It has become common for people in our culture to immediately put on sunglasses as soon as they step out of the house on a sunny day. People see the sun as some sort of enemy that is about to cause harm to their eyes. Doctors warn us of the dangers of sun exposure, and there certainly are reasons to take the proper precautions to protect our bodies from too much exposure to ultraviolet light. Our eyes, however, are made to function at their highest and best when they are exposed to a full range of light and darkness.
It’s important to be in touch with our bodies on a cellular level. You can’t normally see your cells unless you have microscopic pictures taken of them and are able to look at the pictures. We tend to ignore our body and our body parts. But it is very important to have a very thorough feel for our own body.
Enjoy the sun and also the dark of night. Hardly ever wear sunglasses because they weaken the pupils. Enjoy the sun throughout the day, and don’t use a flashlight when you take a walk at night. Enjoy the expansion of the pupils at night. Make your eyes more vital and more alive. Give your eyes a sense of love so that, in many ways, you love your life and you love the universe. Allow your eyes to develop good fixation, which is the ability to allow the proper amount of light to enter the pupils in order to see better in whatever situation you are in. When your pupils become firmer and not sluggish, you can then have a better fixation, and allow the exact amount of light you need for your sight to improve.
In the daytime, you will end up seeing details in much greater clarity. This will take the load and distress away from other parts of the visual system, like the retina and the lens. At nighttime, your pupils will be wide enough to see all that is around you in the dark. Your whole system will become stronger as a result of your pupils being able to absorb more light.
Ignoring your eyes, not giving them enough darkness or enough light, weakens the system through the years. Renewing our strength by reducing the amount of time we wear sunglasses, and reducing the amount of time we spend indoors, can make a huge difference. Be wary of the sun scare.
Many people do not realize that we have pigments in our eyes that darken the light. It’s called the melanin pigment, which is in the choroid area, the area that nourishes the retina. One of the ten layers of the retina is melanin, so the retina itself has a whole layer of pigment that darkens the light. Therefore, you have “sunglasses” inside the retina itself. When you wear sunglasses, it reduces the usefulness of the melanin layer, and the body will produce less melanin. It also darkens the light as it arrives at the retina, so you do not use your own pigments to darken the light. Consequently, your pigments migrate to the back of the retina, less of it is produced for the retina and for the skin, and they are not as effective as they could have been otherwise.
Believe it or not, sunglasses hurt your retina just as much as crutches can hurt one’s legs. If your legs were weak and you were quick in using a cane or crutches or braces to walk with, you may never give up your crutches. But if you worked very hard on strengthening your legs, there is a possibility you would regain their full use. In some cases there isn’t such a possibility, and that’s when crutches or braces are very useful. If there were such a possibility, and you could strengthen your legs, you wouldn’t use crutches as a method of healing, since it’s best to work on the body’s independence.
The same is true for sunglasses. The more you use sunglasses, the weaker your pupils become. You also are weakening your defense mechanism that has existed in your retina and in your ancestors’ retinas for millions of years. What’s more, when you wear sunglasses, you produce less melanin, which then affects your skin as well as your eyes. I have heard of research showing how a couple of villages of Australian Aborigines were informed by the medical profession that they must wear sunglasses, and it was the first time in their history they got sunburned as a consequence. The reason is when you do not produce enough melanin, it’s a systemic issue. We need to produce enough melanin to protect ourselves from the sun, to darken the light. It’s like the paper that a photographer uses to decrease light intensity in the photography shop. The same thing happens with melanin. It darkens the light, and therefore the light can concentrate better in the retina. Wearing sunglasses does the work of our own pigments, and so we produce less of them. But that production affects your skin and also affects your mood, because without good light, it’s hard for almost any human to be in a good mood.
I live in a city that many people like to leave occasionally because of the fog. There are people who live in Seattle, where there’s a lot of rain, and others in Scandinavia, many of whom are very depressed because they don’t have enough light. We need the light to be much less depressed because it actually induces chemical activity, like release of serotonin. The light combines with hemoglobin and creates an amazing buildup—which some people are saying is similar to photosynthesis—that releases serotonin, and the serotonin leads to optimism. There is no medication—including Prozac or any other antidepressant—that can make you as optimistic as sunlight, if you absorb it properly.
If you practice sunning for at least twenty minutes a day, you will find that your eyes adjust much better to the sun. The sun, throughout the years, will become very comfortable for you. You will also find that darkness is easier for you to handle. The dark will not appear to be as dark, as your pupils grow wider and your retinal cells get more sensitive. Best of all, you will enjoy widely opening your eyes in both the strongest and the weakest light. You will also be happier because the combination of the sun’s rays and the hemoglobin in the blood releases many hormones and neurotransmitters, like serotonin, that lead to a sense of joy. You will probably also have an easier time releasing melatonin at night without taking any vitamins or drugs, simply because of your good sun exposure. The joy of this will lead to many other good things in your life.
If your eyes are sun-sensitive and do not widen enough in the dark, the other mechanisms, even if they’re healthy, may not function to the best of their potential. Most of what the visual system does is absorbing light and processing it. Therefore, it’s important that that process be easy and relaxing for the body.
