Are eyeglasses bad for human sight? Has common wisdom and orthodox teaching on eyesight been mistaken for several centuries? This book argues these views.
     A professional engineer and vision educator, Doug Marsh reflects the authority of a modern class of writers whose credibility and persuasiveness is based not on qualifications from a recognised educational institution but on lived experience that has led to questioning of established orthodoxy. Increasingly, people look to such writers for help to escape from health systems that are no longer producing healing outcomes.
     Many have come to accept that doctors are educated to sell drugs and dentists to promote fluoride, but it came as a shock to this reviewer to learn that the training of ophthalmologists and optometrists works, in effect, to make people’s eyesight worse. This was despite the fact that I had long dismissed, with resolute determination, suggestions that I might need eyeglasses.
     Even more surprising, Marsh uses a layman’s understanding of China’s marvellous practical and mystical spirituality, Taoism, to explain the complexity of human eyesight. In the process he highlights the badly mistaken character of the scientific paradigms that underpin much so-called progress. His writing is made all the more persuasive by his understanding of the pressures of contemporary life and the manner in which these work corrosively on human well-being.
     Marsh opens with two chapters on Excess, exploring the rat race, the stress and strain and the health risks associated with The Chase of Contemporary Life as well as The Loss that is civilised vision, with its glasses, contact lenses and refractive surgery. Several lines from Lao Tsu are quoted to suggest how we have gone wrong:
     “Force is followed by loss of strength.
     This is not the way of Tao.
     Calculated sharpness,
     Cannot be kept for long.”
     Marsh puts this perspective into more familiar language in a passage headed ‘Eye’ Iatrogenesis, where he remarks:
     “The notion that medical practices may be bad for your health was mainly unknown a generation ago. The concept of iatrogenesis, damage inadvertently inflicted in the course of medical treatment, came to prominence after the groundbreaking expose by Ivan Illich in Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemesis, the Expropriation of Health in the mid-1970s. The topic is now in the forefront when the Institute of Medicine, part of the Academy of Sciences, confirms that medical errors are a leading cause of death.”
     Marsh makes much use of the 1920s work of William H. Bates, quoting him to the effect that:
     “Eyeglasses... always do more or less harm, and at their best they never improve the vision to normal… That glasses must injure the eye is evident… It means that [the wearer] is maintaining constantly a degree of refractive error which otherwise would not be maintained constantly.”
     The weaving of simple but profound Taoist understanding with the cruel realities of contemporary scientific folly and the brilliant but neglected work of Bates on how to achieve normal, healthy eyesight defines the character of Restoring Your Eyesight: A Daoist Approach.
     The main body of the book, which follows Excess with The Way, addresses the qualities needed to restore eyesight under the headings Rhythm, Softness, Return, Balance and Wholeness. One completes a reading of this part of the book with newfound confidence and resolution. It seems to have become much easier to focus clearly, not with strained effort but with a type of calm certainty that one’s eyes only need to be allowed to do their job in a relaxed, natural manner. In the process of discovering this reassuring manner of recovering a lost visual acuity one cannot help but wonder about the attitudes that for long have obscured such a simple and accessible truth.
     Marsh clarifies the innate qualities of eyesight in a variety of ways. These include Aldous Huxley’s words that “the art of seeing does not stand or fall with any particular physiological hypothesis,” David Bohm’s perception that the reliance on nouns in modern languages imposes “strong, subtle pressures to see the world as fragmented and static” and even the words of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus that “Upon those who step into the same rivers different and ever different waters flow down.”
     These pieces of wisdom lead to a powerful insight from Taoism which has a phrase wu wei, that in English literally means ‘inaction’ or ‘nonaction’. Therein lies the fragmentary conundrum of our modern language. Huston Smith, author of The World’s Religions, notes that such a translation suggests “a vacant attitude of idleness or abstention,” a complete misinterpretation. To better capture the broader meaning of the phrase he suggested “pure effectiveness” or “creative quietude”:
     “Creative quietude combines within a single individual two seemingly incompatible conditions – supreme activity and supreme relaxation.”
     In this manner Marsh shows how many fundamental certainties of the contemporary Western world have adverse consequences that we are ill equipped to recognise, let alone correct.
     The fact that eyesight problems are only one of the negative consequences for human well-being that derive from hidden flaws in our understanding of our own nature reflects the reality of contemporary medicine and science. Their mechanistic and reductionist character distort the reality of nature while the corporate motivation that mobilises and directs an increasing proportion of such activity is careless of human well-being.