Ehh there was already a topic about this somewhere, but it hadn't been posted in for over 120 days so I wasn't sure if I should reply to it.
So I started a new topic instead. ^-^;
Anyways, I'm 14 with really bad vision - I can't see the largest letters on the eye charts, and my nearsightedness is about -3.75 diopters in the right eye and -3.50 in the left. I have glasses and I've considered getting contacts, but I'd much rather have perfect natural vision.
I bought the Vision for Life a year and a half ago, and I did all its 25-min exercises for over 100 days. I still have little notes of progress at the corners of my diary entries, and I don't think the program worked at all. Sure, its success stories were convincing but...
Has anyone else tried this program?
And, is there a procedure for what you should do everyday with the Bates method?
You question sounds like: "if I don't smoke for 25 min every day, how soon I will quit smoking?" You are just trying to ransom yourself for those 25 mins a day. Bates method simply does not work that way, which is proved by your failure with the Vision for Life program. The method is about *changing your wrong vision habits*, it's not a set of excercises.
Be careful of testimonials. Suppose 1,000 people across the world tried the Vision for Life program... and all gave feedback. Suppose that only 100 were success stories, and the other 900 were failure stories. What if only 50 testimonials were needed, which do you think will be used? Of course, only the best success stories will be used.
Orlin Sorensen (the guy selling Vision for Life) does not follow the Bates school of thought. Sorensen makes false claims that eye muscles need to be exercised the same way you would your abs or other muscles of the body. But Bates taught that eye muscles are already under chronic strain (tension) and need to relax.
Bates taught people how to use the eyes properly, the way many children do. He demonstrated how staring was bad for the eyes, because staring intently at an image for a few seconds could cause the image to vanish. This has been proven by psychologists. He taught things like blinking to "dodge" the stare. Did Vision for Life ever tell you about things like that? Probably not.
Also, Oleg is correct. Bates method doesn't work by using exercises for 25 minutes a day, but rather by using techniques consciously everyday until they become natural habits you use subconsciously. Natural habits which are the same eye habits that people with good eyesight use. Such as blinking properly, shifting, oppositional movement, and so on.
There is no fixed procedure that I know of. It is about finding the best combination of what works to promote the most relaxation, but there are a few techniques you can do as often as you like, such as palming or sunning.
There is one relaxation technique in the Vision for Life program that I sort of like, the one where you place a warm towel over your eyes - is that good?
It does not matter if it is "good" or not good, because the techniques given by Dr. Bates in his original work are ALREADY very good and very efficient, so nobody has to invent anything. However, his so called disciples and "Bates teachers" keep doing that over and over again pretending to know better than Dr. Bates.
Oleg - It's a cultural thing. We Americans, for better or worse, have as a whole always prided ourselves on innovation. We say that we come up with all the good stuff, and that the Japanese take it all and make it better. So you have to understand that something 80 years old just isn't as appealing as the latest and greatest thing. It's the idea of progrress - that surely, no matter how good something was 80 years ago, there is something better available today. It isn't always true, but sometimes it is, and the idea is played up heavily by marketing campaigns.
Dave
Site Administrator
"Half of our funny, heathen lives, we are bent double to gather things we have tossed away." - George Meredith
Well, I have never tried the warm moist towel over my eyes, but if you like it and find it relaxing then I don't see the harm in keeping on doing it. But as an alternative, I would suggest you try palming which may be much more efficient and powerful. Palming has even restored sight to the blind. Palming is like rubbing your hands for 10 seconds to warm them up then slightly cupping your hands and gently placing the palms of your hand over your eyes without applying pressure. Correct palming is done with the fingers of one hand overlapping the fingers of the other hand and the fingertips meeting at or near the hairline of your forehead. Try it for 3-5 minutes with eyes closed, while imagining the spilling of black ink (to try to make the background as black as possible). Then remove your hands and if you've done this correctly without straining, you'll notice your eyes feel way more relaxed. Even only a minute or two of palming can have a refreshing effect.
I will respond with a quote from a guy who has cured his vision. I completely agree with his thoughts.
