Let's imagine that you're an aborigine living in a jungle. Your world consists of a five-mile radius around your home. Since childhood you've been trained in how to survive. You have learned how to move your body skillfully and how to respond to poisonous snakes, hungry lions, and wild game you may wish to capture for food. Your physical eye has a simple view of the world: it consists of the jungle, family members, and your home. Your mind's eye and your thinking are equally uncomplicated. Your inner perceptions of your family and surroundings are peaceful and fearless.
One day while wandering at the edge of the forest, you suddenly arrive at a new place - a view your eyes have never seen before. You see people whose bodies are covered by clothes. They are driving jeeps and carrying guns. Your physical eyes send new information to your mind's eye. These new perceptions are processed in the context of your previous experiences. For example, what is your view of a gun? Since you have no previous experience, your perception is naive. A gun's potential to harm is not in your visual experience. Therefore, you do not fear it. If you then see someone being hurt by a gun, a visual fear response will be activated, and when you see a gun in the future, you'll see it through niters of fear and danger.
I am sure that most people who will read this article have not lived in a secluded jungle. But you probably have been exposed to events in your life that have precipitated fear responses. I am suggesting that your mind's eye, out of a survival instinct, has made mental decisions to protect you from some of the things you've seen. Unlike the aborigine, you are exposed to one crisis or stress factor after another, including wars, television, violence, hijackings, restructuring of the family unit, city life, financial challenges, competitive education, alcohol, drugs, AIDS, missing children, threats of nuclear annihilation - and the list goes on. It's not surprising that your physical eye eventually adjusts to these mind's-eye perceptions. There's so much in your world today that you'd rather not see.
Before we can understand how the mind's eye can affect vision, we must first look more closely at the way the mind's eye functions. From the moment you were conceived, even before your eyes were "seeing," your body and brain tissue were storing information about events. For instance, when your mother ate a certain food, your body recorded the event as an experience. If your mother consumed too much sugar, your body experienced certain sensations, and your mind's eye recorded and made a decision about this experience.
After birth, your eyes began to capture these events visually. Your mind's eye is a videotape. Stored in the brain's library is the data of all sensory experiences, that is, everything you've felt, heard, said, and seen. By the time you were six months old, you were more than likely seeing 20/20; by twelve months your two eyes were working together.
Imagine for a moment that you are fourteen months old. Your attention is focused on the bright orange-red color of flames in a fireplace. You maneuver your body over to the fire and begin to play. Very soon you burn your hands and start to cry. You make a decision that red and orange is associated with pain and crying. Your mind's eye records this experience of pain associated with seeing red and orange.
Later you see some brightly colored red and orange paper. Based on your previous experience, you pull away and don't wish to touch the paper. If you continue to respond this way to visually presented red and orange items, the muscles and structures of your eyes learn to see in a fearful way. In effect, your eyes and your vision constrict and become tense. Because of the mind's-eye perception that red and orange burns, it sends fearful messages to the physical eye.
This connection between perception and action is clearly evident when watching eye and facial expressions recorded by a video camera.
Certain probe questions stimulate mind's-eye memories of upsetting past events. As you think about those events, tension and fear are reflected in the gestures you make. It's as if your memory of the previous events triggers a survival response. The way you see the present is affected by your records of past information, which is then reflected in the gestures made by your eyes and face.
Consider that the events of your life, along with genetic, physical, nutritional, and environmental factors, may have affected your eyesight. Retrace the events in your life. Is it possible that these events triggered physical and mental perceptions that brought about your present level of vision-fitness?
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