This article was posted to USENET newsgroup sci.med.vision on Dec 11, 1995.
It was originally found on CompuServe.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

I Can See
by Adam Klein

PREFACE

This is the story of how I learned to see clearly without the aid of
refractive (usually called corrective) lenses. I write it because I feel a
duty to inform as many people as I can that improving one's naked eyesight
is a real possibility despite the skepticism of the eye care professional
world. I will refer to such apparently unrelated subjects as singing, memory
palaces, high-tech catalogues, myofascial trigger points, yoga, diet and
pinhole glasses in order to show how these things combined in my life to
allow me to shed the crutch of eyeglasses, and so some of those who read
this will be encouraged to try for themselves, or keep trying.

INTRODUCTION

For centuries, no one from Europe sailed past the western tip of Africa for
the simple reason that they had been told with no room for doubt that the
world ended there and they would surely perish if they passed it. The
feelings I experienced the first time I encountered success in the
retraining of my eyes must be similar to those felt by the sailors of that
first ship that saw the southwest African coast. An elation that despite
everything I'd been told all my life it was truly possible, though at the
time I had no idea how far I'd be able to take this journey, that is, if I'd
ever see clearly all the time. A deep anger at the fact that I hadn't found
out about it sooner, because almost no one knows about or believes in these
techniques, and because due to my ignorance my social life during the
nineteen years I wore glasses was almost certainly much lonelier than it
would otherwise have been. Those who don't wear glasses as children and
teenagers have no inkling of the psychological effect imposed on the
children by the wearing of these things. We are branded as nerds, brainy
misfits, unathletic "spazzes," to use the slang of my day. When I learned,
through personal experience, that most children wouldn't need glasses if
these techniques were learned, understood, standardized and disseminated,
the ostracization of all these children as being no less different from what
is called normal than being of another skin tone or sexual preference became
to me a heinous crime, a perpetratorless, victim-replete crime. Thus it is
for those like me, of all ages but especially those as yet unborn, that I
must tell my story, in the hope that in the future the techniques of eye
training will be taken seriously and become a part of the eye care arsenal
in the war against blurred vision. I have nothing to sell; I consider
awareness of this information to be a right of all those not diagnosed at
20/20.

MY UNWITTING PREPARATION

I learned some Hatha yoga techniques when I was eight years old. The degree
of body awareness it gave me has proved extremely useful in my adult life.
One technique, a breathing exercise, in part requires the person to relax
all the muscles in the body (besides the ones needed for sitting up) by
noticing tension and releasing it. This is done in conjunction with
regulating the breath with the intention of slowing the heart rate (which
many medical practitioners will argue cannot be brought under voluntary
control) and generally relaxing the body. Years later, when I learned the
techniques of operatic singing, I was able to apply this relaxation
technique by noticing and releasing tension in muscles not necessary to the
production of an efficient tone. (Many opera singing techniques pay little
attention to the fact that there are many sets of muscles in the laryngeal
area, and very few are needed for singing. The great diversity of tonal
color among singers is due to the many possible combinations of muscular
action by which one can make a sound, each of which will result in harmonic
structures predictably different from the others.) The difficulty in singing
is that the muscles used to phonate are not directly controllable, like the
heart rate. One must find ways around this obstacle of inaccessibility
through mental images designed to get the muscles to act properly, and of
course through audiofeedback. For ten years daily I practiced these concepts
guided by my teachers, and my voice underwent many changes in size, timbre
and sustain ability, some drastic. I thus became accustomed to searching for
a sound that initially would have been unimagined in my mind or ears, but
would, when the proper muscular combination was used, often accidentally,
suddenly make itself manifest. Because of this constant change in the sounds
I was able to produce, I learned to dissociate the sound of my voice from my
personality, which some singers and many nonsingers never do, and by
extension to dissociate all other aspects of my physical being from my
personality, excepting of course those attributes innate to my sex, whatever
they may be. Through this experience I came to understand on a personal
level that things are often not as they seem.

