My Vision Quest: Adjust Your Vision—Angel or Stone statue?

[Note: The same preface precedes all the blogs on my vision quest and the ones on giving up grievances. It provides the personal context regarding the relationship of each piece to my quest to restore my eyesight since I've exhausted all that Western medicine can do to repair the damage done by my advanced case of glaucoma. Therefore, if you've read it before, you may want to refresh your memory or skip to the new blog entry below.]

My Vision Quest
On New Year's Day 2011, I began the 365-day journey through the dailly lessons in the workbook section of A Course in Miracles. Given all the amazing synchronicities (meaningful coincidences) I've had since completing The Space Between Stars, I am certain that the course holds the key to restoring my impaired vision, which currently fits the definition of being legally blind both in terms of severely restricted visual angles and visual acuity. The last line before the epilogue of the The Space Between Stars(see www.drsrj.com) ends with the words of the man born blind who is healed by Jesus, ". . . I was blind but now I see." This is the title of the book I am currently writing. The subtitle is: "A Miracle of Restored Vision Redefines Reality." The book chronicles my quest for rstoring my vision that began with events leading up to my first and second trips to see the healer/medium John of God in Abadiania, Brazil. What I been led to considier is quite remarkable. I have always seen the healing of my vision as a twofold process. First, I have done what medical science can do for glaucoma, namely, the reduction of the elevated intraocular pressures which have damaged the optic nerves in both of my eyes. Until encountering the redefining of reality in A Course in Miracles, The Disappearance of the Universe, a spin off of the course,, as well as on my trips to Brazil, I have always seen the second phase for healing my vision as regenerating my optic nerves. I have used the following metaphor to describe the damage: If a healthy optic nerve could be seen as a tree in summer with all its green leaves, my optic nerves are like a tree in late November with a few brown leaves left on their branches.

John of God speaks Brazilian Portuguese. So before going before him, you have to tell a translator 3 things you would like to have healed. Your requests are written on a small piece of paper which is read to John of God. I asked my guide if I should ask for the regeneration of my optic nerves. He instructed me not to ask for that but for restored vision. He recommended this because a woman who had "severed optic nerves" had her vision restored, and when doctors examined her optic nerve, they expected to see her nerve reconnected. But, to their astonishment, it was still severed.

Later, as the plane took off from Brasilia, my friend Rod was reading a book containing case studies of individuals healed by John of 'God. With a trace of excitement in his voice, he read aloud to me the case of another woman with completely "nonfunctional optic nerves." Her vision was restored, and guess what?

When doctors examined her, her optic nerves were still nonfunctional. Both of these individuals had several trips to Brazil to see John of God before their sight returned. This got my attention. A Course in Miracles and The Disappearance of the Universe, as well as some sacred spiritual traditions claim vision involves more than the "body's eyes." It is in this spirit that I offer the excerpted material for your consideration and for your spiritual growth and "restored vision" back to what it was before you emerged from the womb.

[Note: The words in brackets as well as the female-gender based words are my additions.]


Excerpts from Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now.

"The body does not die because you believe in death. The body exists or seems to because you believe in death. Body and death are part of the same illusion created by the egoic mode of consciousness which has no awareness of the source of life and sees itself as separate and constantly under threat.

"So it creates the illusion that you are a body, a dense physical vehicle, that is constantly under threat. To perceive yourself as a vulnerable body that was born and a little later dies, that's the illusion. Body and death, one illusion. You cannot have one without the other. You want to keep one side of the illusion [when you hold physical immortality to be true] and get rid of the other. But that is impossible. Either you keep all of it or you relinquish all of it.

"However, you do not escape from the body nor do you have to. The body is an incredible misperception of your true nature. But your true nature is concealed in that illusion not outside it. So the body is still the oily point of access to it. If you saw an angel and mistook it for a stone statue, all you would have to do is adjust your vision and look more closely at the stone statue, not start looking somewhere else. You would then find that there never was a stone statue."

• Today, consider how you as an observer of what you call reality is shaped by your inner conversatopm or what cognitive-behavioral therapy calles "self-talk." Consider how changing your self-talk can change your reality. Wayne Dyer put it this way, "When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change."