His method centered on the idea that refractive errors are due to mental strain rather than physical eye problems, emphasizes relaxation and mental habits of seeing for vision improvement.

Learn to develop your skill in the Truth that is easiest for you, and the other Truths will follow along. You don’t need to do seven things. You need to do one thing well—and the remaining six will be there too.

the eyeball could change in an instant, from any degree of refractive error to perfect sight when the attention is focused without effort.

The understanding of this concept is the single most important point about improving your vision. The problem is not in the eye, but in the mind and how you are focusing your attention. The slightest effort to see will produce a blur. To see perfectly, it is essential to learn how to focus your attention without effort.

If the mind is preoccupied, the open eyes have no orientation. There’s no one at the steering wheel! This disconnection of mind and eyes can happen many times during a day with no lasting effect if there is reconnection. However, if there is a habit of constantly day-dreaming, fantasizing, worrying or ruminating about problems, the eyes will become

This chapter describes three revolutionary discoveries made by Bates: 1) Vision is primarily mental; 2) Perfect sight can be reverse-engineered through the Seven Truths of Normal Sight; and 3) Improvement comes from relaxation obtained through central fixation.

Visually, you cannot see a detail clearly unless you see it where it is in space. When you relax all strain and just allow the visual image to come to you, you see the entire field of vision, and the detail directly in front of you is seen with greatest clarity.

Use your moments of clarity to get familiar with the feeling in the body and mind that is present when sight is better, so you can duplicate the experience consistently—at first in favorable conditions and later in unfavorable ones.

The brain cannot process incoming visual images if it is busy with its internal noise.