Now I am only going to cover one more Bates exercise here.
It is the one which is most interesting to occultists.
Those who wish to work with the complete Bates system will do well to get one of the excellent manuals that have been published.
Especially recommended is Aldous Huxley’s The Art of Seeing.
.Not only was it written by one of England’s great men of letters, but it is widely available in the public libraries.
As for us, I should recommend palming even to those who have 20/20 vision.
Like swinging, palming is a relaxation exercise.
Unlike swinging, it is done with the eyes closed, usually after any other eye exercises.
What you must do is cover your closed eyes with the palms of your hands.
Your eye should be relaxed, and there should be no tension either in your hands, or in the muscles in your face.
You should not rub your eyes with your palms.
Just allow your palms to lightly touch your eyelids, and as you do this, visualize a sea of blackness.
Bates says that to the extent that you do not see blackness while palming, you are suffering from mental stress and consequent strain.
'When you can palm perfectly,' he wrote, 'you will see a field so black thatit is impossible to remember, imagine, or see anything blacker, and when you are able to do this your sight will be normal.'
One of Bates’ patients suffered from astigmatism and incipient cataract.
He was seventy years old, and effected a complete cure after palming continuously for twenty hours.
Aldous Huxley recommends mental palming when the normal method is impossible.
Simply close your eyes and imagine that you have covered them with your palms.
It is not as effective as actually using your hands, of course, but extremely beneficial nonetheless.
Now the reason that this works, according to Huxley, is that 'all parts of the body carry their own characteristic potentials'.
He suggests that 'the placing of the hands over the eyes does something to the electrical condition of the fatigued organs'.
According to occultists, he is absolutely right.
Edwin Babbitt anticipated many of Bates' ideas in his Principles of Light and Colour.
He suggests that 'a person strongly charged with vitalizing force may sometimes animate and regulate these muscles [in theeye] with the ends of the fingers . . . I have cured inflamed eyes by placingcool wet fingers over [them].'
For problems relating to the optic nerve rather than the eye itself, Babbitt recommends 'a magnetic hand, laid on each anterior portion of the temples, a little back of the eye'.
It is a well-known principle of mesmerism that the hands, and especially the fingers, are points at which magnetic energy is concentrated.
Eliphas Lévi said that the Astral Light is 'projected' from the thumbs and palms.
The AMORC Rosicrucians teach their members to 'palm’ using only the first finger of each hand, on the theory that this is where the 'radial nerve' terminates.
I have met several AMORC members who have worked with this technique, and who were eventually able to discard their glasses using this method alone.
One of these, a South American, had his progress monitored by an opthalmologist, who confirmed that his eyesight was indeed improving.
After you have allowed your forefingers to rest lightly on your closed eyelids for five or ten minutes, you will find it helpful to remove them and just let your eyes relax for a few minutes before opening them.
If you open your eyes immediately after removing your fingers, you may find that they will not focus for several minutes.
This is a normal result, and comes from the excellent relaxation that is induced by the exercise.
The yogis of the Far East, who studied these matters long before Bates or Babbitt, or even AMORC, believe that the two hands have different polarities of energy associated with them.
The left side of the body is, they say, dominated by a feminine, or negative energy.
The right side is positive and masculine.
This was first noted centuries before our modern psychologists began to study the different functions of the left and right sides of the brain.
Since then, it has been pointed out that the right hemisphere of the brain, which controls the left side of the body, is somehow connected with psychic phenomena.
Itzhak Bentov has pointed out that Kundalini experiences usually manifest on the left side of the body.
And more than one authority has pointed out that ectoplasm, when it is seen 'oozing' from the body of a medium, always emerges from the left side.
We are not going to produce any ectoplasm yet, thought.
We are going to make use of this phenomenon to extend vision in a different direction than Dr. Bates.
Having, I assumed, produced perfect vision in every one of my readers, I am going to now tell you how to extend vision beyond even that.
