largely operating by habit, by programming that we have accepted and created for ourselves over the years by repeating and affirming actions and thoughts. It’s in the way we talk, the way we do our morning routine getting ready for work, the way we do everything that we don’t have to dedicate our full attention to. Bad vision is the result of programming that does not serve you for seeing clearly. There are little things you do that throw it off every time and cause your vision to remain perpetually in almost good working order, constantly sabotaged in every moment. Programming is necessarily tied to the conditions that the program recognizes for it to apply itself to. Imagine walking into a room and it’s chaos. A Peewee Herman style breakfast machine is running, some kid is shooting a paintball gun at a cat, there’s some naked old man doing jumping jacks, and there’s an earthquake. You’re intensely aware, and you’re speechless and you don’t know what to do. In an extreme case of not knowing what to do, where your programming completely fails and you try to grasp at it to tell you what to do, you have a panic attack. But in a less extreme situation, you’re intensely aware of the situation, you consciously consider what’s going on, and you take a conscious action, without much help from your programming. It’s in that moment that you’re more aware and in control than ever.

So in that moment when your vision is much worse than typical, you’re able to be aware of what you’re doing. Your programming isn’t used to such bad vision and doesn’t know how to run as well under that condition, so it won’t distract you so much by directing crazy actions and crazy thoughts that keep your vision bad.

It’s your opportunity to notice everything you’re doing in how you’re looking at something. Why did you just move your eyes away to something else? Why did you just blink harder than necessary? Are you holding your breath, or breathing shallowly? Why did you just try to constrict your field of vision? It’s your chance to question every little thing and consider whether you should be doing it. Would someone with normal vision (meaning correct programming for their vision) do this thing you just did as a matter of routine? It won’t be obvious what is and isn’t correct, so you have to think about it.

So going back to the beginning of this post, another way of thinking about what you’re doing is considering whether this is what you want your process of normal vision to be like all the time. What do you want to have to do all the time with your eyes or with your attention? It has to be sustainable and very easy, or it doesn’t make sense.

I want to talk more about breathing and grounding yourself physically, which I went over a little bit in a recent post. But I’ll go into that more in the next post I think, to keep this one focused.

Have you sat down for half an hour and worked with the eye chart without much success in seeing better, and then decided to take a break and stand up, only to glance at the chart and see it clearer for a moment?

Have you tried the “thumb movement” that Bates wrote about a few times in the Better Eyesight magazines, with some success?

Do you see better after you concentrate on your breathing for a moment, or even just when you take a good deep breath after you’ve been breathing shallowly for a while?

Do you often see better when you’re not thinking about an unpleasant conversation, a deadline, or something you’re unsure about that’s bothering you? Or do you see better when you’re having a “good day” in terms of things unrelated to your vision?

Do you often have moments of clearer vision when you’re running out of energy when riding your bike, running, or some other exhaustive physical activity?

Do you notice that people with blurry vision are often mainly into intellectual pursuits, and that a relatively small number of people into physical sports have vision problems?

If you have blurry vision, do you remember ideas and procedures better than you remember actual sense impressions (vision, touch, sound, smell, taste)?

You can think up some interesting and different explanations for each point above. But look at how the mind works, and all of the above things are explained in the same way.

Thoughts are things, and your thinking has a real impact. When you are physically “present” and focus only on your body and your physical world that is here, right in front of you, you are that much less “in your mind”, and your mind can actually stop for as long as you stay physically present. The simplest way to be physically present that you can do at any time is to focus on your breath. The sound, the feeling of the air, the movement of your abdomen and the rhythm of the whole act of breathing. You don’t have to even try to silence your mind when focusing on your breath. Your mind just stops when you stop participating in your mind and direct your attention elsewhere. You spend all your time thinking because you value your mind too much, even though when you take stock of all the things you think about throughout the day very little of what you think about has any value. Most of what you think about is repeated over and over uselessly.

When you are physically present as your breath, you are in control. Being physically present means that you notice your own few thoughts, as language or emotions, as something separate from what you are as a physical presence. You also notice your own physical actions more. So when you work with the eye chart or any other object or scene to work on your vision with, you can better notice what exactly you are doing, and you can catch yourself doing some interesting things that might be detrimental to your process of seeing. You have created your own situation that you find yourself in as a collection of habits that you allow to run your life. They aren’t working for you. So take a moment to notice them and start to change them.

Here’s another way of thinking about what I wrote about in my last entry, as far as how you think about what you’re looking at, and how your attention behaves in moving around.

There are two ways to think about how blurry the image is.

A - Be frustrated with how blurry it is, and hope that in a quick moment you’ll be able to do something to clear it up. Every time you look for or towards another detail, you’re hoping it will be clearer. You’re waiting for all this nonsense to be done with so you can finally see it, because you don’t see it unless you see it clearly. It’s a waste of time looking at or studying anything or trying to discern any meaning from what you’re seeing unless it’s clearer. You “hold out” on perceiving until someday when you’ll be able to see clearly. You treat your eyes as something you have to trick or push into focusing correctly. You disavow any personal responsibility, in this moment, for the situation, blaming it on your eyes or brain for being messed up due to only your past mistakes or experiences.

or B - With each detail or piece of blur you look at, you pay attention to what you do perceive, even if it’s confusing and unfocused. You’re thankful for each thing you look at, and every time you shift your attention even a little bit, to a nearby point, what you’re looking at is a little different, even if it’s just because you’re paying attention to a different part of it more, and with every slightly change you’re thankful for the whole new data set you get to perceive. Every shift, every blink, means a whole new picture. You want to look at more and more things, and look at more and more parts of those things, because you know the more you perceive, the better you see, and then the more still you perceive, and so on in a continual feedback process of your vision improving. You treat vision as an active and busy process of perceiving.

So which way makes the most sense? This is what the idea of “accepting the blur”, a concept that some vision improvement teachers have shared, is all about. Are you going to fight against what you perceive, or are you going to take what you can get and fully immerse yourself in using it to accomplish your goal? Your vision represents the way you perceive, or the way you treat the information that you get.