Imperfect Sight Is Mostly an Illusion

It's hard to believe for a newbie that his or her imperfect sight is mostly a mental illusion, because it feels so real and the glasses that seem to correct it are also very real.

It is however accepted even by the optometrists that eyesight cannot be measured in diopters, as it should have been if imperfect sight was really strictly due to eyeball deformation. That's why the Snellen card X/Y numbers are used, meaning that two persons with the same Snellen reading without glasses may require different glasses for the same correction. Consequently, there's something else that contributes to imperfect sight than eyeball deformation, and it is the illusions caused by mental strain.

It took me quite a long time to demonstrate myself this fact. I learned it from my flashes of improved vision. When a flash occurs, the image does not gradually reduce the blur to the point when it fully converges, as it would be for a focusing camera. During the flash, first a multitude of sharp double-images appear out of the blur, surrounded with a cloud of blur. Then the images line up horizontally. Next, most of the images fade out and only two stay, on quite a big distance from each other, one more vivid than the other. At this point, the fog of blur disappears and the two images appears amazingly clear and three-dimensional. Finally, the less vivid image gradually fades out and the perfect sight arrives. What a weird play of mental illusions! You will never obtain this with just optical systems. I believe my eyeballs come into the right shape quite early, when I begin to see the multiple sharp images, and the rest of time I am observing only mental illusions, when I could already have perfect sight.

The conclusion is: stop trying to do something with your eyes. Switch entirely to practicing with your mind. Don't underestimate memory and imagination techniques.

The Eye Muscles

Forget about the eye muscles. The problem is entirely in the mind. Beside the muscles receiving wrong control impulses from the mind and forcing the eye out of focus, there are also the illusions of imperfect sight, which are the largest defect of imperfect sight, and they are not connected with any muscles, only with the mental strain. As soon as you regain good mental control, the muscles will also be OK, no need to worry about them.

The Biggest Dilemma of the Bates Method

The biggest dilemma of the Bates method is that you want to change the way you use your eyes, yet you need to completely divert your attention away from your eyes. This may seem contradictory at first glance, but it means simply that you're still sticking to the wrong idea that the problem is in your eyes, while it is truly in your mind. The desire to influence your eyes is simply a wrong goal. Replace the wrong idea of doing something to your eyes with the right idea of leaving them alone and instead playing with your memory and imagination, and the situation will change dramatically. This replacement must happen not only in your rational belief, but also in the emotional attitude, and it always takes time. You should become sincerely MORE interested in imagination and memory than the eyes and current acuity of vision.

While I keep caring about my eyes, every Bates technique I do gets perverted and becomes its opposite. Let's take shifting for example. To move my eyes all the time is the WRONG way. The right way is to DO NOTHING with my eyes, step aside and wait. What's going to happen is that I will become bored in a second and my interest will go to another point, and my eyes will want to shift as well. Bingo! What I should do is just to not interfere with this natural desire. Feel the difference: the INTEREST comes first and the motor impulse comes last. Such shift always produces swing as well. This is very unlike the anxiety to keep moving the eyes all the time at all costs, which is even more strain.

I've re-read Chapter X "Strain" and thought that I've been still missing the subtle point of totally letting go of the idea to do ANYTHING with my eyes, whatever technique I am practicing. Since I realized it over again, it is going to change.

…This relaxation cannot, however, be obtained by any sort of effort. It is fundamental that patients should understand this; for so long as they think, consciously or unconsciously, that relief from strain may be obtained by another strain their cure will be delayed.

Amen.

Bates Method Ain't Mechanical

Every my appreciable advance in Bates practice I did in a special state of the mind that I would call conscious and responsive reflection. It is usually when I am not in haste, not obliged to do and think anything and have my time to be with myself and meditate. I look inside my mind and sometimes cope to recognize clearly the wrong thoughts that cause me strain, and eliminate them. These thoughts are not like words but rather volitions (like a mental command to clench fists) that have become habitual and subconscious. Having realized and canceled these, I enter the condition when I no longer support strain, but am not yet fully relaxed. It is quite volatile, I need to continuously balance and dodge my mind to keep the wrong thoughts off. This condition of "no longer supporting strain" is the best starting point for practicing other Bates techniques, such as central fixation, swing, shifting, flashing etc., which are in this case very efficient.

