Improve Your Vision by
Martin Brofman
(Findhorn Press, 2004, 168 pp.,
www.findhornpress.com,
info@findhornpress.com, ISBN 1-84409-030-2, US$14.95,
£8.95) When I first met Martin Brofman, my impression of him
was one of kindness and serenity. It was only later, when
reading his book, that I realized what a genius he is.
Improve Your Vision is
of course a “how to” book about improving and maintaining
one’s physical eyesight. But it is also much more than that –
it is a manual about changing your inner vision and
personality. An “eye opener” in the literal sense, this book
is an extension of one aspect of the author’s earlier work,
Anything Can Be Healed.
As Brofman himself writes,
“Our physical eyes are the organs of outer perception, but
they also relate to our inner perceptions. Eyesight is not
just a physical process involving acuity; it is a
multi-dimensional function affecting and affected by our
emotional and mental state of Being. Eyesight is also linked
to personality and each type of vision impairment correlates
with a specific personality type.”
The author relates how he
serendipitously discovered this link between eyesight and
personality types when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer
over 30 years ago. Given just one or two months to live,
Brofman’s values made a huge shift. He decided then and there
to live in the present moment and to do everything that he
wanted to do for its own sake and to be happy. Months after
he was supposed to be dead, he encountered a follower of Zen
who told him, “Cancer begins in your mind, and that’s where
you can go to get rid of it.”
To make a long but important
story short, Brofman relates that by shifting his perceptions
and his mental state from one of disease to one of health, he
was able to make positive changes both mentally and
physically. Critical to his success as well, he made sure to
surround himself only with positive people and to envision his
own vibrant health at a profound level. Sometime later,
Brofman went to his doctor for a checkup, who examined him,
scratched his head at least metaphorically, and said “Perhaps
we made a mistake.” There was no more cancer to be found in
Brofman’s body.
Brofman then relates that,
“An unexpected but wonderful side benefit of my healing
process was that I no longer needed the eyeglasses that I had
worn for twenty years. I used to be nearsighted and
astigmatic, but my vision changed and my eyesight was tested
as ‘normal.’”
The author discusses earlier
methods of vision improvement such as that set forth in the
works of Dr. William Bates who wrote Better Eyesight
Without Glasses. Not critical of Dr. Bates at all,
Brofman finds him to have been a remarkable pioneer in the
field. Yet, to Brofman’s mind, there was an aspect of Bates’
method that was lacking and that was the process of personal
transformation.
Brofman’s approach, then, was
born of his own personal experience as well as from working
with tens of thousands of people since 1975, helping them
improve their eyesight by retraining their consciousness
– the real key in Brofman’s opinion. Brofman says that
vision is a metaphor and that nearsightedness, farsightedness,
and astigmatism are simply reflections of one’s consciousness
and that that consciousness can be changed by our directed
will.
In a nutshell, Brofman has
found that a nearsighted person has a strong tendency to
withdraw from the world around him or her. As such, the
nearsighted person can much more easily retreat inward while a
farsighted person can do this only with difficulty since the
farsighted person’s focus is directed more outward. “A
farsighted person,” he writes, “is interested in other
people’s lives and avoids looking at their own.” With
astigmatics, they are more confused about whom they are and
what goals they have in life.
After discussing the
personality types associated with each of the three main
vision impairments, Brofman quickly directs the reader to the
means of positively changing one’s consciousness in such a way
that not only will the person’s vision improve but their
overall life consciousness will improve as well.
Positive affirmations and
visualization techniques are given much weight in this book,
as is metaprogramming (the process of reprogramming your mind
to create new perceptions and belief systems). Brofman
recognizes that moments of doubt will creep into the minds of
those attempting vision improvement and that improved clarity
of vision will take time (at least two months according to the
author). But moments of clear vision will occur, and
the reader is instructed to build upon those moments until
they become continuous and permanent.
Give it two months of your
time, Brofman promises, and you will see noticeable
improvement. Perhaps more importantly, you will have made
life-effecting changes in your own personality and Being that
will also result in a happier and less-stressful you.
For a slim volume that is
very easy to read, this book packs a lot of wisdom and insight
within it. For those of you wishing to improve your eyesight,
or even more vitally your insight, this book is definitely for
you. I recommend it.
