Bates had to self-publish his book to get around the system. Fortunately, nowadays that’s a lot easier to do, particularly in digital format. Scientists and their inbred systems wouldn’t be so limiting except that there is a huge amount of censorship happening on the internet that has ramped up in the last few years. At first it was just some fringe people. Now everything that doesn’t fit the agenda or narrow mindset is censored.

People act as if scientists are free curious people who just want to find and publish truth. But in reality scientists are often more like marketing people seeking to find half-truths, misleading facts, or even straight out lies that they can get away with in order to promote whatever makes the one paying them the most money.

Darrell,

“on non-controversial subjects with which one just has a passing interest”

Peter Hitchens thinks it is useful for knowing what other people think (he has had his own battles with Wikipedia and there are a couple of amusing posts on his blog). I go further than him in that it tells us what conventional wisdom is, indeed what the ‘collective fantasy’ demands we believe. My own formulation for Wiki’s uses is that it is all right if you want to know the number of steps in the Leaning Tower of Pisa or its weight in metric tonnes (my son was asked in primary school to find some information on the Tower) or how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.

Sean, thank you for your kind comments and I wish you well. Someone (can’t remember who) said that “on non-controversial subjects with which one just has a passing interest” Wikipedia may be all right. Otherwise we rely on it at our peril and if I am correct several US universities have banned their undergraduate students from referencing it in their assignments. Allo too often it seems that Wikipedia is the only source of info out there on something. Actually maybe not, it’s not that we are lazy but often due to time constraints we might just read the Wiki article rather than looking at other websites which might be a better option.

As regards a group consciousness Sheldrake has something to say about this In fact he seems to come into his element here. He refers to a book called The Psychic Side of Sports (Murphy,White) and states that team games might be an example. He also mentions the ice skaters Torvill and Dean who were so well connected to each other. Also musicians playing together , herds of animals, schools of fish, pack behaviour and so on seem to validate Sheldrake’s contention that we have extended minds reaching out beyond our bodies, not just located within our brains. I refer to Sheldrake’s The Sense of Being Stared At” book. I haven’t got his new book yet but I intend to at some point . Bates said myopia was contagious and he was obviously referring to mental influences. Corbett also said “Tension draws tension, relaxation begets relaxation” so group influences seem to have been considered a long time ago.

As regards Wikipedia on the Bates Method I remember a good few years ago it was much more supportive and friendly towards it and once there was a long list of supportive websites (including Imagination Blindness as it then was) with only one “Critical” (should have been “Hostile”) site, namely the Quackwatch one right at the very end.

As regards the “scientific vigilantes” who devoutly patrol the internet with plenty of time and resources to do so, it’s too bad they are wasting their energy. We might have less than they do but at least we know Bates was right.

Sean, thanks for taking the time to share all those thoughts! I can’t match the size of it in my reply…

Wikipedia is gamed pretty hard as far as anything controversial. It’s handy to find quick info on topics nobody is going to argue about, but as far as anything controversial or political it’s not trustworthy. So obviously as far as natural vision improvement it’s not pretty. I know there were one or more people who tried to keep iblindness.org and other sites as references in some Wikipedia articles, and Wikipedia actually used to be a lot more fair and unbiased than it is now. The editors paid by outside organizations are relentless and have all day.

I’ve heard a little about there being a group consciousness that people enter into, separate from genes. If so, I have to imagine that widespread myopia could be somewhat related to it.

The Gregg Braden video I linked to recently is a newer one. But probably has some similarities to the previous one.

I’ve heard a little of those things. Curiosities with the Moon too. But how it’s laid out wouldn’t really affect anything in my life. I’m sure there’s more to discover. Last year researchers used new technology to discover a huge Mayan city buried in the jungle that would have housed millions of people. Time to rewrite the history again!

David, you talk about the text books above. An interesting thing about the flat earth belief that I only recently became aware of his how recent it is. A Jeffrey Burton Russell wrote a book about it (which I have not read) called inventing the flat earth. Belief in a round globe goes back to the Greeks and persisted ever since. A deliberate myth was propagated (the school text books have been identified) that the Middle Ages was a time of superstition and ignorance with the intention of making our rational age look good in comparison. As it happens a similar thing happened to Voltaire. French writer Marion Sigaut has shown from the documentary evidence that he was one of the worst liars and scoundrels who ever walked the earth but his supporters created a legend surrounding him. In particular school text books in France pushed it. I am sure there are lots of similar cases. An interesting theory I only chanced upon last week, however, is that of Robert Sugenis, who argues for geocentrism. His view is that the universe rotates around a stationary Earth. He is not a scientist but his arguments are interesting and he has good layman’s grasp of the issues. Apparently even Einstein, among others, conceded that it was a mathematic possibility. (There is an excellent interview on Fatima TV on YT.) I suppose it is largely a matter of where the observer is standing. Sugenis argues that Einstein came up with his first theory of relativity to rebut the Michelson-Morley experiment which showed that the Earth was not moving through space.