"My recovery has been too long and too slow. I think there are simple
reasons for this. First and foremost, I initially had too little faith in
the great Dr. Bates. My faith in some of his statements didn't come untill I
thoroughly had demonstrated the facts to myself, which in some cases took a
very long time. Secondly, my mind was for a long time (and maybe still is)
cluttered with ideas from Bates books written by people with defective sight
and wrong ideas. One of these ideas, I think, is that the people that have
the most success, are the people that go on and invent a lot of their own
techniques. This I did for a long time. Actually I think I've made up enough
of my own techniques to fill up close to a thousand pages in a book. My
biggest dream some time ago, was to write all this down, and get my own book
on the Bates method published. The techniques I mostly thought were
revolutionary at the time I made them. Unfortunately, in the aftermath I've
discovered that they're not. What I've discovered is that all of them were
just complicated and unefficient ways of doing what the methods, as Bates
explains them, do a lot better. The start of this realization was a couple
of months ago. That's why I wrote this in an earlier mail: "If I hadn't
taken all these precautions about posting (and if I weren't so lazy), I
would have posted a lot more f.ex. on the use of the imagination, which I
consider my strongest card. But I see that the way I use my imagination is
changing so much, that I am too afraid to give people wrong ideas - which
there is really WAY more than enough of on the other vision lists. I
consider the only safe route to perfect vision is to follow the advice of
those who have actually got there. Of course, I read other opinions too, but
then I'm very carefull to have the filters in my brain running. After this
time, I've only realized this more and more, and I'm glad that I hesitated
in writing up on some of my ideas, because I now know that they were not
good ideas. So I doubt that you'll see a book published by me in a long,
long time. As a matter of facts, if I had to write down my own experiences I would have to use the same words as Dr. Bates did."
There's of course certain space for variations around Bates fundamental techniques, because one needs a change from time to time, to avoid getting bored, but the underlying principles should be always clearly understood and kept in mind. What the "marketing campaigns" effectively do is that they hide the fundamental principles under the "appealing" bright packaging. In result, when people begin going a wrong way, they don't understand what's happening and what they should do next.
While conceptually, there's nothing revolutionary new under the hood of the new "appealing" packages. Really nothing more effective than original Bates, but a lot of stuff less effective, ineffective and misleading. Prove me wrong if you can, with real contra-examples, not talking about some abstract "enhancements". I understand that Americans and all other peoples around the world want to make money and glory by selling "enhanced" Bates method to unaware people, but we are talking about cure, not the business.
The problem is not that Bates is old, not effective and needs to be upgraded, but because people often can't understand what they should do and try something else. There is a certain part of Bates method, like any sensual experience, that cannot be passed verbally between minds, you have to live it through by yourself, following the directions in the book. Then you have to listen carefully to the feedback you get from your body, analyze it and correct your further practice. I guess it is too challenging for most people. We are lazy, not sensitive enough, not intelligent enough etc., we want easy answers and the "new methods" pretend to give easy answers. Eventually, if you are lucky, you can get through them down to the truth, like the guy I quoted, but then you'll discover that Dr. Bates was the true genius and already said it all in the most straightforward, laconic and insightful way.
I agree that the Bates method is often misunderstood, overlooked and misapplied, and that it happens more often than not.
In one issue of Better Eyesight, Bates himself wrote about the value of FM Alexander's treatment in eye diseases. Bates was clearly open to other approaches. He never would have developed his methods or continued to publish issues of Better Eyesight if he believed that everything that there was to say had already been said. At what point had everything been said? Frankly I think it's unreasonable to assume that everything useful has already been said about any subject, and that there are no other valid views and approaches to understanding or manipulating things.
I'm not talking about businesses either. I think you're missing my point about cultural differences. Some countries or areas have remained much the same in the way things are done, or the beliefs that have been held, or the language that has been spoken, for hundreds of years. The US is an example of one that has continually preferred new things and new ideas over the old, so it's only natural that people are drawn to the newest ones.
Dave
Site Administrator
"Half of our funny, heathen lives, we are bent double to gather things we have tossed away." - George Meredith
I am not denying innovation and progress. I'm not conservative myself too. I like Americans for their freedom and innovation, but your point about national cultural difference is irrelevant, because the nation I belong to, Ukrainians, is a part of the Christian world too, so our cultures are close.
What I'm trying to say that there's been nothing since Bates that would enhance the method, except milling the wind. You keep avoidng giving concrete examples of such supposed enhancements. You say Americans like innovations, but they have been tremendously conservative towards Bates teaching when it was new 80 years ago, and they still are now.
Consequently, no earnest scientists even dared follow Bates and further develop his method, and therefore no new scientific evolution of the method has been made. Basically, he was the ONLY true scientist who worked on this teaching, the rest of people were just quacks, who flooded the empty niche.
