08-20-2010, 05:01 AM
Just a few notes. These are my most recent notes on want to update the articles on the site with and redirect the emphasis towards. It's kind of rambling and repeating because that's how it came out on various days as things occurred to me and I wrote them down. Ignore the mixed pronouns, but I'm looking for feedback. Does any of this make sense?
Look for small details within that which youâre looking at. It isnât staring. You shouldnât feel your eye movements or try to force eye movements with the idea that youâre preventing staring. Really what youâre doing by forcing yourself to make eye movements is neglecting what youâre looking at in favor of how youâre looking at it, and you canât look at it right if you donât pay attention to it. When you look at a small enough detail, you will have trouble keeping your eyes pointed at it â itâs unavoidable. Your eyes will naturally shift slightly, and you will have to keep shifting your gaze to find it again and attempt to look at it directly.
At first it may seem like you donât see enough around you or as if youâre blocking off your attention when you look only at details. This is only because youâre getting used to a different way of seeing. But itâs the way of seeing that your visual system was designed for, so itâs relatively easy to adapt to it compared to the way of seeing that was unnatural and led to the gradual deterioration of your quality of vision.
There is some misunderstanding out there about eye movement or keeping your gaze moving, never stopping at any point in order to avoid âstaringâ. The word âstaringâ was used by Dr. Bates, but today it only causes confusion as to the exact definition of the word and what is being described as a detrimental thing. Letâs avoid any use of the word.
If you watch a person with normal vision, his eyes donât always dart around much to different objects. Much of the time his eyes appear to not be moving at all. His process of looking at things is a matter of continuously looking for details and looking within those details to find further smaller details of interest. If he is not searching a wide area or looking around himself, he looks at the details of one thing only.
As I describe this, it may sound like an obvious description of how we look at things, but for whatever reason you have gone wrong in doing this, and your habits have changed to an abnormal way of looking at things such that your visual system has gone haywire. Further complications and side effects can result from this dysfunction, giving people the illusion that it is a complex problem or that their eyes themselves are degrading and likely beyond repair, leading them to resort to measures even more drastic than glasses such as surgery. Although itâs possible that in your dysfunction you have caused long-term problems that may take some time, the poor vision that people experience is mainly and by far commonly held in place continuously simply by the dysfunctional process of seeing they have gotten used to. Fortunately, the correct way is easy. It only needs to be practiced and adjusted to.
Myopia and other conditions should be thought of as disorders. As disorders, they have no organic cause and can be resolved entirely by education and training. The training resolves the disorder by establishing correct patterns of visual functioning. Symptoms such as blurry vision, eyestrain, and double images have for too long been treated as organic conditions that are due to imperfections of the visual system. These symptoms in reality are all ultimate effects of a disorder and will disappear as the disorder is resolved.
I think shifting is badly misunderstood as an attribute of normal vision. Itâs a matter of looking for details in every moment. Look for details with sincerity. By that I mean: Do not look from detail to detail because thatâs what you think youâre supposed to do. Do it because you are sincere in your interest to find details on that object. There simply is no way to fake this and make it work. We get in the habit of establishing systems and packing them in place with dirt in an attempt to make them permanent and self-sustaining. But it doesnât work that way when we deal with ourselves, specifically removing a bad habit. All we do is make things perhaps better for a short time but ultimately more complicated and worse. With that in mind, when youâre looking for details, you better want to find something, and it better be small. Your vision will not adjust into a correct pattern if you try to deceive it by playing some sort of game of looking from detail to detail. In such a game, you simply are not fully engaged and sincere. When you do something long enough with enough sustained intent (which may need to be repeated a lot as you lapse away from it), you become it.
At first itâs intense. Itâs all you can do. But it becomes easier after frequent repeated sessions, because at some point you become the process itself, and as a multi-functional being you do not have to try to be what you already are - you become it and grow, and of course you are many things at once.
The rules we learn as part of the Bates method can be harmful. We learn about movement and shifting and we try to do things right with those concepts in mind, as well as we can understand them, or think we do. When we look at things, we remind ourselves to do it a certain way, because weâre trying to relearn the correct way and, despite lousy results so far, we continue to do what we think is the right way in order to combat the years weâve spent doing it the wrong way. The right way isnât about technique in the sense of moving your eyes at the right speed or looking at a new detail after a certain amount of time. Itâs about the way you approach it. It has everything to do with the way you approach it. Look at the ways people with normal sight see. Some of them appear to totally just stare. Men in certain Middle Eastern cultures tend to appear as if theyâre staring for long periods of time, not moving their eyes. But they do. They just have a different learned cultural way of looking at things, and itâs just as correct as a person with normal vision who is constantly looking around, scanning for things to draw his attention. So donât get caught up in things like that.
