I first created “Imagination Blindness”/iblindness.org years ago with the belief that vision heavily depends on imagination, and bad vision is due to a person neglecting and losing the power of their imagination. Visualization, or “seeing” in your mind’s eye, is a major component of imagination. But it isn’t the only part.
Imagination is about ideas, and using them. In dealing with ideas of how best to use your eyes and mind to improve your vision, if you make use of the right idea by assuming something to be true and acting in congruence with it, you will find that your vision benefits. It doesn’t work well to go through the motions superficially. You have to be fully involved in the experiment, without holding back.
So the ideas you experiment with will depend on your understanding of the visual system and what exactly is wrong. You are already using this concept, in some way. If you believe your eyes are misbehaving, lazy, or not doing their job, your actions will reflect that, and you will exert muscular tension in your eye muscles to try to get a handle on them. You didn’t necessarily mean to tense up those muscles. A lot of small functions of your mind and body will start reflecting the general idea you are running with. When a company has a mission statement, many employees will embrace it, and the owner will find the employees doing interesting things with the mission statement in mind that he didn’t even think of doing.
So the best you can do is be clear with yourself about what idea you’re adopting. You can always change it later, albeit perhaps with some confusion and adjustment if you’ve really gotten used to it. You can’t micromanage yourself well enough to stop yourself from doing every little thing that isn’t in congruence with an idea. You have to enforce it at a broader level by assuming it’s the truth and then explore how to embrace it, and after a while see how it’s going. This is in contrast to scientific experiments, where the scientist is supposed to remain unbiased and reserve judgement in the interest of not influencing the results of the experiment. But that doesn’t work in a situation like this, because your full involvement and belief is necessary.
Here’s an example of an idea that I believe is pretty close to the truth. You are only responsible for looking at, and perceiving, a very small area at a time. An area, maybe, the size of a dime at 20 feet away, or the size of part of a letter at a book held 16 inches from your face. You could modify this belief by asserting whatever such size you want to experiment with as being the best size for you to pay attention to. So if this is true, that’s quite a weight off your shoulders, because everything around you isn’t your responsibility to see except for the one small area you’re looking at. So if it’s true, what else would have to be true? It would mean you no longer have to deal with seeing a whole word at once on the page in front of you. And that, in turn, would mean you have to keep moving your attention to regard more areas of detail nearby. Would it also mean the quicker you are able to move your attention, the more you see? And maybe unexpectedly you find that in doing for a while you actually are alerted to things in your peripheral vision better. And you might also find that you have to be patient, in a way, in order to see like this. Patience wasn’t exactly an idea you had thought of at first.
You couldn’t have put all the ideas described in the above paragraph together individually. They had to follow from a broader idea, the idea that you are only responsible for looking at a very small area at a time. From that, a whole collection of behaviors or actions develop.
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I founded iblindness.org in 2002 as I began reading books on the Bates Method and became interested in vision improvement. I believe that everyone who is motivated can identify the roots of their vision problems and apply behavioral changes to solve them.