In 1983 my father was diagnosed with lymphoma, and because of the dismal
forecast given him about his life by the doctor who diagnosed him, he sought
an alternative cure. Through this search of his I became acquainted with the
Hippocrates Health Institute, which promotes a cure for cancer through a
diet of only raw, alkaline-reaction-inducing foods. Though several people
had been helped back to health by this diet, my father's version of it
eventually failed and he underwent chemotherapy, but due to the year on this
diet his body was much stronger and better able to withstand chemo's
chemical onslaught, and in fact he never lost his hair, even when he was
given the drugs he was assured would make it fall out. (Also, the cancer in
his bone marrow at his first biopsy, before the diet, had somehow
disappeared by the time he decided to undergo chemo.) This adventure taught
me that the medical community, no matter how much they insist we submit to
their care, actually know very little about the workings of the human body.
The nutritional industry is similarly sailing equally uncharted waters. I
became predisposed to distrust these and other authorities when it comes to
proclamations concerning the abilities and inabilities of the human
organism.

In 1972 I got my first pair of glasses. I had resisted them for a year,
saying I didn't need them, but once I got them I wore them constantly,
except to see closely. It bothered me that every time I had a checkup my
eyes had slipped a little more into myopia, starting at 20/70 and ending at
my last checkup in 1984 around 20/300. (20/70 is "legally blind" in New York
State.) I was never given more of an explanation for this decline than that
it was a normal progression for myopes. When I took genetics in high school
and college, I began to wonder why I was the only myope in my entire family,
including parents, both brothers, uncles, aunts, and cousins. Genetically
this made no sense to me. So for years I doubted the eye care industry's
claim that my condition was unchangeable, but I found no concrete
substantiation of my suspicions until 1991.

In 1989 I was led to the book "The Art of Memory" by Frances Yates through
my participation in an avant-garde opera by Robert Ashley, "Improvement: Don
Leaves Linda" which refers allegorically to Giordano Bruno and memory
systems, and through my acquaintance with one Philip Guerrard who was
familiar with Yates' books on these subjects. The art of memory is a
technique of using imagery as an aid in the memorization of speeches by
ancient Greek orators. It involves building structures, e.g., houses or
palaces, in one's imagination, to house images chosen for the ability of
their attributes to remind one of an idea, phrase, or even a word. The
theory is that since humans depend so much on visual information, it should
help in the retention in memory of such abstract things as words or ideas if
one links images to them, preferably striking images. I tested this on
myself, and made a house for all the jokes I knew, since I had long been
annoyed by my inability to remember all the jokes I knew at parties or on
long car trips with new acquaintances. It works. I can now at will call up
from memory any one of over fifty jokes simply by mentally looking through
the house I used and seeing the representative objects I placed there. I
then used the art to help me remember all the important facets of my vocal
technique, which was easy since many of them were images already. I thus
became able much more quickly to figure out which part of my technique I
wasn't paying enough or any attention to when I was having vocal trouble.
This made me better prepared to improve my eyesight when those techniques
useful to me asserted themselves over the other ones not specific to my
personal psychomuscular makeup. I made a house for them as well, some images
of which are described later.

MY CHANCE EXPOSURE

In 1991, I was singing the role of Don José in Philadelphia, and I glanced
at a Hammacher-Schlemmer catalog that a chorus member had brought to
rehearsal to alleviate the tedium of waiting for a chorus scene to be
rehearsed. In the catalogue was an ad for "aerobic glasses," made of opaque
plastic and studded in a honeycomb pattern with pinholes. It advertised
seeing clearly without using lenses and improving eyesight. The concept of
pinholes was familiar to me: before I allowed myself to wear glasses I had
discovered that I could see better if I formed a small hole with both pairs
of thumbs and index fingers and looking through them. I ordered the "aerobic
glasses" at an exorbitant price ($40.00; I later saw the same thing in a
health food store in Iowa for $25.00. They're worth about 50" in material,
if that.) and received them at my next job, which was Faust in Durham NC. I
wore them and shared them with fellow cast members, who were amazed at the
effect they produced. Almost everyone who tried them could see fairly
clearly, and what amazed them was that it could be done without lenses of
any sort.

