This is an experience that happened to me late 1975 or 76.  I was a practicing vision specialist at the time and I’d been wearing glasses for 9 years. I didn’t see well without glasses.  I could barely see the big E on the eye chart, and needed them to drive.  I started doing some vision exercises, and gradually reduced the strength of my eyeglasses prescription, and my vision started to improve.  Then, at a certain point, it stopped.

One day I was meditating (I had meditated since 1971) and I had a profound experience that I never had before.In the midst of my meditation, and with eyes closed, all of a sudden I found myself observing myself and everything else in the room.   Today we would say “out of body experience”, but I had never heard of such a thing.

My eyes were closed, but through some way—I can’t say ‘the mind’s eye’, because I don’t know how it was observed–everything in the room was crystal clear.  Beyond optically clear–everything was clear. There were no questions–about anything.  Everything was just. . .I don’t even know how to describe it.

In the midst of this experience, I also realized I also couldn’t tell from where I was seeing.  It felt–the experience was–like simultaneous perception from an infinite number of points around the room, because I was observing myself from the front and back and top simultaneously.  I don’t know how to speak about that either.

When I opened my eyes, my eyesight was crystal clear.  I left my home, got in my car, put my glasses on the seat next to me, and drove to my office to examine myself.  On the way to my office, I could see everything: street signs billboards, everything.  I got to my office, I sat in my chair and started looking at eye charts I’d never seen before, and I could see every letter on every chart.    I put myself behind the horopter and went through same process, asking the same questions I ask my patients, “which is better #1 or #2?”

I went through the process and when I was finished, came up with the optical prescription, I was sure that the device would say “zero”, I didn’t need a prescription.   But the prescription in the machine was exactly the same prescription as I was wearing in my glasses.  The report was calling for the same prescription that my eyesight had always called for.

I had to ask myself the question,  “How is this possible??  I just had a 300% improvement in eyesight that seemed to occur instantaneously.  I could see everything on the eye chart without any stress or strain, and yet the optics of my eyes hadn’t changed at all!  Then all of a sudden it came to me:  Oh, we don’t see from the eyes alone.

It is now 32 years since that day, I’ve never had a pair of glasses on my face since that day, for distance or for reading.  6 months ago had a professional vision exam, and even though I don’t register as being nearsighted any longer, (which I was back then) I actually show more astigmatism now than before.  The amount of astigmatism that was objectively measured would make it impossible for me to see 20/20.  Yet I do.

What I’ve come to realize is that we don’t know what it is that is seeing.  From my experience, the seeing isn’t happening in the eye; unless you identify the eye as the seeing mechanism. For me, it’s not happening in the mind‘s eye; unless you identify yourself and the source of your essence as being in what you call that continual flow of thoughts that we think of as mind.  For me, is a situated–perhaps call it an awareness—is situated in the place that is aware of, not only the sensations of the body, but is continually aware of this activity of this thing going on in we call the mind.

All of us experience thoughts, most of think we are thinking them.  From my experience, what’s actually happening is that we are observing them.  In fact the only reason we are aware of the fact that thinking is occurring is because something is watching it, something is seeing it.

So, for me, the reason I believe that my eyesight changed so radically, and seems to give me optical clarity when the optics of my eyes would indicate that it would be impossible to have that clarity, is because the identification with the source of seeing, for me, is no longer in the eye or in the mind.  What I trust is that thing that sees without looking.

Jacob–Hawaii