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.