With the "glasses" came a booklet called "SECRETS OF SEEING WITHOUT GLASSES
OR CONTACTS" which described exercises to do to strengthen and relax the
muscles around the eye, a schedule for wearing the "glasses" and also a
reference to one Dr. William Bates, on whose original techniques the writers
of this pamphlet had allegedly improved. I mentioned that name to the woman
playing Marguerite, Kay Lowe, and she said she had his book. I borrowed and
read it. The pamphlet writers had not improved on Bates' technique, only
added others, and actually misrepresented some of the most important
exercises.

Dr. William H. Bates, M.D., wrote his book "The Bates Method for BETTER
EYESIGHT WITHOUT GLASSES" in the early part of this century, and it was
published by Emily Bates in 1940. Bates, who died in 1931, was an
ophthalmologist in the New York area who taught himself to overcome his
presbyopia ("farsightedness") and then proceeded to refine and augment the
techniques he developed for himself to help others to learn to see without
the aid of lenses. (The book is still available for purchase. (It is an "Owl
Book," published by Henry Holt, New York.) It was during my reading of the
chapter "Imagination as an aid to vision" that I first experienced the
possibility of long-lasting vision improvement.

The book described a process of observing a letter at a distance at which it
appeared in clear focus, then using memory of the letter to imagine it
clearly while viewing it at distances at which it would not be seen clearly
(in my case, farther away). One could increase the distance in small
increments, as Bates had one woman do. I applied this technique immediately
after reading it to a few whole words on the page I had been reading. It
worked. (It must be emphasized that I read the book with my unaided eyes. I
believe it would do no good to read it while wearing glasses. because one
couldn't then immediately try out the various exercises described.) I held
the book farther away by degrees until I was seeing the words clearly at a
distance twice that at which I had been able to see clearly with my naked
eye for the past decade and a half. By the time that gig ended I was able
after some practice to read book spine titles on my TV eight feet away. The
first title I read this way was "Wonderful Life" by Stephen Jay Gould. I am
not a believer in fate or occult connections between things, but that title
was appropriate, I thought.

Some of the explanations in Bates' book for various eye problems have been
superseded by modern advances in methods of physical examination and a
better understanding of the behavior of light. But his techniques for
relaxation of the eye musculature have not, to my knowledge an in my
opinion, been significantly improved upon.

THE TECHNIQUES

The techniques in Bates' book which I found most helpful to me (it must be
understood that eyesight, like singing, is a highly psychological endeavor
and no one set of images will work for any two people, let alone
everyone)were: Palming, Shifting, remembering the color black, never staring
at any one point for more than a second, and using the letter chart provided
with the book to help relax the eye muscles (not the ciliary muscle, the
ones around the eyeball, the ones responsible for moving the eye around.
They can not be felt when they're contracting and I discovered that mine had
been locked in a certain combination of tension for many years, which had
increased incrementally by each checkup). Please read his book to learn
about these techniques in detail. The arcane writing style and the quaint
naïveté of someone writing before television can nevertheless be digested. I
will describe here the tricks I've discovered myself that are not described
by Bates.

THE NECK CONNECTION

My next gig after FAUST was in Chautauqua NY, where I attended a lecture by
a trigger point specialist, which is someone who alleviates muscular pain
such as headaches by application of an understanding of the relationships
between incorrectly contracting muscles and pressure points called trigger
points that if properly massaged bring about a release of the offending
tension. His live demonstration on singers he had never before met convinced
many of us that there was some substance behind his radical rhetoric, and
convinced me that his reference book "Myofascial Pain and Dysfunction: The
Trigger Point Manual" would be worth having. (He wore glasses, and I asked
him if he'd heard of Bates, and he said yes but didn't seem interested in
applying it to his own field. I found it curious that even someone as far
from the medical mainstream as a trigger point specialist, and someone who
constantly worked to relax others' muscles, should show such little interest
in improving the function of his own eye muscles.) I bought the book through
the local bookstore at home. It is a user-friendly reference guide to
alleviating muscle problems by the use of diagrams showing the many trigger
points and which muscles they affect. It led me to wonder if there were
eye-muscle trigger points, and several months later I discovered one while
on a long car trip.

