When you read Bates’s book, don’t put too much importance, for your own purposes, to his absolute statements about “perfect” vision and how such-and-such is true all the time.
When you think about perfect vision and compare it to what’s real for you right now, that mess of blur that you seem to have no control over, it’s daunting. But all you have to do right now is do something a little bit better in the way you use your eyes. And by doing it a little better, you’re making it easier – and possible – for yourself to take another step of the same size to do something a little better still. Don’t try to tackle it all at once, because there are too many pieces for you to focus on all at once.
When you tell yourself that you won’t accept anything less than perfect vision, you’re refusing any kind of distortion or confusion with your vision that may be necessary as intermediate steps. It takes some time to improve vision permanently. You can have flashes and moments of clear vision, but it takes time for you to recreate your programming. In every moment you’re creating or reinforcing your own existing programming.
And by programming, I mean specific things that you do, allow and ignore. For example, just examine one thing, like what you do after a blink. When you blink and you open your eyes, what happens? Do you stare and tense up and hope that what you’re looking at will appear a little clearer? Do you try to “squash” the double image into one? And then do you allow yourself to do it, without stopping yourself and questioning what you’re doing? And then do you ignore and forget that you even did it, so that later (now) when you discover it, it’s as if you’ve never even noticed it before, despite probably having done it a million times? That is how asleep you have become, subjugating yourself to the patterns you have created to live your life for you. You put yourself on auto-pilot and allow the faulty programming to continue. So take a moment and notice it and stand against it, refuse to ignore it, and replace it with what serves you. Or just replace it with something. Try something. In this example, after a blink, try immediately thinking of the smallest point you can imagine, as I’ve described in previous posts. And when you keep practicing it, you’re recreating programming for what you will begin to do after every blink.
This is why improving vision is not simply about “relaxation” as many people working with the Bates method like to see it. The concept of relaxation is important, with the way tension permeates the struggle with blurry vision, but the concept is too simplistic when you try to apply it to a situation like this. You have created something that you need to fix. You can’t just “relax” out of it and hope the problem goes away.
I feel like I should expand on what I said above about what to do after a blink. Or just my thoughts on seeing in general, I guess. I’m always struggling to find a way to explain this. Several people have shared that they have found what I’ve said helpful and they’re improving their vision with it, so I guess I’ll keep trying to find a way to explain it better. It’s like trying to explain how to do something by describing the endless things not to do. I don’t know if that’s possible. There’s not just one way of going about learning this, because it’s just a matter of unlearning what you’re doing wrong somehow.
Anyway, when you blink and open your eyes, the first thing you do is think of the smallest point, whether you see anything or not. Your temptation is going to be to “look” at something, or in other words, to do something with your eyes that you think is necessary to make them point at something. That’s what you think is necessary to do. You don’t think it’s possible to look at something, and have your eyes point at it perfectly, together, and focus correctly, without you doing that thing you do to try to force it to happen by tensing up your eyes and trying to take control of the situation. I think what you don’t do anything, you find that you’re kind of blind for a moment, and you don’t realize that it is only a moment, and your visual system needs to have that freedom for a moment to reorient itself. It takes time.
When you only assume responsibility for seeing only one point at a time, of an infinitely small size, you basically are shedding the responsibility of “seeing” anything. You don’t have to “look at” anything in the way that you think “looking at” something is done. If you want to look at the brand name on the TV, you keep the size of the infinitely small point in your mind and glance at a point on about where the brand name is – you don’t have to see anything! – and then immediately another point on it, and to another, repeating for as long as you want, and then to another object. You don’t have to do anything fancy with your eyes to try to “fix” the image. You do nothing at all. Your eyes are slowly taking it all in and given a moment will begin to adjust. Your control of your eyes is as passive as if you were pointing a pencil at an imaginary and infinitely small point. The pencil doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t try to create the point by staring at it. All it can do is point at an infinitely small point, and that’s it. But it has to keep moving, from point to point.
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I founded iblindness.org in 2002 as I began reading books on the Bates Method and became interested in vision improvement. I believe that everyone who is motivated can identify the roots of their vision problems and apply behavioral changes to solve them.
Very informative. How do you apply this technique when reading? When I read texts, I captured one whole word at a time. If I try the smallest point technique and shifts on the word, my reading will slow down very much.
You couldn’t have worded it better, honestly. It’s as though you had collected my recent reflections and ideas and put them together, drawing conclusions, which I was apparently unable to. Now that I’ve read your post, I recall that whenever I let go and just enjoy what I see, searching for details, and not tensing up my eyes, I get clear flashes very quickly afterwards. I mean, at first it often gets slightly worse, but then shoots up so much. Whenever I do thing my eyesight gets better for some time, but then I start straining out of the blue again. With your post you made me notice something fundamental about my eyes, for which I’m very grateful to you.
Keep up the good work, it’s very helpful what you write here 🙂
Thank you for that, very helpful.
Thank you so much for writing your own experience. I find the blog very helpful and I keep waiting for the next post. It makes me feel like I’m not all on my own doing this…