Since your right and left hands do have different polarities, when you bring them together, there tends to be a flow of energy from one to the other.
This produces an intensification of the human aura where the fingertips come together, and with practice, the aura can be made visible in a darkened room.
This effect was first noticed by an English physician named Walter John Kilner, who deserves credit as the first scientist to study the aura in a systematic manner.
Dr. Kilner used specially treated screens to make the aura visible, but I am going to ask you to do this experiment without a screen.
What you will need is a closet large enough to put a chair in, and two bath towels.
Put your chair in your closet, close the door, and use your two towels to seal the crack under the door.
This is necessary to prevent any light seeping in under the door.
You should now be sitting in the closest thing to absolute darkness that you are likely to see in this lifetime.
Now bring your two hands together, palms touching, as if you were praying.
Then, separate your palms, so that any energy that crosses over from one hand to the next must pass through your fingers.
Kilner suggested that the fingers should be separated, so that the energy has to jump a short distance through space.
But I have found that when theexperiment is done in complete darkness, it is best to keep the fingers together.
Once you have positioned your hands, look at them and will that you be able to see the light that is being produced by the magnetic energythat is passing between them.
After about ten minutes, stop.
Then try again the next day.
You will not be able to see the light on the very first day, and you probably will not be able to see it on the second.
Or the third.
Or even the thirtieth.
In fact, it may take you three or four months to begin getting results.
But results you will surely get, if you merely persist.
The first results will be a faint glimmering that can be seen at sometimes and not at others.
You should not be satisfied with this.
It indicates that you are making progress, but you should persevere with this experiment until you see a definite, steady, clear blue light where your fingertips join as soon as you enter your darkened room every time you enter.
You will find that in doing this distributed practice is key.
In other words, five minutes a day every day of the week will produce more in the way of results than thirty-five minutes on Saturday afternoons.
You will also find that you are developing psychic sight.
Many of the groups that teach this little experiment do not include with their directions what I feel are sufficient indications of the experiences their students are likely to have with it.
Some of these experiences, while quite harmless, are likely to be rather disquieting if you are not prepared for them.
And I want you to know that they are just the normal result of your newly extended vision.
One thing that you may see on occasion is a psychic projection.
If you accept the possibility of projection, it should be obvious that there are people who are doing it, and that occasionally you may cross paths with one of them.
I have looked up from something I was working on more than once to see a white figure glide right through the wall of my room, float soundlessly through the room itself, and vanish through the opposite wall.
Usually these figures will be recognizably Oriental, for obvious reasons.
They will also be quite oblivious to your presence.
These little invasions of privacy happen all the time, but people cannot see them.
After you have developed your psychic vision, you will see them.
You may also see lights of various kinds, usually when you are sitting in darkness meditating.
They may be floating balls of light, or they may appear as if they were beamed from a powerful searchlamp.
They may be coloured, and they may be pure white.
Opinion among Eastern mystics varies from one person to the next concerning these experiences.
Generally, those who have seen these lights advise their students that to see them is proof of great spiritual development.
Those who have not seen them seem to tend toward precisely the opposite viewpoint.
Swami Muktananda even tried to categorize these experiences.
He ranges from a red light the size of the human body through white and black spots to a lentil-sized blue pearl.
The implication seems to be that if you have this kind of experience instead of that kind of experience, or that kind of experience instead of some other kind of experience, you are more or less advanced.
I tend to suspect, though, that these lights suggest the presence of some kind of energy that is normally invisible, and that is apparent to people with trained sight.
That you should see a red ball of light instead of a blue square of it merely indicates that energy conditions are this way instead of that.
We can only read more meaning into these experiences if we assume that these conditions are of our own making.
In some cases these kinds of lights are produced deliberately as a form of communication.
In Old Diary Leaves, Colonel Olcott relates an experience had by the medium W. Stainton Moses:
I saw by my bedside, distant about two yards, and at the height of about 5' 6” from the floor, three small phosphorescent balls of light about the size of a small orange.