Once I learned to see clearly fairly often, around 40% of the time (and the
rest of the time was never nearly as blurry as it had been when I wore
glasses) I was able to drive with unaided eyes, except at night when my eyes
got tired and it became more difficult to relax them. (Since then I have
become able to drive quite late into the night with unaided eyes.) One
evening I began to massage the neck muscles at the base of the skull. I
found that if I held pressure on these muscles my eyes would involuntarily
see more clearly. It took several more months for it to occur to me that I
didn't need to constantly hold my fingers to my neck to see clearly more
easily, that the same result could be achieved by using muscles on the
other, anterior, side of my neck to counterbalance the pull of these rear
muscles and relax their hold on my eyes. The memory image I use for this is
a seahorse, because of the curvature of their heads and necks. When I use
the muscles in front of my ears to rock my head forward and loosen those
rear neck muscles, it feels like I'm imitating a seahorse.

BLINKING

When I first started learning to release the ocular tensions accrued over
the years, my yoga background was invaluable. I soon became aware of many
theretofore unrecognized tightnesses in the eyes brought on by various
actions. One of the very first I noticed was a tension brought on by
blinking. This is difficult to describe, and I must use image metaphors. The
way I learned to blink had a feeling associated with it similar to the
action of pulling shut a long trapdoor than was suspended by a spring at the
free end, and pulling it from a position about halfway down the length of
the door. Another analogy would be using one's foot to depress a
spring-loaded organ or synthesizer volume pedal. Or simply pushing down a
cafeteria-type spring-loaded dish holder mounted on a table the surface of
which is at shoulder height, with the tips of one's fingers from as far away
as one could reach, keeping the arm perfectly straight. If you can keep one
eye wide open and the other shut but not at all squinting, they way you keep
the eye shut is the way I used to blink. This way of blinking, I found,
caused my eyes to blur a bit, and I quickly started blinking more, as it
were, with the front muscles of the eyelids, those muscles employed when one
shuts the eyes tight while also raising and stretching the upper lip in a
smiling grimace. It would be like going to the free end of the trapdoor and
pulling down gripping the edge with the palm side of your forearms facing
you. Or using your thumbs an the very end of the organ pedal instead of your
whole foot along its entire length. Or just sitting on the plates. It was a
very noticeable blink and resembled a nervous twitch. Gradually I allowed
myself to blink in a more normal-looking manner, but without the old
blurring tensions. I use the large "front blink" now only when the other
techniques aren't helping, or when time doesn't allow more effective but
slower techniques like shifting. The memory image I use for this is the old
Porky Pig, way back before Bugs Bunny was created when all toons had drops
of sweat eject from the tops of their heads when they got nervous, and their
eyelids were dark and shiny and opened and closed with a mechanical
precision. A better image for some would be that mechanical owl in "Clash of
the Titans" whose eyes blinked so loudly.

THE INNER EYELID

Any Trekkie will identify with the above title and its presence in Vulcans
which allowed Spock to instinctively shield his optic nerve from the
blinding rays of McCoy's experimental light bombardment which killed the
creature within Spock. Its relevance here is that there's no better way to
describe one of the tricks I discovered to keep my sight clear. It's related
to the blinking problem, except that one applies this feeling with the eyes
open. It actually feels like I'm lifting up another eyelid that sits
directly on top of my eye, like lifting up a long skirt to reveal a white
petticoat. It's a very calm feeling when it's achieved, and until I
discovered the Seahorse and Zaphod techniques was one of my main tricks. I
say "tricks" because one must trick the muscles into behaving with these
images. The image for this one is, of course, Mr. Spock himself.

