Martin SussmanThis is the second of a three-part series about the relationship between nearsightedness and your physical, emotional, mental and spiritual self.
PART II
There is a way in which our personality is an expression of who we are, and there’s a way in which our personality masks who we truly are, both to the world and perhaps even to ourselves.
Over the years, I have worked with thousands of people in my EYECLASSES Vision Seminar. The purpose of the seminar is to give people the experience of connecting to their clear-seeing self. At the first night of the seminar people were asked to fill out a questionnaire, asking them questions like “How strong are your glasses?” and “How old were you when you first started to where glasses?”
Another question was, “What are things that you’ll do without your glasses?”
At one early seminar, a person wrote, “Well, the only thing I’d do without my glasses is take a shower.” We started to get lots of answers like that, so we changed the question to, “Name three things you’d do without your glasses.” And then in parenthesis we put (Besides bathing and sleeping).” So then, that controlled those answers – for awhile – until somebody said, “The only think I’d do without my glasses is I’d look for my glasses!”
On a much deeper level, one of the questions we asked people was: “Name three major events that occurred in your life the year or year and a half before you first noticed a limitation with your vision.”
Over half the people – even before we did the seminar and helped them understand and remember more about their eyesight – remembered significant, major events that occurred in their life 12 to 18 months before they noticed a limitation with their vision. Some of those were things like “I was a kid and we moved from one school to another,” or “I got a new job,” or “My younger brother was born,” or “My grandmother died,” or “I got married for the first time,” or “I got divorced,” or “I started to notice that my body was changing as I became an adolescent.”
There were different kinds of external, major events that people described. Then, after completing the seminar and intensively spending two and a half days dealing with all the different aspects of vision, an additional bunch of people would remember events that they had not remembered when they first filled out the form. So it got to be nearly 7 out of 10 people who could remember a major event that occurred in their lives, 12 to 18 months before they noticed a problem with their vision.
Let’s assume that at birth the vast majority of us have fine eyes. That’s not just an assumption because scientists say that 97 percent of all vision problems that occur are the result of something that happens or some patterns that we develop in life—we are not born with poor vision. Three people out of 100 have innate vision problems, congenital cataracts or some other thing like that, but the vast majority of people are born without glasses.
There’s 70 million people in the United States who are nearsighted, that’s about a quarter of the population. There are other things that people wear glasses for, so in total about 55 percent of the people in this country wear glasses or contacts in order to see clearly – more than half the people cannot see without their glasses or contacts. It’s now more normal to have poor vision than it is to have the vision that you were born with.
So the mast majority of us are born with clear vision and yet now the vast majority of us have less than clear vision. There is a transition point between the clear sight, that clear time, and, for lack of a better way to describe it, the less than clear time. And so, I ask the people that question, what are the three major events that occurred in your life a year before you noticed the limitation with your vision, and three out of four people were able to identify a significant, major event, so the period in between the clear seeing and the development of the not clear seeing, I call that the “Vision Transition Period.”
What happens to people during the Vision Transition Period is that in some way or another their perception of themselves or the world around them or their relationship to other people changes significantly or becomes less clear or there’s something in their vision that they don’t want to see.
That choice of not wanting to see, or that choice of pulling away from what’s around you to protect yourself or because it’s too confusing or perhaps because it’s too overwhelming, that choice to pull yourself away from what’s around you is filled with emotion, and that emotion then and that choice filter down into the physical body so that we then develop in ourselves a sub-personality of nearsightedness, a sub-personality of not seeing clearly.
I’ve discovered that during the Vision Transition Period there are three different areas of change.
The first is self-image – a person may start to see his or her self differently. For example, an adolescent starts to grow up, there’s hormonal changes in the body, they realize that people are looking at them differently, perhaps they realize there’s expectations on them now that they weren’t aware of before, that they didn’t see before, and so their image of themselves changes. It can be a physical change, an emotional change or a perceptual change. Ultimately though, it is the self-image that changes.
The second area is that the change has to do with relationships, a significant relationship changes or the way that they see themselves in relationship to other people changes. “Nobody likes me,” nobody wants to see that, but that may be there. Other examples are, “My parents were divorced 12 months before I noticed a problem with my vision,” or “My parents started fighting”, or “My grandmother died,” or “We moved to a new neighborhood and I had to make friends with new kids.” So some aspect of relationship changes.
The third area is the situation, the environment changes, there’s a situational change. A person moves from one house to another or goes from one job to another or makes some other kind of change so the world around them looks differently.
You can’t always isolate one change from another, sometimes when a family moves from one house to another, obviously, relationships change as well, or if there’s a relationship change because, let’s just say, the parents get divorced, there may be a situational change because the child who is becoming nearsighted is moving from one place to another as well and maybe their self-image is involved in all of that.
I think you’re beginning to see that the key thing is not what the external change is, the key thing is what the myopic nearsighted personality does in response to that external change that they don’t know how to deal with, which is this: in some version or another, the nearsighted personality constricts or pulls in their world and brings their energy in, either as a protection from the outside world or some perceived threat that they see or they pull their energy in because it’s safer, or they pull their energy in because there’s too much to deal with out there, or they don’t have the strength or confidence to respond to it so they don’t know how to deal with it. Or there’s just too much stimulation, too much going on, and they pull in.