There are three essential dangers from utilizing corrective lenses. If you wear glasses, you tend not to use as much of your external muscles because you depend on a focal point. They also cause us not to pay attention to the periphery, because we normally look within their frame. For this reason, you weaken the eyes through the years, which is very bad for your total mechanism.
If you wear contact lenses, your body wants to reject them at first because they are foreign objects. This means you must weaken the immune system in your eyes in order to accept the contacts. This weakens the entire eye over time. Also, the contacts prevent enough oxygen from coming to the eyes, because the contact lenses block it. Even the permeable contact lenses are not permeable enough for oxygen, and they are hard to clean.
And whether you wear glasses or contacts, the biggest danger is simply the sense of dependency you create. The more you wear them, the more you need them. You never give your eyes the chance to work out and to regain their sense of strength and natural ability.
At the age of forty-five, seven out of eight people wear corrective lenses. I don’t think we were ever born to have all this correction. The reason that we have all this correction is that we are creatures of imitation. There are many millions of brain cells that only work to imitate each other. Monkeys imitate each other, and humans imitate other humans. By practicing vision improvement and being adamant about it, you will be able to affect your vision and the world for the better. This book will change the world completely because many boundaries will break in what we believe our real capacity is. Just imagine how many diseases will be prevented as a result of people working on their eyes.
Now you know how to measure your own vision. You have an eye chart on the wall. Let’s assume that you read the fourth line with great ease, and then you read the fifth, sixth, and seventh with more difficulty. By the eighth, you can’t read anymore. If this is true, you’re standing exactly in the right place. It could be three, five, ten, or twenty feet.
Now also determine five or six different objects in your environment that you like to look at. These objects could be flowers from three yards away, or a fence from a yard or two. Changeable items like the clouds in the sky cannot measure your improvement, but steady objects, with steady light at the same time of day, can.
When you reduce your prescription and first see with a weaker prescription, just be aware of the fact that you will not see as well initially. Normally, within three weeks you will improve. Keep the glasses in your pocket all the time, but try to see well without them as long as it feels effortless. Don’t squint or strain. Just look softly through the fog or fuzziness you have, and work on your mind to reduce your frustration.
The most important thing to remember is that how we train ourselves to look is more important, for the time being, than what we see. With time, what we see will be more important. You’re returning to the process of looking. When you were an infant, you didn’t see things well and you didn’t care, because you didn’t know that things could be seen any better than how you saw them. As you looked at details, from one to the other, your vision got better. Your macula, the fovea centralis inside it, and even the foveola, which is a smaller spot within the fovea that sees details, started to act well because your mind was interested in what you were looking at. As a result, the brain-and-eye connection became stronger. Slowly, as you started to crawl and walk, the brain developed, and the eyes became stronger, seeing better and better. Normally, childhood vision is so much better than adult vision. Many people measure childhood vision as 20/15, which is better than 20/20. We want to return to that phase. We want to look with great curiosity at all the details the world gives us. Some are nice and some are ugly, but we always want to look.
One woman who had started to lose her vision stated in one of my classes, “I stopped having any interest in looking at things because, in my opinion, the city I live in is ugly.” I could understand why she stopped looking at details, but the more we look consciously at details, the better we see them. There are many people who live in beautiful cities like San Francisco and still do not look at details. Remember: all details, whether beautiful or not, can be interesting. Remember that when you were an infant, all details were interesting to you.
Looking through your fog could be interesting as well. For example, you can look at the different details in flowers from a distance where you can see the flowers relatively well; then look away, either at a fence, a bush, the sky, or buildings that are farther away, but you still see some details in them. Close your eyes and visualize the contrast between details at a far distance. You can visualize the leaf of a bush and the sky, the fence and the earth, or whatever has different contrasts. Then look at the objects again, and return to the flowers. Many people see the flowers better.
Straining your eyes to look far makes you see worse; looking far without strain, with the help of your imagination, and with the help of seeing more and more details, allows you to see better from nearby. Nearsighted people need to work on slowly making the point of focus farther away. This means a nearsighted person who sees really well from eight inches should hope that, after beginning this practice, he or she will see really well from ten, then twelve inches. It is the ability to see farther and farther at a distance, even if it is from a relatively close range, that is going to heal your myopia.
So, the number one thing to remember is, when you put your glasses in your pocket, don’t worry about identifying people’s faces. Announce to all your friends, relatives, and family that, right now, you have decided to spend the next four to six months using your glasses as little as possible in order to improve your vision problems. The main thing is to make sure that when you look at the world, you look at the world from the eyes with which you were born. Make sure that you blink. Adjust to the world as it is. Enjoy it.
Keep in mind that, if your tendency is to wear glasses, you can improve your vision enough that glasses won’t be necessary. In fact, you may end up seeing better without them than you had originally been seeing with them. If you have recovered from a major eye surgery with rehabilitation, instead of just seeing the top of the chart with your glasses, you may see the bottom of the chart with your glasses. If you cannot recover your vision, you may learn how to use the little vision that you have to function as fully as you can with your eyes and body. There is a possibility for rehabilitation in every situation, and we need to believe in our eyes to create such a revolution. This revolution will come from the simple truth that we have inner powers and that this book has helped you to reach them. With diligence, faith, love, and work, we will be able to change ourselves and all who are around us, until this world is a better place.