The pleasure of looking at details is a form of unity with the world that nature gave us. The more we look on a regular basis, the less casual life is for us. Everything in life becomes interesting as we see all the differentiation within it.
I remember a biker who came to one of my classes in the 1980s. He rode his motorcycle from the Peninsula, a forty-minute ride to our school. After studying for two and a half hours in a vision class, he went straight to Golden Gate Park just to watch the beautiful flowers in the Arboretum, one by one. He looked at their petals and at their veins. He looked at their stems and at their leaves. Smaller and smaller details he continued to find. The class had stimulated him to want to look at beauty.
I used to ask my daughter, Adar, to go to the beach with me. I would take along an eye chart, some tennis balls, and her glasses, which had an obstruction for her left eye—it was her stronger eye—to give her right eye a chance to work more. Since she almost always resisted going, I had to tempt her by suggesting that I would put her on my shoulders. Fortunately, she remembered that she had enjoyed being on my shoulders from the time she was a baby, so she would agree. When we arrived at the beach, she would do eye exercises as she looked at the waves and into the distance. Eventually, Adar began to notice that her reading of the chart had become much better and would always say, “Daddy, why did I oppose coming to the beach? It’s just so nice to be here.”
On our way to the beach we would stop from time to time, and I’d get her to look at signs. At times, we would stop at a flowerbed right near the beach, and I’d ask her to count two hundred petals with her weak right eye. As she counted, I would look at my watch and find the count had taken between fifty-five and fifty-nine seconds. This always surprised me because it seemed too quick. I also remember another time during her adolescence, while massaging and relaxing her in a dark room, I asked, “Adar, how many petals can you count in one minute?”
She answered that she could count between thirty-five and forty.
So I said, “Adar, I have timed you and found that you can count two hundred of them in less than one minute.”
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 o
ne 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.
You are engaging your weaker eye in practice that it’s not used to. Normally, the strong eye dominates. When there is stress on the visual system—and I would like to suggest that most of us, even those who have good vision, have some visual stress—the tendency of the system is to use the strong parts and suppress the weak ones. But this is unhealthy for us. It makes us work very hard to see. When you wave to the side of the strong eye and look with the weaker eye, you wake up cells in the eye and in the brain that normally are not working. When you wake them up, there’s a great relief because there is more balance in the system, and no one group of cells works harder than the others.
Now close your eyes and imagine that the space is white and the ink is black, and remember a single letter you just saw. It will give you a sense that you are really looking at that letter. Say out loud, “The ink is black and the page is white.” You don’t need to wave your hand while your eyes are closed, but you can imagine that you are waving your hand to the side of the strong eye while reading with the weaker eye. Then open your eyes and wave to the side of the strong eye and read the next line with the weaker eye. Now close your eyes and say out loud, three times, “The ink is black and the page is white.” Then open your eyes and wave your hand to the side and read the next line. Next, look away into the distance, and wave your hand to the side of your head. Now look back at the fourth line without changing the distance at which you started; then close your eyes and visualize the letters again. Repeat the process for the last lines of text. Each time you close your eyes, say out loud, “The ink is black and the page is white.” Or say the opposite: “The page is white and the ink is black.”
When you finish doing all these movements, look back at the third line and see how clear it became. Then look back at line number one. What you did is that you trained your brain to look at smaller details with the eye that normally did not work as much as the other. In this way, you create equality in your brain, which takes away the stress from underusing the weaker eye and overusing the stronger eye.
You should see these results rather quickly. Most people are astounded at how much better they can see when they take the paper away from their eyes. For a time span that could last for two seconds to several minutes, they can see the page in much greater clarity because they used their weaker eye.
Repeating this exercise two or three times a day for the first two months, and once a day for the next three months, will forge a whole new pathway in your brain, and the brain will become accustomed to utilizing both eyes in unison.
Accompanied by other exercises that we will do, this will start to wake up the precious macula in both eyes. This is relevant because the macula reflects what is in the universe. One of my workshop participants, a physician by profession, spoke like a poet, and his poetry resonated deeply within me and within the other workshop participants. He said, “The macula is like the sun, and the periphery is like all the stars around the sun, and the farther you get from the sun, the less bright it is. The farther you get from the macula, the dimmer you see. But you would see with dim light.”
