Beyond darkness: How I see the world without eyes

‘Dream with your eyes open,’ they say. But my experience is different: you don’t need eyes to dream.

There’s an inner eye that allows us to picture everything -every intricately shaped object, every vibrant colour, every feeling that a face reveals.

I believe it’s quite possible for every blind person to imagine the world around him. It takes a little research, a little asking around and a little use of the other senses.

Years ago, I happened to meet a team of five blind classical dancers who excitedly told me how they touched the face of their teacher to observe facial expressions and assimilate every smile, every contortion into their dancing routine. My early theory that things that were considered strictly visual could be observed and added to our own style and mannerism was proven right after that meeting.

Let me explain my theory:

·         Vision is one way of gathering information about our external surrounding. Therefore, when blinded, we tend to gather the same information through touch, smell, taste, and sound.

·         Of course, there’re other ways of discerning information about our surrounding  getting the scene described by a sighted peer/companion, asking deliberate questions about a physical space, walking around the space with a companion, touching and feeling the objects yourself.

·         Using technology to get descriptions like colour, object, facial expressions etc.

Let’s make it clear that none of these could replace vision, but in the absence of vision, these are highly effective ways of getting a clear enough understanding of our physical surroundings.

So, is it possible to visualise the space?

Before answering this question, we need to first dispel the myth that blindness creates total darkness inside. I can’t speak for others, but as far as my own experience is concerned I see a consistent bright light inside. This particularly started to show up after 2008, when I sat on a three-day extended meditation to clear my negative thoughts and fill myself with positivity. I believe the healing life force inside of me has since been showing up in the form of the bright white light. Part of this is also because of my practice of ‘Twin Heart’ meditation as part of my basic #Pranic Healing training, which I learnt in 1996.

This basic healing white light has always been the base, the paint from which I’ve been drawing my own mental canvass.

How is visualisation working for me?

·         Whenever I meet a person, I subconsciously create a mental picture of their face. Some details could go wrong, which is quite natural as visualisation isn’t a substitute for seeing, but I surprised myself and my acquaintances by giving a near-accurate description of their faces.

Late one night during the covid-19 lockdown, I hung out with a few cricket buffs on #Clubhouse, when the app had insane number of visitors who’re either isolated due to covid or were working from home.

When I revealed my vision challenge, people got curious and asked me how I watch cricket. It was no-brainer because commentators, especially on radio, exactly describe on-field actions. My imaginative mind would go into an overdrive, recreating the game inside my head.

I also revealed, inadvertently, that I form mental pictures of people I listen to and most of the times their faces were the same as I imagined. That was when I happened to tell one of the persons that he had a bulbous nose. After a minute of stunned silence, he posted a picture of himself on the app and to everyone’s surprise he had a bulbous nose.

Visualisation is no fluke. Nor am I the only blind person to be doing this. But very few people come out and talk for fears that they would be considered as supermen and superwomen devoid of normal human feelings and excluded thereby from the society they belong.

But I feel it’s high time we talk about the extraordinary ability of human brain to create pictures to compensate lack of sight. In fact, this’d be an excellent subject for research on cognitive therapy or neuroplasticity. I’m not sure how many people would be interested, but if you study human biology and spirituality closely, this should interest you.   Beyond darkness: How I see the world without eyes