Yoga of Perfect Sight

Improve your Sight

If you have imperfect sight and desire to obtain normal vision without glasses, I suggest that you keep in mind a few facts. In the first place the normal eye does not have normal sight all the time, so if you have relapses in the beginning do not be discouraged. First rest your sight with each eye on the Snellen test card at ten or twenty feet, and see how clearly you read the fine print at ten inches. Then close your eyes and rest them by palming for about half an hour. Then open your eyes for a moment and again rest your sight with both eyes at the same time.

Your vision should be temporarily improved if you have rested your eyes. If your vision is not improved it means that you have been remembering or imagining things imperfectly and under a strain. With the eyes closed and covered, at rest, with your mind at rest, you should not see anything at all—all should be black. If you see different colours, you are not resting your eyes but you are straining them.

When persons with normal sight do palming they observe perfect darkness before their eyes and they do not suffer from pain, discomfort, headache or fatigue. When a person with imperfect sight closes the eyes and rests them successfully the eye becomes normal for the time being. When such a person looks at the distance and remembers some letter, some colour, or some object perfectly, the eyes are normal and the vision is perfect.

One of the quickest and most satisfactory ways of improving the sight is with a perfect imagination. The white centres of the letters are imagined by the normal eye to be whiter than the margin of the card, while the eye with imperfect sight imagines the white centres of letters to be less white than the margin of the card. Persons with imperfect sight have been cured very quickly by encouraging them to imagine the letters in the same way as the normal eye imagines them.

When reading small print in a newspaper or in a book the normal eye is able to imagine the white spaces between the lines whiter than they really are. The whiter the spaces are imagined the blacker the letters appear and more distinct they become.

Persons with imperfect sight do not imagine the white spaces between the lines of fine print that they are endeavouring to read, to be as white as the margin of the page. Persons with imperfect sight cannot read fine print until they become able to imagine the white spaces whiter than they really are.

By central fixation is meant the ability to see best where you are looking. When one sees a small letter clearly or perfectly it can be demonstrated that while the whole letter is seen at one time, one sees or imagines one part best at a time. The normal eye, when it has normal vision, sees one letter of a line best or one part of a letter best at a time.

The more perfect the imagination, the more perfect is the sight. It is interesting to realize that the truth about vision in all its manifestation does not obey the laws of physiology, the laws of optics, the laws of mathematics, and to try to explain it in some plausible way is a waste of time.

Most people have an imagination that is good enough to cure them if they would only use it. One can improve the memory and imagination by alternately remembering a letter with the eyes closed for a minute or longer and then opening them and remembering the same letter for a fraction of a second. After a patient has become able, under favourable conditions, to imagine mental pictures as well with the eyes open as with the eyes closed, his cure can be obtained in a reasonable length of time. One patient, for example, could see the large letter at ten feet but by remembering a letter, alternately with his eyes closed and with his eyes open, obtained almost normal vision in a few weeks.

Reading some small print or fine print in dim light for fifteen or thirty minutes at a time greatly helps myopic patients to improve the sight for distance. For example, a boy could read only five lines of the chart from twenty feet and his vision was recorded 20/50. He was trying to improve the sight by palming but failed to improve considerably. As he could not very well remember some mental picture perfectly, his improvement was poor. When he was advised to read fine print in dim light for ten-fifteen minutes at a stretch and then glance at the white centres of the chart letters at twenty feet his improvement was very quick. He could easily read the normal line. By repeated practice the vision permanently improved. It is because reading in dim light greatly helps to reduce myopia.

It is very important that all patients who desire to be cured of imperfect sight should discard glasses. Going without glasses has at least one benefit; it acts as an incentive to the patient to practise the right methods in order to obtain good eyesight.