He was absolutely right. The farther you get from the macula, the less you see bright light and clear details, but the more you see dim light and unlit details. There is a place for both the macula and the periphery. We need to use both. The macula can be stimulated by strong sunlight with the sunning exercise. It is stimulated by your thoughts and by your actions. The more you look at details, smaller details nearby and smaller faraway details, the better you see.
Look far away right now. Look at a cloud. Look into the distance, just like you had learned to do before. As you look far into the distance, you see clouds and mountains, buildings and sky. While you see clouds moving, or mountains on the horizon, wave your hand to the side and look into the distance. Also, pay attention to smaller details than the ones you would normally see. Let’s say you see the windows of a faraway building. Now close your eyes and visualize the windows and their frames. Try to recall details within one single window. Then open your eyes and look from window to window. Do not strain to see. Take a look at the absolutely smallest details you can possibly see in one window, as long as you don’t strain.
Now close your eyes and visualize a contrast. If you saw a white curtain with a black frame, visualize the differentiation of those colors. If you saw wrinkled curtains, close your eyes and visualize the difference between the wrinkles and the protruding parts; then look up and down that window. From there, start to look at all the rest of the windows. Moving from one to the other will activate your macula. Additionally, you don’t lose the periphery and you pay attention to what you see with your weaker eye while waving your hand to the side of the stronger eye.
In most cases, a person’s weaker eye for proximity is also his or her weaker eye for distance. However, with a minority of cases—but still a high percentage—it can be that one eye is stronger for seeing near, and the other eye is stronger for distance. If this is the case with you, do this exercise first with your eye that sees well from nearby; then do it with your eye that sees well from far off. This work can make a very big difference to you in that both eyes will participate more equally in whatever you’re looking at. As you continue to look from afar, you will see that your eyes get sharper, just like from nearby. As you look at smaller details, the larger ones become clearer because your macula has gained function and can look at a great speed from detail to detail. In fact, the speed is so great that you cannot notice.
You can also examine how well you see from mid-distance. Mid-distance is somewhere between four feet and fifteen feet. You can use the same “fist telescope” technique that was mentioned earlier to tell if one eye is stronger at mid-distance.
Comprehension Problems with the Weaker Eye
A third of those who have disparity between their eyes have comprehension problems with their weaker eye’s reading, meaning that they don’t necessarily retain what they read with the weaker eye. This exercise works to correct the disparity.
I recommend blocking your strong eye with a small piece of paper taped to the bridge of your nose. Now wave your hand to the side of the strong eye. Read three sentences with your weaker eye; then take the page away and use a tape recorder or MP3 player to record yourself
as you repeat, from memory, what you read. Now play the tape back while reading along with the weaker eye; 80 percent of everyone who does this will realize that their retention of information is bad with the weaker eye.
If you have a partner to work with, keep reading the sentences to your partner as you recollect them until you get the sentences right. This will help to build retention with your weaker eye. Before doing this exercise, be sure to palm for six minutes, in addition to sunning and working with both eyes; only then should you isolate the weaker eye.
Step 8: Blocking the Strong Eye
This next exercise, as physical as it is, can also give you a whole new mental outlook of the world. Sunlight is the best lighting in which to do this exercise. Otherwise, very strong interior light will work if it makes it easy for you to see the letters.
Look at the page in front of you from a distance that is comfortable and easy to read. Wave your hand to the side of your head, from all the way above your forehead to the side of your eyes and beneath them. You could also wave around a colored piece of paper, a toy with different colors, a stick with a ribbon, or anything else that draws your attention. Look centrally at the letters on the page while peripherally sensing the object that you wave. As a result you will be working both your periphery and center together. That will release your eye from strain. Your eyes, as I mentioned before, cannot strain if both eyes are being used together.
Whenever there is strain, it is because one eye is being used more than the other. This exercise can make a huge difference by helping you to integrate the center and the periphery. Anytime you are looking at something that you can’t easily see, like a menu or a newspaper, wave your hands to the side, and slowly but surely the letters will become clearer to you.
Now take a small piece of paper, approximately one inch by two inches, and tape it to the bridge of your nose so it covers your stronger eye. To make sure you have done this correctly, close your weaker eye and make sure you cannot see the page with the stronger eye that is covered. Then wave to the side of your covered eye and read the page with your weaker eye.
Vision for Life Page 6