They formed an equilateral triangle, the base of which would measure eighteen inches.
I fixed my gaze on them and they remained quiet, glowing with with a steady phosphorescent light which cast no gleam beyond itself.
Satisfied that the phenomenon was objective, I reached for a match-box and struck a match.
I could not see the balls through the matchlight; but when the match went out they came into view just as before.
I repeated the match-striking six times (seven in all)when they paled and gradually went out.
Olcott says that 'the three luminous spheres form the special symbol of the Lodge of our Adepts', meaning the Great White Lodge.
If the fingertips-together experiment is not to your waste, you may accomplish the same thing by a certain Sanyama recommended by Patanjali.
In Book three, Sutra Forty-one, Patanjali says that ‘by Sanyama on Samana, [these is produced] effulgence'.
This effulgence is merely an intensification of the human aura, just as we produced with the fingertips-together experiment.
It results from the fact that the Solar Plexus area is the seat of the Vayu called Samana.
Samana is the fire of digestion; however, the word 'fire' is to be taken literally as well as metaphorically.
Samana not only digests your food; it is the seat of the Tejas Tattwa — the Fire Element — in the human body.
By arousing and awakening this Samana through concentration, the yogi arouses and awakens the potencies of fire within himself.
And those potencies include light.
They also include heat, and that is why I personally prefer the fingertips-together exercise.
I find that my own concentration on Samana generates more heat than light.
An uncomfortable amount of heat, in fact.
Control of this particular Vayu is the basis of the yogic art tumo, which enables naked ascetics in Tibet to take baths in freezing water.
ManyWestern critics of yoga believe that tumo is based on self-hypnosis, but, having done it myself, I am not so sure.
The heat at least feels quite real, and if you do your experiments in a freezing apartment, you might prefer this method.
That said, let us take a look at how the experiment actually works.
I have said that the lights you see are produced by energy in your surroundings.
This energy is no way different from that which is called 'ball lightning' and which is known to science.
But the light that is generated in these cases is outside the normal range of human vision.
Thatis why only the Adepts can see it.
Light with a wavelength longer than about 700 millimicrons isinvisible to virtually every human eye.
It is in what we call the infra-red region, the 'redder than red' region.
It is redder than the reddest red man can see, and it is therefore invisible.
The same thing is true with light that has a very short wavelength.
These energies fall in what is called the ultraviolet region.
Like infra-red rays, ultraviolet rays are beyond the normal range of human vision, and therefore invisible.
The human aura is in this category.
It consists of ultraviolet radiations.
Since to normal people ultraviolet radiations are not visible, most people cannot see the aura.
The range of the eyes can be extended, though, and this is in fact one of the trends of evolution.
Says RichardMaurice Bucke:
Much more modern than the birth of the intellect was that of the colour sense.
We have the authority of Max Müller for the statement that: 'It is well known that the distinction of colour is of late date: that Xenophanes knew of three colours of the rainbow only — purple, red, and yellow; that even Aristotle spoke of the tricoloured rainbow; and that Democritus knew of no more than four colours — black, white, red, and yellow.'
Geiger points out by examination of language that as late as fifteen or twenty thousand years ago man only perceived one colour.
Pictet finds no names of colours in primitive Indo-European speech.
And Max Müller finds no Sanskrit root whose meaning hasany reference to colour.
At a later period red and black were recognized as distinct.
Stilllater, when the Rig Veda was composed, red, yellow, and black were recognized as three separate shades, but these three included all the colour that man was capable of appreciating.
Still later white was added to the list, and then green; but throughout the Rig Veda, the Zend Avesta, the Homeric poems, and the Bible the colour of the sky is not once mentioned; therefore, apparently, it was not recognized.