Look for small details within that which youâre looking at. It isnât staring. You shouldnât feel your eye movements or try to force eye movements with the idea that youâre preventing staring. Really what youâre doing by forcing yourself to make eye movements is neglecting what youâre looking at in favor of how youâre looking at it, and you canât look at it right if you donât pay attention to it. When you look at a small enough detail, you will have trouble keeping your eyes pointed at it â itâs unavoidable. Your eyes will naturally shift slightly, and you will have to keep shifting your gaze to find it again and attempt to look at it directly.
At first it may seem like you donât see enough around you or as if youâre blocking off your attention when you look only at details. This is only because youâre getting used to a different way of seeing. But itâs the way of seeing that your visual system was designed for, so itâs relatively easy to adapt to it compared to the way of seeing that was unnatural and led to the gradual deterioration of your quality of vision.
There is some misunderstanding out there about eye movement or keeping your gaze moving, never stopping at any point in order to avoid âstaringâ. The word âstaringâ was used by Dr. Bates, but today it only causes confusion as to the exact definition of the word and what is being described as a detrimental thing. Letâs avoid any use of the word.
If you watch a person with normal vision, his eyes donât always dart around much to different objects. Much of the time his eyes appear to not be moving at all. His process of looking at things is a matter of continuously looking for details and looking within those details to find further smaller details of interest. If he is not searching a wide area or looking around himself, he looks at the details of one thing only.
As I describe this, it may sound like an obvious description of how we look at things, but for whatever reason you have gone wrong in doing this, and your habits have changed to an abnormal way of looking at things such that your visual system has gone haywire. Further complications and side effects can result from this dysfunction, giving people the illusion that it is a complex problem or that their eyes themselves are degrading and likely beyond repair, leading them to resort to measures even more drastic than glasses such as surgery. Although itâs possible that in your dysfunction you have caused long-term problems that may take some time, the poor vision that people experience is mainly and by far commonly held in place continuously simply by the dysfunctional process of seeing they have gotten used to. Fortunately, the correct way is easy. It only needs to be practiced and adjusted to.
Myopia and other conditions should be thought of as disorders. As disorders, they have no organic cause and can be resolved entirely by education and training. The training resolves the disorder by establishing correct patterns of visual functioning. Symptoms such as blurry vision, eyestrain, and double images have for too long been treated as organic conditions that are due to imperfections of the visual system. These symptoms in reality are all ultimate effects of a disorder and will disappear as the disorder is resolved.
I think shifting is badly misunderstood as an attribute of normal vision. Itâs a matter of looking for details in every moment. Look for details with sincerity. By that I mean: Do not look from detail to detail because thatâs what you think youâre supposed to do. Do it because you are sincere in your interest to find details on that object. There simply is no way to fake this and make it work. We get in the habit of establishing systems and packing them in place with dirt in an attempt to make them permanent and self-sustaining. But it doesnât work that way when we deal with ourselves, specifically removing a bad habit. All we do is make things perhaps better for a short time but ultimately more complicated and worse. With that in mind, when youâre looking for details, you better want to find something, and it better be small. Your vision will not adjust into a correct pattern if you try to deceive it by playing some sort of game of looking from detail to detail. In such a game, you simply are not fully engaged and sincere. When you do something long enough with enough sustained intent (which may need to be repeated a lot as you lapse away from it), you become it.
At first itâs intense. Itâs all you can do. But it becomes easier after frequent repeated sessions, because at some point you become the process itself, and as a multi-functional being you do not have to try to be what you already are - you become it and grow, and of course you are many things at once.
The rules we learn as part of the Bates method can be harmful. We learn about movement and shifting and we try to do things right with those concepts in mind, as well as we can understand them, or think we do. When we look at things, we remind ourselves to do it a certain way, because weâre trying to relearn the correct way and, despite lousy results so far, we continue to do what we think is the right way in order to combat the years weâve spent doing it the wrong way. The right way isnât about technique in the sense of moving your eyes at the right speed or looking at a new detail after a certain amount of time. Itâs about the way you approach it. It has everything to do with the way you approach it. Look at the ways people with normal sight see. Some of them appear to totally just stare. Men in certain Middle Eastern cultures tend to appear as if theyâre staring for long periods of time, not moving their eyes. But they do. They just have a different learned cultural way of looking at things, and itâs just as correct as a person with normal vision who is constantly looking around, scanning for things to draw his attention. So donât get caught up in things like that.
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"Half of our funny, heathen lives, we are bent double to gather things we have tossed away." - George Meredith
"Half of our funny, heathen lives, we are bent double to gather things we have tossed away." - George Meredith