SEEING BEYOND

In Des Moines, the summer after my initial success, I discovered a trick
more mental than muscular. It's important to not let the sight process get
nervous, because it will panic and the muscles will contract severely (and
bring my vision back to where it was when I needed glasses). To this end I
tried to understand what it was that made my eyes go myopic in the first
place. Bates talks about the effect that reading a lot has had on people's
eyes in general, i.e. we have trained our eyes to see close in order to
read, and many of us try to apply the muscle ratios needed to see very close
to seeing far away, which doesn't work. The eyes have been shaped by nature
(those of you who still don't believe in evolution will not like this.
Sorry.) to see images far away. Seeing close is of secondary importance, in
terms of survival. But the eye can adapt to either extreme. Force of habit
will cause it to let one set of muscular ratios predominate, and since
seeing far requires little or no muscular adjustment from a state of rest,
since the eye was built to see far, living a life where most sight is for
distant objects, the muscles necessary to see really close will from disuse
"forget" how to do it, like our toe muscles which only in persons without
the ability to use hands are exercised enough to make the feet able to write
with a pencil, though we all have the same sets of muscles. Conversely,
prolonged use of the eye muscles for close work will tend to lock them into
that pattern of performance, and one will with great difficulty if at all be
able to relax them again to see far. (Computer screens are especially hard
on eyes, because the screen image is not clear to start with, and the
tendency to stare to see it clearly is encouraged.) Charles Darwin, in "The
Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex," makes the observation that
"savages," as he calls them, meaning no disrespect, overwhelmingly see at a
distance much better than Europeans. Of course. Savages don't read books all
the time.

My eyes had gotten used to focusing in order to see close. I speculated that
their tendency through learned unconscious habit to focus on close things,
which entails crossing the eyes to varying degrees depending on proximity,
probably was affecting my ability to see distant objects. In other words, my
eyes were using see-close techniques for both near and far vision. At least,
I thought, my eyes were thinking that objects were closer than they really
were, and not understanding when they weren't getting a clear image. (To
extend the Star Trek reference, in the first movie V-GER was thinking, "I
have sent the creator the correct sequence. Why does the creator not
respond?" Or in Robocop when he says "my targeting system is off." But he
knew why. My eyes didn't.) I tried tricking my eyes into focusing for the
proper distance by pretending the object in question was a little farther
than it seemed. I got this idea while looking at the pattern of tiles in the
Men's Room and trying to get the parallel lines to converge. This was a game
I had played for many years, but now with my eyes more relaxed it had the
effect of clearing up the image, specifically of removing the false second
image caused by astigmatism, which according to Bates is simply another form
of incorrect muscle adjustment. Just as all the eye muscles contracting will
elongate the eyeball, so a few of them contracting will warp the ball just
enough for the cornea to become uneven, which causes astigmatism and hence
multiple images.

(Also, in the pamphlet that accompanied the "aerobic glasses" was an image
of a stop sign that was split into two images, neither of which had all the
parts. One is asked to bring the images together by looking as if at a
distant object so that the stop sign becomes complete. One could do
something similar on this page by trying to make the following two sets of
letters converge in order to form a five-letter word (BATES):

              X                   X
            B T S                A E
              X                   X
             A E                B T S
              X                   X

Line up the X's and see if you can see all 5 letters in the words. It's
tricky. [This document or at least the previous five lines should be printed
in a monospaced typeface, 10 characters per inch.] The purpose of this
picture is to train the eyes to diverge in direction while looking at a
close object, which helps relax them. It also causes the image in each eye
to be equally important, forcing the weaker or less-used eye to pull its
weight. This is probably the only part of that pamphlet of any value.)

With this trick I was for the first time able to hold my vision clear for
long periods, that is longer that 20 seconds, without constantly shifting
focus. I was able using this method to go through Lucia di Lammermoor's
entire mad scene with sharp images, and that was in low light. My memory
image for it is Zaphod Beeblebrox from the Douglas Adams "Hitchhiker"
trilogy (now in five books), since he has two heads. When one looks past an
object in the foreground, one will see two of the close object. When one
looks at the foreground object, one sees two of the background object. I try
to turn Zaphod's two heads into one by looking past them. Curious logic, I
admit, but memory systems work best when they're quirky.

MUSCLE STRETCHING

As a matter of muscular hygiene it is good to keep the muscles stretched out
-- ask any dancer or gymnast. The same applies to the eyes In the morning,
or whenever they're tired, it helps to stretch the eye muscles by moving
them to their extremes- right, left, up, down, and all directions in
between. Many people have advocated this exercise; I saw it illustrated in a
Charlie Brown cartoon when I was young. Most, I'm sure, never took the
exercise seriously. My image for this is a Cylon warrior. Watch Battlestar
Galactica, you'll understand why.

