People have talked at times about the passive nature of vision, learning to receive light without trying to force anything to happen, quoting Bates saying that anything you "do" to improve vision is wrong, etc. Often they go overboard with that concept and avoid doing really anything at all to improve their vision, trusting that somehow their complete passivity will see them through. It has to be applied in the right context. Here's where I believe it applies best:

In your act of seeing, when you look at an object and look at its various parts, various points of detail, you might make the mistake of trying to force a point to exist as a consequence of your act of looking at it. Consider that what you have to do in order to see clearly has nothing to do with the point of detail. Your forcing and struggling does not affect it. It already exists the way it is. When your vision is blurry, it gives the illusion that you have to "clear" the image, and while if you think about it you know rationally that the image is already clear "out there", subconsciously you may still be thinking of it as something you have to do to the point to make it fit for your consumption, ie: you have to make it clear in order that you can perceive it. But you have that backwards. You problem is only about you. It has nothing to do with the point, which is fine the way it is. You have to perceive it, as it is, in order to see it clearly. It's one direction, from it to you. You don't tell it what to be. Specifically, to apply this concept, shift your attention among points and think of it as receiving the expression of each point, as if it literally is expressing itself. Then move to the next. The thing to keep in mind here is your movement of attention and your reception of the expression of each point are two separate things. You're responsible for your movement of attention to each small point, and with the second part you're doing nothing at all, because it's simply the point expressing itself.

This procedure described above may sound like an abstract and unimportant thing, but the changes you have to make in your way of seeing are subtle and are far easier than you think. So examine how this is applicable to you in the way you try to change what you see in order to make it clear or make it what you think it is.

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"I conceive that the great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false estimates they have made of the value of things." - Benjamin Franklin

Dave, thanks -- this clarifies something I've been thinking about myself lately, how often I try to subtly force an image to be clearer or darker or a single image when I'm seeing double. You said I'm thinking of this as an example of an attempt to control my environment in general, like trying to make someone else do something they may not want to do, which of course is strain. I had been thinking about how much I strain against "what is" in different ways, considering writing a blog post about it, and if I do I'll reference this thread. Thank you.

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Nancy
2012: 20/45 on average, no glasses except for night driving
2001: 2/200, -10 hard contacts with -1.75 cylinder
Vision & dreams blog: http://dreamersight.wordpress.com/
Vision & dreams website: http://dreamersight.com/

Dave,
I think you are right,
but I anyway have to tell you that it is not to 100% obvious that this is the case that you say if you really go deep into investigating this question.
Because, many people believe that the act of us observing the world around us is what makes the world come into some creative existance in the now.
So there is some feedback loop, a dependency between us and the object that we observe.
So if you don't participate in a the seeing process of the now then the vision system collapses, according to that theory.
This also explains why fear is a bad thing for myopia.
For instance Gred Braden said something like (please, excuse me if I didn't get all words right here, but anyway):
"Everywhere we look, everywhere that consciousness explores with the expectation that something will be there, that exploration, that act of looking observation is the act that creates something for us to see, so we actually are building this universe as we go".

I know also that light is actually a mystery, because light as a particle comes into existance only if someone observes it, otherwise the light is spread out all over the place (no location, wave or more like an infinite cloud maybe).

So that question is definitely not easy to answer if you go down into sub atomic particles, and in a way that is what you do when you observe a point right.

What shall we do.
I use to think that what I look at comes into existance only when I look at it, else it is something else unknow mystery, so as I look at the point, then the point has been transfered to something that is participatory and observable. What actually happened in the tranformation is very hard to tell, did the mind affect the point that you looked at, I mean something as to initiate the transfer from the light as a cloud to something more like a particle that can reach the retina, it is not obvious that the mind just observes, the mind could very well also affect the point in a way that makes it observable to us.
Maybe there is some signal processing feedback loop involved there in the transformation that enable us to see a point clearly despite that the conditions of the transfer wasn't that good, maybe it was neccessary for the mind to affect the point to get a feedback loop back that caused some better receiver conditions.
Who knows ?

Today I imagined a ball bearing and realized that a good ball bearing has low friction, while a broken ball bearing has very high friction and thus the broken ball bearing of course does not work satisfactorily.
Now, this is an analogy when it comes to eyesight since the friction in a ball bearing is the tension in the myopic eyes.



So what this tells me is that there are two systems, one system that includes the body and one system that includes the external world.

When it comes to vision the foveas connects these systems together, alignes them, might call that connection the "connection vector".
And if you for instance are aware of the opposite movements without uncontrolled locking then the eyesight is effortless.
So this insight tells you that there is not so much difference in how you move your eyes (that is if you swing or shift), the important thing is that there is no "friction" (locking is not master what so ever because the mind is the master).