The key thing is to look at the Vision Transition Period because that’s when the aspects of personality began that are related to being nearsighted. Now, as I said, 7 out of 10, people that I’ve had these reports analyzed from remember a major event that occurred in their life a year or so before they noticed a limitation with their vision, but there are 3 out of 10 people who do not.
Now they could partly be they’ve just suppressed a particular memory and can’t remember it, or it could be that there was not necessarily any significant major event that occurred outside. It’s just that the internal pattern of pulling away from the world could have grown in little increments over time and it could have been a slow process, but eventually it became habituated and it became locked into their emotional and physical being. There wasn’t any specific trigger event, they did not necessarily have a Vision Transition Period, but instead, their process was more gradual in terms of locking in that habit structure that says, “Pull away from the world.”
How does going back to that period and releasing the emotions that are attached to that period change the way that you can see now? The key thing is not what happened then, the key thing is the habit pattern, that part of our personality that got locked into emotion and into our physicality back then. If we do have a nearsighted personality inside us, that nearsighted personality is operating right now in our life.
Do you ever have the situation where there’s a problem coming up but it’s not really a big one and you sort of pretend—you hear that squeak in the wheel in the back of the car, “Oh, it’s not really that big of a squeak and it doesn’t come all the time.” We pretend to not see and we pretend to not look and then sometimes we avoid it until there’s no room anymore to avoid it. There are many ways that our nearsighted personality exists right now, we can go through an entire day and go to the store and go to work and go to a million different places, but maybe never or maybe only once or twice actually really look in another person’s eyes.
Our eyes are sensitive, emotional receptors; when you really want to get to know somebody you don’t look up their nose; you don’t look in their ears; you look in their eyes. The eyes are an energy pathway, and the energy flows in both directions – into and out of the body.
“The eyes are the windows to the soul.” When you look into someone else’s eyes, in a sense, you’re looking into their soul, and when they look into your eyes they’re looking into your soul. If there’s a desire to hide or a desire to protect or if there’s shame, you won’t want somebody looking into your eyes, or you may not want to look into somebody else’s eyes. The nearsighted personality lives in every moment.
The Program for Better Vision Audio Course combines not just physical exercises but also specific ways to release the patterns that have existed in the nearsighted personality. There’s a guided visualization that brings you back to that period of time to release the energy because for some people, you can’t clear it now until you’ve cleared it then. For other people, you can clear it then by clearing it now, and so there are different ways to get at it that are in the Program for Better Vision. But the key thing, again, is it’s not the external event, it’s the nearsighted response to the external events, and they exist now as well as then.
There are people I know who have done a lot of work on their consciousness and releasing stored emotions and they’ve even had their eyesight improve without even wanting to even improve their eyesight because they did this work and then go back for their regular eye exam and their glasses are weaker. For others, when they release the emotional underpinnings and then start to do the physical eye techniques, vision changes more quickly because no longer are the patterns ground so hard into their consciousness.
The other factor that’s involved is that the Vision Transition Period comes at a different time in different people’s lives. Some people had their vision transition somewhere between six and seven years old, others happened when they were 10, 11, 12 years old, some people, it happened when they were 16 or 17, others it happened at points later on in life. So if you’re trying to change an aspect of your consciousness that has been with you for so long, that can be a harder task than changing one that’s not that deeply intertwined and imbedded with all the different aspects of consciousness and personality.
Some people are so dependent on their glasses that they would feel more comfortable taking all their clothes off than taking their glasses off! Here’s an interesting phenomenon: when you’re dealing with the consciousness of vision: each person who is nearsighted and highly dependent on their glasses or contacts, when they take their glasses and contacts off, feels uncomfortable, but each person feels uncomfortable in their own unique way.
Some people feel uncomfortable because they’re out of touch with what’s going on, they can’t see whether that person across the room is looking at them or having a critical look in their eyes or if they’re not paying attention. Other people, when they take their glasses off, they become afraid because they can’t tell if there’s a threat coming.
So different people feel different things when they take their glasses off. Well, when you take your glasses off not only are you feeling what you feel now in the face of that blurry world, but you’re also feeling the way that you felt during the Vision Transition Period.
So taking your glasses off and spending some time in the world with your eyes the way they are is the doorway into gaining clearer vision and gaining access to that part of yourself that can see clearly because it gives you the opportunity to see what your response is to—you think it is your response to not seeing.
“Oh, I’m nervous because I can’t tell what those people are looking at me or not,” or, “I’m afraid because I don’t know if that car is coming towards me,” or whatever the external things are that you think it’s about, but really when you take your glasses off and you allow yourself to feel how you feel about seeing or allow yourself to feel how you feel about not seeing, you then have the doorway into the very foundation of that nearsighted personality that’s inside of you and what the emotions are that have been stored in connection to that nearsighted personality.
In Part 3 of “What Your Glasses Reveal About You” we will explore how attitudes can affect how you see and what seeing means on different levels of consciousness.
