One of the first things that happens when people take their glasses off is they tell themselves they can’t see, they take their glasses off and they start looking around, “Oh, I can’t read those words, I can’t tell if you’re looking at me, I can’t tell what that says over there, I can’t read that exit sign and I can’t see if you’re smiling or if you’re not smiling.” They go around and they catalog everything that they can’t see. So what are you doing there? You’re using your mind and your thoughts to reaffirm the not seeing. It’s just like when I had that experience I described before [ed. note: in Parts 1 and 2].

I opened my eyes, I’m seeing perfectly clearly, but I won’t let myself believe it. “Oh, that’s not real, must be because I’m blinking,” or, “That’s not real because the sun is shining,” or however I talk myself out of it. So here we are reaffirming that part of ourselves that can’t see or that doesn’t want to see, and so, there’s a nearsighted Mr. Magoo personality inside of us that has the physical component, the emotional component, the mental component, the spiritual component. And it says to the world,, “I don’t want to see what’s going on around me, by seeing less, I feel safer.” It’s a good excuse—what’s the first thing we say when we drive through a red light and the cop stops us? “Sorry officer, I didn’t see it.”

For some of us, not seeing is a way to avoid responsibility, to not take on the fullness of responsibility that may be available to us. Particularly, I find this as a personality aspect to the 7 to 9 year old nearsighted boy. They’re getting the message from the world that they can’t be a kid anymore, it’s time to grow up, time to be serious, time to take on responsibility. And so there’s a transition there, they no longer see themselves—or they see the expectations that people are placing on them and they don’t want to see that. Another way to describe all this is to say that what we have now, which is the physical manifestation that says, “I can’t see,” that really began as an emotional statement that said “I don’t want to see.” And so, when you have said in the past “I don’t want to see,” with emotion—I mean, that’s a natural response.

What happens when we’re watching a movie and something scary comes on? We cover our eyes, right? What happens though? There are a couple of things there that are very interesting, we begin to see something scary and we don’t want to see it, because not seeing is a way of protecting ourselves. Or we’re watching the movie and we can tell something scary is coming, we don’t see it yet, but we can tell it’s coming, and right before we can sense that it’s coming we cover our eyes, right? There’s that aspect to our vision that involves sensing what’s coming and if we don’t want to see what we sense is coming, we can shut down our vision. That’s what I referred to before when I talked about Louise Hay saying in her book that nearsighted people don’t want to see into the future. They sense it, it’s not just some vague sort of future; they sense what’s coming and they don’t want to see it.

What is that sensing into the future? It’s also our intuitiveness, it’s also our perceptiveness, so when we shut down on that kind of sensing, we’re shutting down on much more than our physical sight and it’s very often the shutting down on those other levels, those other ways of sensing, that then gets locked into the physical. So there are two aspects that are important to talk about in our eyesight right now. One is central vision, what is it that you’re directly looking at when you say, “Can you read the bottom line on the eye chart?” You look at one letter. The other is your total field of vision—as you’re looking at that one letter, at the same time there’s light and images coming in from all over, all around you, all at the same time. There are a bazillion points of light, bazillion pieces of images that are coming into your eyes all at the same time that you’re looking at one thing directly. So what happens for nearsighted people is that they over-focus their attention on what they’re looking at directly. At a book, they’re just looking at the book, they lose awareness of the total field of vision—if they’re looking at the computer, they just see the computer, they don’t see the total thing. So what happens is that they lose the balance between he central focus and the total field of vision, so nearsightedness, in that sense, is not just that you can’t see the bottom line on the eye chart clearly, but nearsightedness is also the myopic view where you shut many things out to just focus on one thing.

So, part of reclaiming your vision is opening your eyes to everything that is coming into your eyes and not just one, small, little part of all that. What many intuitives say is that your sensitivities, your intuitiveness, come from your peripheral awareness, and your logic and your rationality are connected to your direct focus. So if you are opening up your total awareness you’re also opening yourself up to that total sensing, because even though you may not be aware of it, there’s light and images that are coming in all the time from everywhere. So one great suggestion that I have for people is not only spend the time without glasses in the world so that you can experience the emotions and release the emotions I talked about before, but also spend time in the world without your glasses so that you can allow the total visual world to come into you. So take a walk in the woods and try to allow yourself to see everything all at once, don’t be so centrally focused, but see everything all at once.

The result is action that comes out of the compassion that exists in the seeing, in the open seeing. Let me explain what I mean. Movies and entertainment are artificial, so there are things being thrown across our eyes designed to manipulate our emotions in an artificial way, so let’s not talk about that superficial, artificial way, let’s talk instead about real life. So you have kids who are very open, usually very loving, particularly the younger you find them, very loving, very curious.

For example, a little kid could be walking down the street with their parent and the little kid could see somebody in a wheelchair, maybe for the first time, and the little kid’s initial, immediate, unfiltered response is to be curious, “What is that, why Mommy is that person in the chair?” He might even want to go up and touch the chair or something like that. And what’s the parent’s first response? “Don’t look at that.” Some version of, “Don’t look at that.” So in the child’s way, in that pure, child’s way, there is a relationship between what we see, what we feel, and what we do, but we are in our process of socialization, we are taught to separate that out. We are taught to not look at certain things, we are taught to not look at people in a certain way, we are taught to be separate and we are taught, in the process of being taught to not see, we are taught to not act.

The people we admire most in the world are the ones who have that open vision into the negativity and engage with it and do something to move it forward and to alleviate the suffering of the world. It’s when we have lost touch with our own vision and have lost touch with the power of our own vision and our own ability to act with that vision that we then ask questions about what to do when we see things that we don’t like. And so, healing your vision is healing your vision, and that brings forward the opportunity for you to act out of whatever that open eyes and that open heart call you to act out of.

What Your Glasses Reveal About You: Part 1
What Your Glasses Reveal About You: Part 2