THE INTERVIEW
Veronica: How
and why is the modern world experiencing an epidemic of vision
problems?
Jacob: I
think that we are having an epidemic of not only vision problems
but also health problems for a few different reasons. One of
them is that we all seem to be functioning under a state of societal
hypnosis. In other words, we are functioning based on ideas and
theories that actually do not define reality, but because these
ideas have been passed on generationally, we are seeing the world
through our ideas and so we don't experience it directly.
The other main reason is that most individuals are not present
in their life. There was a piece written many thousands of years
ago by a man named Hsin Hsin Ming who was the third Zen patriarch.
And the piece goes like this: "The great way is not difficult
for those who have no preferences; when love and hate are both
absent the world is clear and undisguised. (and clear is the
key word) Make the smallest distinction however, and heaven and
earth are set infinitely apart. If you wish to see the truth;
then hold no opinions for or against anything. To hold what you
like; against what you dislike; is the disease of the mind."
Basically, the piece says: if you wish to see the truth, then
hold no opinions for or against anything.
We have to take a look at the way
our world is being run most of the time. We have become a very
mental society. One thing we know about the mind is that the
mind can never solve any problems. The mind cannot come up with
the answer to anything because it is never present, so it never
has a direct contact with what is happening in the moment. The
mind only reviews the past and projects its feeble memory of
the past into what we call the future.
When we are viewing the world through the mind, we are not experiencing
life directly, we are seeing it through our ideas, our beliefs,
our judgements and so on. And so those ideas and those concepts
literally create an artificial boundary on a reality that is
in fact infinite. The mind takes an infinite reality, creates
finite borders and those finite borders could be defined as the
restrictions that people see as near-sightedness, far-sightedness
and astigmatism; a warp in their view of reality. When you are
experiencing life through the mind, most of what we call thinking
is really worrying. The reason that we go into worrying is because
the mind creates the illusion of problems and then gives itself
a secondary job of creating solutions to these problems that
it creates. However, if you have ever read or spoken to anyone
who has achieved a state of presence, what they say to you is
in that state there are no thoughts, there are no problems, there
isn't anything. The greek philosopher Heracleides called that
state the hidden harmony and Jesus described it as the peace
that passeth all understanding. In other words, a level of awareness
and peace that cannot be understood. So the part of us that sees
things as a problem, doesn't know, doesn't have any way of knowing,
what needs to be fixed and the part of us, when we are present,
that doesn't experience any problems, doesn't understand. It's
an interesting dilemma because from one view of reality there
are problems and solutions and the requirement for understanding
and from another view of reality there exists no problems, no
solutions, but rather an awareness and a direct experiential
feeling about life, yet not an understanding of it. So when you
ask the question, "why are we having an epidemic of vision
problems?" it gets to the core of the fact that very few
people are viewing or experiencing life directly without looking
through the filters of their mind. When you are looking through
the filters of your mind, there is no way of seeing clearly,
not only on an optical level, but on a deep level as well.
The other piece of it, that is very important, is this. The average
person who goes to a vision specialist receives a prescription.
The prescription that they receive is based on their response
to the question, "which is better, number one or number
two?" Now, what we don't realize is that while we are wearing
those glasses, we are constantly viewing reality with the judgement
in mind - which is better, number one or number two? Now, these
lenses that we call corrective don't seem to correct anything
and actually feed the problem. This is why most everyone who
gets glasses ends up getting stronger and stronger glasses from
year to year. Those lenses actually keep us stuck in a state
of judgement, rather than a state of feeling.
Veronica:
Are there any benefits to these lenses then?
Jacob: Yes,
they seem to heighten an aspect of our vision that scrutinizes,
discriminates and judges, but simultaneously they significantly
diminish our ability to feel reality and our ability to precognitively
sense what is the next step of our life. With glasses on, the
visual field, our ability to see to our sides, our expansive
vision, is diminished dramatically as a secondary result of the
bodies energetic field being diminished as well.
To look at something like near-sightedness. If you look at a
child who gets frightened; one of the things they will do is
possibly curl up in a fetal position. If a child is watching
a movie and they are looking at something that is frightening,
they will cover their eyes and frequently bend their knees up
towards their chest. Those are the physical manifestations of
the energetic field which not only envelopes the body, but we
think actually creates the form that we call solid. That is a
secondary effect of that energy field diminishing. When we make
a meaning out of an experience or event in life that we consider
frightening, our energetic field contracts, our whole being contracts
holographically. When that happens, part of what actually contracts
is our vision. Now, since most of us don't recognize that, when
we go to the vision specialist because our vision has diminished,
the vision specialist doesn't typically say, "have you had
some kind of event that was frightening for you, something you
didn't care to look at or see?" Most of the time, they put
you in a long, dark, thin room, put an instrument in front of
your eyes that basically covers the entire field of vision and
only allows you to look at a very tiny hole in space. And then
by asking you the questions, which are better, one or two, they
seem to take your vision and focus it in with very sharp boundaries.
When we are viewing the world through the sharp boundaries, what
we are in fact doing is limiting our own body's energetic field
to those sharp boundaries and as I said before, when a child
gets frightened and they contract, they contract to create a
safety buffer between themselves and the aspect of reality that
they feel frightened by. If, however, you then give them a pair
of glasses, what you do is take the reality that they are in
some way trying to create a buffer from and once again put it
right on top of them, you bring reality very clear again.