In their rush for money and/or fame, they perverted and discredited the original ideas. For example, they discarded the importance of, or even discouraged people from sun treatment, shifted accents from the fundamental principles to stupid performance of "excercises" and even justified wearning glasses! Would you call an "enhancement" something that is simply misleading, does not work or work much worse than Bates method? No wonder that nowadays we have Bates method associated with "alternative", "natural" medicine and other new-age stuff which sounds like bullshit and scares many people away.
In fact Bates heritage is still not discovered by us. A true renovation of Bates method would be just opening and popularizing the truth to the masses and accepting it widely in the official ophtalmology. Then the new true scientists will generalize and evolve the method, which I believe will happen quite soon.
Oleg - I get Dave's point. He is not asking you if you believe in innovation or progress, but rather trying to explain why people go after Vision or Life or a commercialized brand and don't look into Bates right away. There is a cultural relevance in play - people in America look at the hierarchy of facts and their initial reaction is usually that whatever is new must be updated, and therefore better, than any of its predecessors. So, people in America need to understand why a new technique is not as efficient as the original, and why they should do what was originally suggested 80 years ago. In the case of the moist warm towel technique Azula was asking about, you did not answer the question directly but waved it aside and your answer seemed to carry the tone of "you should know better about this. this is the real thing. it doesn't need anything further." so Dave felt the need to show the cultural relevance of why people wouldn't readily embrace the idea of something 80 years ago being better than a "refined, contemporary" package (from their perspective). You cannot simply force your opinion on people (especially Americans). The cultural mindset/influence, deceiving as it may be, is too strong on Americans that any updated package/product is better than anything 80 years ago, so you'll need to take extra steps to clarify your reasons for not agreeing with a product or technique before slamming it. There may be relevances between the people of your country and here, I used to have a good Ukrainian friend from Kiev (who was a foreign exchange student) and she told me about her country. The cultural mindset didn't sound quite the same as American culture, even though Ukraine is a rapidly growing country. It sounded like they were more receptive to changes and other possibilities, as reflected in my friend herself. Maybe it's just herself and her point of view and you have a different view on things. Also, I just read this on a website that "a cultural dichotomy today exists within Ukraine, with western regions reflecting European, especially Polish, influence, while in the eastern regions the impact of Russian culture is evident." You have a different major cultures there dividing the western and eastern regions, so it seems like different culture mindsets are likely. Remember, diplomacy. It makes the world go rooooooound. We're getting off topic here, though. I already answered Azula's question directly so I have nothing else to say on the topic.
Take a moment to notice that I am not slamming PEOPLE, I am slamming the misleading TECHNIQUES, and Dave and you act like if I were slamming PEOPLE, you see? You don't have to stand on defending position at all. I do understand why people get misled and there are indeed many excuses to that, unfortunately, cultural, national, psychological, whatever.
My argument for original Bates is very simple and concrete. Bates was a true medician scientist who spent almost ALL HIS LIFE to study and practise natural eyesight cure, and he CURED THOUSANDS PEOPLE. Now compare this result with that of his so called disciples and Bates teachers and see the difference! After each "innovation", the efficiency of the method continuously deteriorated, and it keeps happening. So my conclusions are not based on my mindset or my nationality. I'm acting out of pure common sense.
Regarding the answer about the warm moist towel I agree with your answer, because you are saying exactly what I am: you can try it if you like, as a variation of palming, but palming is still much more powerful if you do it right.
P.S. I would like to stay away from discussing politics and national relations, because it's really off-topic and my experience shows that such discussions lead to nowhere. It has really nothing to do with eyesight. Period. Though I'm pleased people in the US know about Ukraine
Oleg, Like Spock recognized, my point is that whether you like it or not, you're beating your head against a wall if you expect very many Americans, who usually go after the latest package, to take you on your word that Bates was the end-all and nothing since has value. That's too close to fanaticism for my tastes, and, like it or not, I'm by far not the only one who sees it that way, and you're not going to get anywhere by restating over and over that Bates is all that matters.
Besides that, there are things that, while not replace the Bates method, supplement it well to address limiting factors or blocks that would prevent someone from getting the most out of the Bates method. Details on sungazing, new-age principles like the Law of Attraction (popularized by the movie The Secret), posture, breath work, acupressure and massage.
Go ahead and put in the last word, and then I'm going to lock the topic, because I don't think this discussion has any value left. If anyone would like to start another topic on vision for life, feel free.
Dave
Site Administrator
"Half of our funny, heathen lives, we are bent double to gather things we have tossed away." - George Meredith
Oleg, read my new post at <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.iblindness.org/forum/index.php/topic,365.0.html">http://www.iblindness.org/forum/index.p ... 365.0.html</a><!-- m -->