Sheldrake’s book is wonderful. There is a fascinating section about what vision is where he argues that it seems to be something active rather than passive (the latter is what we are taught). I have wondered if this ties into the importance of attention when seeing. The other thing is this and it might be similar to Darrel’s point (in his excellent posts) about laws. Sheldrake’s theory is morphic resonance and he illustrates it with crystals, lab rats and tits: the latter two learnt behaviour that mysteriously spread while existing versions of crystals have proved difficult and ultimately impossible to grow once newer ‘versions’ appeared, in scattered locations across the world. I wonder if there is a connection with the epidemic in myopia and the difficulty experience by those trying to cure it. I have long thought this and perhaps when some begin to succeed it will become easier for the rest.

As for scientific dogmatism I fully agree. As it happens I am just finishing a book by an Italian author about Darwinism. His basic argument is that science adapted to the political environment (then Malthus’s ideas about population) rather than the other way round. Darwin himself accepted the inheritance of acquired characteristics (Lamarck is now derided) and saw the utter lack of fossil evidence for gradual evolution as an enormous problem for his theory. The author refers to Kuhn and his paradigms, but in the case of the fossil record this was not new evidence but there from the beginning. Barely a week goes by for me without further evidence of the extraordinary gap between the official story (whatever it may be) and the evidence.

While I am here I may as well say that I am convinced that we are all living in a collective delusion. (I am not the only to think this. For example the late English writer Richard Webster believed this – his Sceptical Essays website is essential reading, the section on false accusations). David once wrote here (going back a good few years) that we are reluctant to abandon our bad habits because “you like them too much”. I have more than a suspicion that they also fall under the collective fantasy umbrella (it is a very wide one).

Finally, I did look at Greg Braden’s videos and I assume the one David links to here is the one he links to in his Method (I will check this later). I am afraid to say I did not find him that useful and I was probably missing the point. David also recommended The Nature Of Personal Reality but this strikes me as a very odd book and I have only read the opening chapters, although it makes much more sense if you think of ‘Seth’ being knowledge hidden in her own mind but otherwise inaccessible. I would be very interested in reading what David might have to say about this whole thing about beliefs in any future posts. (My big problem is remembering: keep attention, relaxation, searching for detail and everything else: when I get on top of some of them I realize I have been forgetting the others.)

I hadn’t thought about the similarity with treating vision with glasses, but that’s a good point. It’s inconvenient to think that these things change or fluctuate over time.

I guess once they’ve got the textbooks published, that’s it, no opposing ideas are welcome!

I’d like to point out as well that when Sheldrake views the ‘laws’ of nature not as immutable laws at all but habits, he offers evidence that this may be so. For example the speed of light, records showed, seem to have been fluctuating over the decades, but the speed of light (or ‘c’) was (dogmatically) fixed by the scientific consensus some years ago and the scientific community will not reconsider the speed of light anymore since, we are told, the old measurements were inaccurate and now we have it finally sorted! Also Sheldrake points out that the idea of laws is a product of civilisation, primitive peoples don’t have laws, they have customs, more akin to habits, and all this leads me to a comparison with Bates Method principles that good vision, or bad vision (in healthy, normal eyes) is due to habit, not a static material ocular condition. Sheldrake states the natural habits at work in the universe appear like laws as they are deeply habitual and have been around a really long time, not unlike for example severe myopia which might to a casual inquirer appear static and unchangeable (like a law) especially if the person afflicted wears glasses all through waking hours. But its intransigence is habitual in origin. The more careful observer (like Bates was) might notice, if the myope took off his/her glasses for a while, that the bad vision was constantly changing, fluctuating within certain limits perhaps. Like the speed of light maybe. “Transmutations impossible to the camera” (Bates). Meaning that “we see largely with the mind and only partly with the eyes” (Bates again).

Yes, science was, as you say, supposed to be about a never-ending process of inquiry. But the foundation and framework for that process was very limited (often very outspokenly so) from the very beginning, with the express purpose of ‘understanding’ (i.e. putting into a hierarchical order, managing and using) nature and, I daresay, as a consequence, human nature.
Man-made tools and technology were the means – and the end.
Anything ‘natural’, anything not dependent on ‘experts’ and their devices , just runs completely counter to that.
The opposition is to be expected, really 🙂

Sounds on topic to me! But any random comments are welcome too.
The blind spots analogy sounds good.
Science was supposed to be about a never-ending process of inquiry. Now the scientific fields are more like different sects of a religion where everyone pretty much agrees on the same stuff and thinks in the same way. If you have other ideas, you get pushed out and your career is over.
It’s fine that people with similar beliefs group together, but what’s disturbing is more and more extreme attacks on people who think differently.

then you sufer from what you warn, how hypocritical!

I don’t know if you’re being facetious, but I’ve heard some Flat Earth arguments, and it’s not very convincing to me.

Thanks for the feedback!

Thanks for sharing! I have found myself listening to interviews of authors instead of reading their books. They often boil down their most important points in a long interview, and I can listen to it while driving or lying down to rest.