And the only way for them to deal with that is to create more
near-sightedness. When you get glasses, the eye doctor says this
will correct your vision and you assume if you haven't been able
to see at distances that your vision has been brought from where
you were able to see it out there further away in space. But
in reality, that's not true. If you look at a pair of glasses,
lets say for near-sightedness, they don't push the world out,
they actually compress the world. They take the world and they
bring it in to where you have restricted your visual space and
your energetic field to. In other words, we aren't getting what
we think we are getting. It's something very very different than
that.
Veronica:
Throughout your book the message I kept getting was that we get
in our own way, we make it hard for ourselves, a struggle, and
if we would just let go, we would not only heal our eyesight,
we would probably heal our entire life. It sounds simple really.......yet?
Jacob: Well,
as I say, it's very simple and almost impossible because of the
conditioning we have had and yet it is something I am doing in
my life right now. And so, I know, I absolutely know, that it
is available to everyone. And it is something that requires awareness
and requires presence. And you know the mind will lead you to
believe there are problems that require solutions and so pretty
much every technique, every approach that we come up with is
a trick created by the mind that looks like it will solve this
illusory problem when in fact it actually avoids change.
They say the only thing that's constant is change. The problem
is that the only part of our being that doesn't feel comfortable
with change is the mind. The mind goes totally in the opposite
direction as existence wishes to flow.
So, lets look at it in another way. When I did my medical training,
the very first thing that we learned was that the body is constantly
putting itself into a state of balance. In medical terms, we
call that homeostasis. In other words, the body is always making
attempts to heal itself, to bring itself into balance. If you
look at mother nature and you look at weather patterns, the rising
of the sun in the morning and pretty much everything else that
happens in nature from the way you plant a seed and get a tree
to any number of different things, you'll have to notice that
everything that we experience is a miracle and what we see regarding
nature and the universe and the solar system is that it does
the same thing that I was trained to do in my medical training.
It is always bringing itself into balance. In every instance,
in every moment of life's experience, existence is trying to
bring us into balance. What that means is that life is self-healing.
In other words, you always get exactly what you need. It is built
into the plan. And so, if you did nothing at all to change the
subject of your life, in every instance your body would miraculously
begin to heal itself. Now a good example of that in relation
to vision is this. You say that you are near-sighted. When you
awaken in the morning before you put your glasses on and you
are laying in bed and you first open your eyes, before your mind
has started chattering, how does your vision look?
Veronica:
Fine, I guess.
Jacob: Well,
if you speak to almost anyone who wears glasses, regardless of
the strength, they will tell you if they close their eyes and
just breathe and then gently open their eyes, not trying to see,
but allowing the world to see them, for a flash, their vision
is clear. For many people, it's crystal clear. So, what I am
saying is this; in that instance, the mind's filters have not
yet moved into place. So, if you see that, if you have a direct
experience of that, then your attention is to just be present
for that experience, not doing anything, just being present.
Every technique we have, psycotheraputic and otherwise, has to
do with doing something. If you have rage, then you need to beat
on pillows. If you have depression, then you need to take medication.
And I'm not suggesting that some of these techniques at times
are not appropriate, however, for me it feels like the technique
frequently is what gets in the way of experiencing what we are
all looking to experience. Trying to make it faster or to change
it is what we do to avoid being present. It is the major thing
we do. The mind's clever way of constantly thinking, because
we need it to do that, is the way that we in fact avoid being
present in our lives. People talk about addictions like doing
recreational drugs or smoking or any number of different things.
I'm saying that addiction is anything we do to avoid feeling
what we are feeling. In other words, anything we do to avoid
being present with what in fact is happening is addiction. All
of us are addicted to one degree or another and mostly to a major
degree to going into the mind, to avoid life. And that is the
bottom line reason that I feel that we're not seeing clearly.
The secondary effect of that is when we're not present, we are
out of touch with life and so we create educational systems that
are very stressful on the eyes of a young child, so that strain
itself creates vision problems. We are so out of touch, that
we create technologies that are poisonous to our system. We are
so out of touch, that we create food that is made with poisons,
so that when we eat it we create diseases in our system. So,
what I am sharing with you is what I feel is the primary core
ingredient to why we are not seeing. Based on that core imbalance
of not being present, we then create a multitude of techniques
and experiences in life that continue to magnify the problem
even more.
Veronica:
You state in your book that clearing our vision allows us to
literally see the parts of ourselves, of our lives, that were
invisible to us before. Removing our lenses reveals the difficult
feelings that we were trying to avoid seeing when we first got
them and as long as we are wearing glasses or contacts, we are
carrying around an invisible barrier to recognizing and resolving
some of our deepest issues. Those lenses tend to hold our awareness
in the shape of our unresolved fear or anxiety. The answer is
just to take off your glasses and start seeing. Now, for a lot
of people that would be kind of radical.
Jacob: I
am not suggesting that the average person can just remove their
glasses. What I am suggesting, is that you begin to experiment
by taking your glasses off in a safe place like your home, and
then work with someone who can support you in gradually reducing
the strength of your glasses, so that you gradually develop an
authentic security in your own ability, your own function to
move through the process. Going cold turkey may not be the best
approach for many people.
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