THE SIDE OF THE HEAD

At the same time I discovered the Seahorse muscle, I began to try
consciously relax the muscles between the eyes and ears on the side of the
head. These are not the same as the muscle I use to rock my skull forward,
which is in front of my ear but attaches to my neck. These muscles are
limited to the skull and extend up under the hair. The feeling I get when my
sight is absolutely clear is one of utter freedom from tension, and thinking
about these muscles often helps achieve that. My image for this is the
famous Munch painting "The Scream," because of where the subject's hands
are- right on those muscles, or slightly below. Positional accuracy is not
important.

CROSSING AND RELEASING

When I went to Paris to perform Ashley's opera at a festival there, I became
more aware of a tendency for my eyes to want to cross when the image wasn't
clear. For months I had resisted this urge, thinking it counterproductive.
But now it occurred to me that maybe there was a tension problem there that
I wasn't allowing to be resolved, so I let them cross. I had discovered
early on that while practicing with the eye chart in the morning (and in
this I combined palming with remembering black and shifting so that one eye
was covered while the other tried to relax), the way each eye would go about
relaxing would start with it focusing really close (I didn't at first
notice, since the other eye was covered, that this involved the covered eye
crossing while the open one kept looking straight ahead), then gradually as
I shifted it back and forth across the line of letters it would come into
focus. (I also learned at this time that the eyes focus independently of
each other, for when I would switch eyes the newly uncovered one rarely was
seeing with the same degree of clarity that the one I had been practicing
with was. This explained to me the difference between my eyes in my
prescription. The right one had always measured up slightly weaker; actually
it was just trying harder to see close. Now the right one sees clearly at
least as often as the left one does.) Now, in Paris, I did the same thing
without the other eye covered. They crossed, and I would shift my attention
from what one eye was seeing to what the other was seeing, back and forth,
and as they relaxed they would uncross and both eyes would be clearer. It's
an interesting exercise to alternately disregard what the other eye is
receiving. It made it clear that my eyes hardly ever see with equal clarity,
and sometimes, depending on the circumstances of the light, even see colors
differently. It also helps to make the more blurred eye clearer to instantly
compare its image to the clear one. My memory object for this is the old
Wilkinson blades sword logo, since they cross. In combination with the
Zaphod technique, this can get the eyes clear very quickly.

THE FOREHEAD MUSCLES

This is my most recently codified relaxing tactic. After the Seahorse and
side-of-the-head muscles had been employed for a while, I became aware of
tension located in the area above my eyes, basically the forehead region. (I
must stress that I was unaware of this tension until I'd been relaxing other
muscles in the vicinity for some time. Indeed, this can be said for all the
tensions I've released: In their turn, each was noticed only after others
had been released, except of course the first one, which was released
through suggestions from the Bates book as outlined above.) This forehead
tension is quite subtle and I have been able to release it only through
imagining the muscles to be more relaxed than they are, in effect willing
them to release. It is difficult to effect this release without incurringor
letting recur other tensions nearby, such as beneath the eyes. Still, on a
recent road trip I enjoyed my highest percentage todate of absolute clarity
with this concept, in conjunction with the Seahorse, shifting, remembering
black and crossing & releasing. My image for this, I hope rather obviously,
is the head of a Sperm whale with its enormous forehead area.

A WORD ON MY IMAGES

The images I have chosen to remind myself of the techniques herein described
and the ones from the Bates book that I use that I have not described, have
particular relevance in my life. I don't expect any of them to mean much to
anyone else. If you choose to use mnemonic devices in your journey to better
vision, please pick images of special meaning to you, for they are most
easily remembered.