I think my findings accord with what Bates wrote about mental strain:

"TEMPORARY conditions may contribute to the strain to see which results in the production of errors of refraction; but its foundation lies in wrong habits of thought. In attempting to relieve it the physician has continually to struggle against the idea that to do anything well requires effort. This idea is drilled into us from our cradles. [...] The mind is the source of all such efforts from outside sources brought to bear upon the eye. Every thought of effort in the mind, of whatever sort, transmits a motor impulse to the eye; and every such impulse causes a deviation from the normal in the shape of the eyeball and lessens the sensitiveness of the center of sight. If one wants to have perfect sight, therefore, one must have no thought of effort in the mind. Mental strain of any kind always produces a conscious or unconscious eyestrain and if the strain takes the form of an effort to see, an error of refraction is always produced."

Unfortunately, the next time I try to reproduce my previous success, it often happens that I fail to remember the mental state I was in, and only try to repeat things mechanically, which has little or no efficiency. I think many practitioners are familiar with this effect.

The resolution I'm finding is that one has to let more peace into the mind for more quality reflection. Perhaps one needs to devote more time to practice and during that time learn to fully retire from any business one may be doing during the day. Nothing is going to work if one keeps thinking about other things, while straining volitions remain in the background. Also, it is easier and more efficient to support the relaxed state of the mind afterwards, than to reacquire it again, but one needs yet to learn to do it, because it easy to return to the habitual strain when one gets back to work.

Another thing to mention is creative thinking. Our mind likes to have fun and play games, and is relaxed by doing so, but dislikes boredom and is strained by the latter. For this reason, even if some particular thought or image used to do a great job of relaxing my mind, after having been repeated many times it ceases to work, because it becomes boring and my mind rejects to think it any more. So I need go ahead and invent another one. These little and temporary personal customizations of Bates techniques make them work for me, provided that I thoroughly understand the underlying fundamental principles.

I've seen some people claiming that Bates method isn't perfect and needs to be enhanced because many people fail with it. I believe though that it's not the problem of Bates method but the problem of practitioners. Bates method is not mechanical but creative, and people are sometimes just not willing to be like that.

Dodging Your Eyesight or "What Is the Bates Routine?"

Look at this impressing story told by Dr. Bates:

"The patient, a man with fifteen diopters of myopia, was so much disturbed by what he saw when his vision had been improved by the memory of a period that he was directed to look away from the Snellen test card, or whatever object he was regarding, when he found the letters or other details coming out; and for about a week he went around persistently dodging his improved sight. As his memory improved, it became more and more difficult for him to do this, and at the end of the week it was impossible. When he looked at the bottom line at a distance of twenty feet he remembered the period perfectly, and when asked if he could see the letters, he replied: "I cannot help but see them."

It is known that Dr. Bates did not provide any routine for his method. This fact is very confusing for most newbies who tend to think about the Bates method as a set of exercises, like bodily ones. Look at the community forums and you'll find that "What is the daily Bates routine?" or alike is a top 10 question. It's hard to get comfortable with the idea that the Bates method should be practiced all the time. It's just unclear how to technically do it.

At first, I tried different routines (even exercises beyond the Bates method), and I confirm that just doing things few times a day (excluding sun treatment) doesn't work in the long run, or works very inefficiently. Even if I get relaxation and a clear flash during my Bates session, it's pointless if I then go back to work and strain. I like how Rishi said: "You have the same time to use your eyes wrongly than you have to use them rightly." So, my real challenge is to put my habit of strain on a slippery slope, so that it would be slipping down all the time, even if I am not busy controlling it.

I think I am close to finding a solution, and it is what I call, following Dr. Bates, dodging your eyesight. In short, it means to consciously divert your mind's attention from the act of seeing, and thereby begin looking without effort. This is nothing new; in fact, all Bates techniques, such as central fixation, memory of black dot, swinging etc. are techniques of dodging. The subtle but important peculiarity is that I learned to identify and support the state when I pretend that I don't care about clear vision and rather engage my mind with other qualities of vision than its acuity. When I succeed to dodge long enough without "getting disturbed", the clear flash arrives almost with no additional action on my part. I'd say anything I do while dodging slips me down to the clear flash.

What I need to do now is take each of my daily activities and learn to dodge at the same time – first dodge consciously and then unconsciously. Currently I have learned to dodge while I'm on a walk outdoors. Unfortunately, when I use my eyes to obtain information, e.g. when I work at the computer, it is very easy to go back to strain. Combining dodging with reading is what I'm currently working on. I have thought up a bunch of "dodging games" that help me obtain that state. I will write about them in my next posts.