Preface

Besides wearing glasses or contact lenses, absolutely nothing, nothing whatever, can be done to alleviate errors of focusing in the human eye.

This, in the West, is the currently held orthodox belief to which, at one time, after a university training in biology, I fully subscribed. But now I know it to be wrong. I have proved to myself that it is not only possible, but simple, inexpensive, and above all completely safe to alleviate, not only errors of focusing, but also a number of other errors which degrade the performance of that most miraculous feat of biological engineering, the human visual system.

I no longer bother with glasses. I drive safely without them, visit the theatre and cinema, go bird-watching. My eyesight has been so much improved that I can perceive, for example, a ten-centimetre (four-inch) thick power cable at a range of three kilometres (nearly two miles).

Together with this improvement in focusing ability, startling enough on its own, I have found a remarkable improvement in the quality of my eyesight as a whole. It has a new vividness, richness, and greater stereoscopic depth. I am able to detect moving objects more quickly and follow them more accurately. The steam rising from my coffee cup is now seen to be composed of individual particles. Colours are clearer, softer, more detailed and vibrant. Short-sightedness is automatically corrected when using binoculars; at the age of 16, before I ever needed glasses, I bought the best binoculars I could afford, and thought them very good indeed. In recent years, though, I had begun to doubt my first opinion use. In any event I was thinking of changing them for a yet more expensive pair. But now I find that the deterioration had nothing to do with the binoculars: it was entirely in my own eye. The image they deliver now is, if anything, better, more subtle, and more detailed than ever.

The method I used is not new. It was devised by a very remarkable and persistent man, Dr W. H. Bates, an ophthalmologist who practised in New York between 1885 and 1922. He published his method in 1919.

The Bates method, revised and updated since, has helped thousands of people, but such is the peculiar nature of optical defects, and such is the conservatism of the medical profession, that it has been generally ridiculed or ignored. As a result, millions of people are now wearing glasses and need not be. Worse: it is my belief that glasses (and contact lenses)* actually cause deterioration of the sight and may even be responsible for or contributory to certain forms of eye disease.

In these pages, though, we will be concerned not so much with eye disease as with the restoration of normal functioning to eyes which would otherwise be considered healthy. In practice that usually means overcoming errors of focusing; the other errors will disappear at the same time.

If you wear glasses you will probably have been diagnosed as suffering from at least one of these conditions:

1 myopia, or short-sightedness;

2 hypermetropia, or long-sightedness;

3 presbyopia, or “old-age” sight;

4 astigmatism.

All of these respond to the Bates method. In addition, people who have normal eyesight can often improve their vision far beyond the accepted standard of 6:6 (or 20:20, as was). In other words, someone who can read the bottom line of an optician’s chart at a distance of 6 metres (20 feet) — the ordinary standard — may, after practising the Bates method, be able to read the same line at 8, 10 or 12 metres. (See Appendix A for the method of measuring visual acuity.)

This sounds so far-fetched that I neither want nor expect you to take my word for it. All I ask of you is an open mind and the willingness to discover for yourself that the method works. If, soon after beginning its gentle and restful practices, you find that there has been an improvement in your vision, no matter how temporary or slight, then you too will have discovered that it is possible to alter “errors of focusing in the human eye”. And when, some time later, you experience your first flash of perfect eyesight, when literally you glimpse the potential of the method, I doubt if anyone will be able to dissuade you from going on.

And if, finally, you are able to see as I can see today, then the pleasure I have derived from writing this book will have been multiplied, and I shall have gone some way towards repaying the debt of gratitude I owe to Dr Bates and his followers.

* Unless a distinction is made, the term “glasses” in this book should be taken to include artificial lenses of any kind.