CONCLUSION

With my concepts and techniques kept readily accessible in my memory, I am
able to successfully fight the incorrect muscular habits formed in my
childhood and reinforced during the years I was dependent on refractive
lenses. As time passes, it gets increasingly easier to keep my eyes relaxed
and see clearly. I almost never wear glasses any more, and then only
extremely briefly when I need to read a street sign while driving at night.
The few times when I'm unable to adequately overcome eye tension, which are
now no longer than half a minute and occur only after extended computer work
or at the end of a long day, are a pittance to pay for the freedom from
frames or contact lens chemicals and their accompanying expense. One of the
greatest benefits is the ability to lean my head against something, be it a
pillow or my beloved's breast, without any obstruction or worry about having
to get up later and put contacts in a solution, and watch the TV or a sunset
or the stars. Another great thing is that people look at me differently
without the wall of lenses on my face. I didn't like contact lenses- they
made my eyes tired and were too much trouble-so I went from a bespectacled
aloof intellectual to a personable "normal" guy in the space of three weeks.
I can play frisbee in the rain and go swimming with perfect clarity and no
problems of fogging or losing a contact. I don't have to worry about where
my glasses are. The list is very long.

Make no mistake, to unlearn bad vision habits is difficult and requires
constant attention. It requires a strong will, immense patience and great
determination, and mostly the desire for the freedom success brings.
Everyone who wears lenses should be given the opportunity to apply Bates'
techniques. All they have to lose is the freedom they are already denied by
their dependence on their lenses. The gains are comparatively immeasurable.
But millions are denied the mere possibility of awareness of these facts by
the silence of those who, since they were taught otherwise or tried and
failed, will not spread this knowledge. A recent National Geographic article
on vision stated categorically without mentioning theories to the contrary,
that science does not know the cause of myopia. Answering my letter to the
editor, which pointed out Bates and his technique and its success in my case
but which was not printed, the editor wrote me that, due to space
considerations and expected interest to readers, many things, INCLUDING
BATES' "THEORIES," had to be omitted! I wrote back asking what could
possibly be of more interest to readers of an article on vision than the
possible existence of an inexpensive way for a large percentage of
lenswearers to rid themselves of their optical crutch. I have received no
response to my second letter. And the Bates method was once again ignored.
Bates' book has been in print over fifty years. It was sheer luck that I
came across it at all. Once again, it's not a conspiracy. It is the inertia
of ignorance and the inability of most people to think outside strictly
conditioned pathways. I hope this little treatise will encourage others to
give the Bates method or some variant a try and hopefully experience the joy
I have.

Adam Klein
June 1993
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

UPDATE July 1994

Still not using glasses. Also, still not seeing clearly 100% of the time,
but more often than before, with less work. I have been experimenting with
where to focus the idea of relaxing, that is where in the eye area to simply
"tell" the muscles to relax. This is a direct steal from my singing-learning
process, and also from yoga. Try to feel tension, and then relax to get rid
of it. The two spots I've been comparing are between the eyes and near their
outer edges. I talked to a medical student in February, and he mentioned
that there was a muscle that attaches obliquely to the eye, from the nose
side on the bone to the temple side on the eye, and I wondered if that was
the muscle which was making my eyes cross and not the ones on the outer part
of the eye. After four months of trying to relax one and then the other
region, it seems clear that for me it's better to relax the outer areas They
seem to be what makes my eyes cross, not the ones in between. So the "Geordi
LaForge" area (described above as the "The Scream" image, but since then
changed to Geordi, because of where his visor attaches to his head-- the
actual area is slightly below where those clips seem to be, but close
enough) is evidently one of the most important ones these days to
concentrate on. Since settling on that area over the inner one, I can see
clearer longer in much less light than before.

I should mention that my eyes never crossed before I started to figure out
how to relax them, and they don't stay crossed. It's just until the muscles
that are making them do that, which are very hard to feel, relax.

I have discovered Stereograms, random-dot and otherwise. If they're wide
enough, that is, if one needs to look very close to parallel to see the
image-- in other words, when the fusion dots approach 2.5 inches apart,
they're very good for relaxing the eyes. Besides, they're too cool for
words. I've even managed to make a stereoscopic desktop pattern for use with
Wallpaper*, which itself, when using the 128x128 pixel patterns, is good for
relaxing. A large monitor helps.