For the omission can hardly be attributed toaccident; the ten thousand lines of the Rig Veda are largely occupied with descriptions of the sky; and all its features — sun, moon, stars, clouds, lightnings, sunrise, and sunset — are mentioned hundreds of times.
So also the Zend Avesta, to the writers of which light and fire, both terrestrial and heavenly, are sacred objects, could hardly have omitted by chance all mention of the blue sky.
In the Bible, the sky and heaven are mentioned more than four hundred and thirty times, and still no mention is made of [their colour].
The English word blue and the German blau descend from a word that meant black.
The Chinese hi-u-an, which now means sky- blue, formerly meant black.
The word nil, which now in Persianand Arabic means blue, is derived from the name Nile, that is the black river, of which the same word the Latin Niger is a form.
The implication is obvious: that man's colour perception is gradually extending toward the blue-violet end of the colour spectrum.
That means that man will eventually see auras.
It is therefore not surprising that some people can already see them, and that the capability can be cultivated inothers.
Now the reason all of us cannot see auras at the moment has more to do with accommodation than with the retina's spectral sensitivity.
As Kilner explained it:
The human eye is by no means a faultless optical instrument.
It is imperfectly corrected for chromatic aberration, since the various colours come to a focus on different planes.
The red being the least refrangible, [it] has its focus furthest from, and the violet nearest, the lens.
The focus of the yellow is about midway between the yellow and the violet, and in the normal eye the yellow rays fall exactly on the retina, while the other colours come to a focus a little in front or behind it.
Correction is arranged for in the brain centres.
Ultraviolet rays come to a focus in front of the retina, whereas rays on the red side of yellow focus behind it.
The brain can correct for a certain amount of defocusing, but as the colours come to a focus further and further away from the retina, they become less and less distinct.
Finally,we arrive at the very edge of the visible spectrum.
Colours beyond that point are invisible.
This is why observing the aura in a darkened room has the effect it does.
There are no yellow rays in the room since you are sitting incomplete darkness, and with a little effort, the eyes can be coaxed intofocusing toward the more violet end of the spectrum.
Red rays, which are normally visible, would in theory become invisible, and ultraviolet rays, which are normally invisible, would be moved into the visible range.
Since the human aura is somewhere in the ultraviolet spectrum the aura itself becomes visible.
This can be achieved to a limited degree in a lighted room by deliberately defocusing the eyes.
In How to Read the Aura, W.E. Butler suggests that we do just that.
'This is done,' he said, 'by focusing them about six to nine inches beyond the subject.'
You will find that a delicate balance is needed here, which must be acquired by practice.
There is atendency to look directly at your subject, a habit which comes from a lifetime of experience, so that when you first began to see the aura, you change your focus and it disappears.
If this happens, merely shift your focus again, and the aura should come into view.
If you have any success with this, you will find that the aura’s colours tend to shift with their owner's moods.
We have all heard the expressions 'green with envy', 'yellow coward', 'seeing red', 'black mood of despair', and so on.
These have to do with actual colours in the human aura, which seem to be produced by the corresponding emotions — a connection that was first noted by Plutarch in the first century.
The black clouds that surround a depressed person are the easiest to see.
Apparently,they are the closest of all the aura's colours to the spectrum of normally visible light.
But others will become visible in time.
One student of Transcendental Meditation who attained the state of Cosmic Consciousness, as understood by the Maharishi, reported that he ‘would see energy surrounding people, little thin auras of different pastel colors, and bigger, egg-shaped ones, made out of huge spirals'.
You may also discover the phenomenon that we might call chromatic onomatopoeia — the connection that apparently exists between colours and sounds.
This connection becomes apparent for most people when under the influence of drugs.
Baudelaire mentions it in Paradis Artificiel as one of the effects of smoking hashish.
However, it comes to some occultists without recreational chemicals of any kind being involved.
One begins to 'see' sounds and 'hear' colours.
All of these are simply alterations in consciousness that may accompany the development of psychic sight.
