Upon that, she replied, “But, Daddy, I can’t follow my count.”
“That is the exact point,” I answered. “What happened was that you had counted automatically, and by exceeding normal speed with your counting, you engaged the macula in a function it already knows how to perform. You directed your macula to look.”
So, my daughter, whose lens was removed, and whose cornea is small, was able to exceed all expectations about her vision by connecting her brain and her macula. Everyone can do the same, either with a healthy eye or with an eye that has some defect. Like my daughter, you too can make the connection between your brain and your macula. You can move from detail to detail rapidly, and as a result your vision can become as sharp as my daughter’s vision had.
Find a lovely place to sit and look at beauty, to look from detail to detail of a beautiful thing. Once you gain this desire, the world will look beautiful to you, and you will want to mobilize yourself. It is so important that you retain curiosity about details. As children, we have it naturally; as adults, we have to make an effort to give it our attention and our souls. It is wrong to be childish, because that is immature and taxes you, but it is wonderful to be childlike, to be unfrozen and in a state of perpetual awe.
If you were born with macular degeneration or have an inclination toward it, looking at details will slow it down and may even reverse it. Looking from detail to detail is the work of the macula. Your macula becomes activated as many millions of cells start to come alive; their activity triggers activity in the brain. This activity in turn creates more synapses between the macula and the brain, and between the brain and the macula. It’s amazing how a small part of our body, the macula of the eye, can energize the whole body. It’s also important that all of us strengthen our macula so we will be able to see well for the hundred or more years that we could live.
Shifting is one of the best habits to get into.
Figure 2.16. Find a lovely place to sit and look at beauty.
Read the Fine Print
People used to look at raindrops on leaves. They used to look at fruit that matured on the tops of trees. Nowadays, people tend to look just at the big picture. We learn to try and look at whole paragraphs of pages, just to grab their contents without looking at details.
In the past, we used to revere the written word. We used to read poetry. People used to look at every word and find something to respect. People used to read the same poem over and over again and find new meaning each new time they read it. Those times are over. These days, every poet who would try to live off poetry may just as well apply for welfare because there’s no way that he or she can make enough money by selling it. On the other end, suspense stories and prose with low-level content sell, and because they’re not extremely interesting when you look at them page by page, people don’t mind skimming through a whole novel to get the gist of it. This only weakens the activity of the macula. It’s the tragedy of the modern world that we don’t really engage with great presence in whatever we’re looking at.
This next exercise, therefore, is a good push in the opposite direction. Look at the page in this book with different sized paragraphs of print. Look at the third print size, which is the size of normal print.
No one has
perfect vision
all the time, and
our eyesight
varies.
Figure 2.17. Look at each letter slowly, in detail,
as if you were writing it with your mind.
Bates checked hundreds of thousands of eyes
human and animal, young and old.
While his subjects slept, ate, got sick, underwent anesthesia,
posed for photos, did arithmetic, gazed at stars, played ball, and sewed on buttons,
Bates tagged after them and measured their vision.
The results surprised him.
Bad vision got worse, got a little better, had flashes of perfect vision.
Sleep often produced worse vision.
Normal eyes went nearsighted every time the subject told a lie.
Look at each letter slowly, in detail, as if you were writing it with your mind. Follow each part of each letter with your eyes, point by point, line by line. For example, if you see a Z, you can look at the lower line of the letter; then notice the middle line, and gradually take in the top line. Look even closer to see many different points in the bottom line, many points in the middle line, and many points in the upper line. Try to distinguish between parts of the Z, even though it is just one letter. Then continue to look at all the other different letters in this same way. Look at each different part of each letter as if you were writing them slowly with dark ink
This way of looking utilizes the macula, the center of the retina, in the exact way you looked at the details in the world when you were an infant. At first, you may not have seen them well. But once you looked at whichever details you could see, you woke up the connection between the brain and the macula.
Now look at the first print size: the large print. Look from point to point on each letter in the large print. Then look back at the smaller print size and find whether you see them better than before. You can do this same exercise from two perspectives. You can start with small print and then look at larger print, or vice versa. In both ways, you should be able to reach the same results. You are training your brain to look at smaller areas than your normal tendency.
After you read the print in this way, look away from the page for a minute and see if you remember what you read. It is amazing how many people have absolutely no recollection of the text, or a very limited recollection.
I enjoy sharing this story about someone in a recent class who lost vision in one eye almost completely and could not really see text. I had him read an eye chart, and he could read only eight letters. When I quickly moved his face away from the chart, he did not remember even one out of those eight letters, for three times in a row. We finally made some progress when he remembered at least one. Consequently, he started to have some vision in an eye that both he and his doctors had dismissed as being completely blind. The first day of the class, he had to be led around by another person; that was when his stronger eye, or what he called his “seeing eye,” was patched. The second day, he still had to be led around but felt more confident and could not be stopped. After trying to recollect what was on the chart, he walked with an eye patch without any disturbance and looked with the eye that he had dismissed as blind. He didn’t see well yet, but he was not blind.
On a much smaller scale, what’s amazing is when you start to remember part of what you read; even if you don’t remember but just try to recollect it, you’ll find that the vision in both eyes becomes much stronger.
This work with the macula can change you physically and spiritually. Quite often, we have a single-minded idea about the reality of life, when the reality of life actually has many levels and many variations. Looking at many details helps you experience the variations that both the physical and the psychological worlds have to offer.
The Ink Is Black and the Page Is White
With a small piece of paper taped to the bridge of your nose to block the central vision in your strong eye, look at an eye chart in bright sunlight or under bright inside light. Look at the page and imagine that the black ink of the print is interrupting the white of the page. Slowly move your attention from letter to letter. Start with the large print in line one. Meanwhile, wave your hand to the side of the stronger eye. This way you’re simultaneously working to increase the periphery of the stronger eye and improving the central vision of the weaker eye.