8. Techniques to Learn Better Eye Movement

Let us consider your position. How is your eye movement? What it your own particular difficulty? You have encountered some difficulty in seeing or you would not be reading this book. When you take off your glasses and look at the person across from you, does his face appear distorted, fuzzy, or blurred? Do you see it double? When you pick up the telephone book is it difficult to see the numbers clearly? Do you squint and try to force your balking eyes to see until you are half-blind with headache? Are the muscles of your face tense, and are there wrinkles or dark circles under your eyes? Do you have difficulty in seeing at the near point or at the far point?

Your capacity for seeing can be improved. You can learn to see without glasses and be relieved perma­nently of the pain and distress so frequently associated with defective sight. But you cannot do it by magic.

You do it by replacing bad habits with good habits.

Of course, good seeing habits, like habits of good manners, speech, posture and morals, should be ac­quired early in childhood. Too often, however, skill in seeing is never correctly learned or is lost in youth and forgotten because of the pressure and strain of modern life. This important point will be discussed in another chapter.

"How long," you ask, "will it take me to re-educate my eyes?" The length of time required for improving vision depends on the seriousness of the condition and upon individual power of visualization. It has hap­pened literally in a flash; it sometimes happens in the course of three or four sessions; it can, on occasion, take months. Success in learning correct seeing habits is a matter of persistence in following the exercises and mental drills, and on the degree of relaxation that can be achieved.

In Human, All too Human, Nietzsche declared, "Peo­ple must learn to see; they must learn to think and they must learn to speak and to write. The object of all these pursuits is a noble culture. To learn to see—to accustom the eye to calmness, to patience, and to allow things to come to it. To learn to see, as I understand this matter, amounts almost to that which in popular language is called 'strength of will'; its essential feature is precisely not to wish to see."

If you substitute the word "try" for "wish," you will have the essence of this method of re-education. To try is to make an effort, to add another type of strain to the one from which you are already suffering. Never try to see. Relax the eyes and sight will enter your eyes as naturally and easily as air enters your lungs or sound your ears. It is only waiting to be received.

You must not limit yourself to the practice of tech­niques. Correct seeing is not a chore, it is a delight; it is not something to be applied to a particular object or at a particular time; it is to become a part of every­thing you do at every moment of your life.

CENTRAL  FIXATION

One day a small boy asked his mother, in perplexity, "Why is it that I can see something that is bigger than my eye?"

That is a good question. Sight is one of the most misleading of all the senses. The panoramic view that we take in "at a glance" is really a succession of in­finitely rapid, tiny pictures superimposed one on the other at such high speed that we think we see the whole scene at one time. Actually, the area which we see at one time is so small that it requires four minute shifts of the eye to see, in its entirety, a single printed letter!

The retina, as we have pointed out, is a sensitive film on which the picture falls. But there is one point on the retina where the vision is perfect; that is the Macula Lutae, a point only one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter in the very center of the retina. When we focus at this point we have what is known as central fixation and our vision is perfect.

In cases of defective vision and eyestrain we no longer confine the focus to the point of central fixation. It covers a larger area and vision consequently is less acute. It is, therefore, the function of this book to help you regain the ability to focus correctly at this central point.

You can easily demonstrate this for yourself. Take an index card or a sheet of paper and make a small hole in it with a pin. Now hold the card before your eye and look through the pinhole at a picture on the opposite wall. If your eyes have been defective, the picture will stand out sharply, much clearer than you have ever seen it before. Why? Because the tiny area through which you are looking confines the light rays to the center of vision, the Macula Lutae. It is this clearness of focus that we will try to enable you to hold, not merely as a flash of improved vision but as your normal way of seeing.

In any abnormal condition of the eye, central fixa­tion is lost. But how, you wonder, are you to determine whether you have lost this faculty? If your vision im­proved when you looked through the pinhole it is because you have lost this capacity and are seeing with Eccentric Fixation, that is, with the periphery nerves instead of with those delicate, sensitive ones at the center of vision.

Eccentric fixation often causes headaches, fatigue, pain or discomfort of some kind, such as twitching of the eyelids or the eyeballs. This twitching, by the way, can be stopped by pressing the sides of the base of the nose as high as the inner canthus with the fore­fingers of both hands, avoiding any pressure on the eyeballs. Continue the pressure for several minutes, with the eyes closed, and you will obtain relief.

Another way of checking on whether you are seeing by central or eccentric fixation is to look at a word on this page. Do you see it most sharply where you are looking or do you see it better when you look a little away from it? When you look at the top of a printed letter do you see the bottom of the letter more clearly than the top? If so, you have lost central fixation.

When central fixation is lost a mental strain results because perfect mental focus accompanies perfect vis­ual focus, while visual strain is accompanied by men­tal strain. This is easier to understand, perhaps, when one recalls that the eye is more closely connected with the brain than any other organ. The eye, indeed, might be said to be a part of the brain as it starts in our em­bryonic stage as a segment of the brain and only dur­ing the growth of the embryo becomes the human eye.

Central fixation, on which correct vision depends, is regained through mental relaxation. This does not mean a passive, lethargic, sleepy kind of relaxation, but a mental control based on thinking of one thing best—not one thing only, as is the case with concen­tration, which itself is a form of strain. The mind is at its highest efficiency when it acquires this form of control.

Because the premises on which this manual for the re-education of the eyes are based appear to be de­ceptively simple, it is necessary that they should be firmly impressed upon the reader, who is apt to skip swiftly over the words, thinking, "Is that all? I don't see how anything so simple can make any real differ­ence. Oh, of course I can do that."

Yet the fact remains that until these basic principles are thoroughly understood, until the reader is prepared to follow them in their entirety, he will receive little real benefit from them. Other books on this method have been published—indeed, this one was written in response to the flood of letters I have received from people who have written, complaining, "But I have tried the method described in these books and I don't seem to get anywhere."

They got nowhere because they followed the exter­nals and omitted the one essential—the mental side of seeing. Eyestrain, let me repeat, is the cause of eye defects and there are many types of eyestrain, but the one treatment is relaxation, which begins in the mind.

For that reason, it makes little fundamental differ­ence in improving your vision where the truth lies in the long and bitter controversy over accommodation. Whether it is the ciliary muscle or the muscles of the eyeball that effect accommodation, seems irrelevant as long as the cause of the trouble lies in the brain.

As long as the optic nerve is unimpaired, eyesight can be improved, but not as a matter of wish fulfill­ment. This is where the deceptive simplicity enters the picture. People believe that they are... [Chapter Incomplete]

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