It is interesting to know that a thetan doesn’t look through his eyeballs. He has two little gold discs, one in front of each eye lens. These are not the lenses of the eyes, but, as you might say, mocked-up energy. They are little gold discs that are superimposed over the eye and he looks through these. The eyeballs merely serve to locate these discs.

An eyeball isn’t even a good camera. Some people, dissecting eyeballs to find out how people looked with them, have been totally baffled since the first time this was done because it is about the worst camera that anybody ever had anything to do with.

What the ophthalmologist doesn’t know is that the individual looks through these little discs — the ones in front of each eye — and when things begin to deteriorate, or when the anchor points of the body deteriorate, they are liable to follow suit. They become distorted one way or another.

They begin to Q-and-A with the distortions of the eye themselves — the eye reacts to light, so these little golden shields react to light. After a while the little gold shield becomes black or corrodes in some fashion which makes it very difficult to look through.

Of course, we don’t know why he is looking through them in the first place. When they do deteriorate the individual starts wearing glasses. The person thinks this is necessary. The next thing he does is to make the lenses of the glasses stronger.

He puts on a pair of glasses. This is a big shield — a big disc. This disc also goes in front of the eyeball and he knows this and he cannot see things unless he looks through one. The reason why glasses become very difficult in an auditing problem is that one is not auditing glasses.

I have audited glasses, just as an experiment, for a long time. Havingness in terms of glasses, or in terms of eyeballs, does produce some sort of change, but havingness in terms of little golden discs produces an awful alteration in terms of eyesight, sometimes faster than is comfortable.

You can take this old-time effort processing and produce a change of vision with everybody with no permanence, but a fantastic alteration of vision can occur, making somebody very uncomfortable.

Copyright (©) 1957 by L. Ron Hubbard. All Rights Reserved.

Have the preclear get the effort to see, followed by the effort not to see, followed by the effort to see, one after the other. The next thing you know is that all the little muscles in the eyes will start to Q-and-A with the little golden lenses in front of the eyeballs, which are changing under all this processing, and the next thing you know is that he is seeing double, cross-eyed, or something like that.

Things will turn on with tremendous brilliance as though somebody swung a rheostat-and he will turn it down quickly because that would mean that he would be confronting too much. You should thus change his idea of what he should be able to confront. If you change that idea, he will then adjust the machinery of sight. But if you attack the machinery of sight directly, you are just forcing him to confront and you get this phenomenon of a person turning up his vision and turning it down again at once.

You get the person capable of being able to get beautiful scenes and visio in the bank and then going totally black. You get a person cleared up tonight and tomorrow morning he is a psychotic wreck. That is all under the heading of HAVINGNESS and CONFRONTINGNESS. When you remedy havingness and confrontingness, he will remedy the rest of it.

There is no reason why a thetan couldn’t stand in the middle of the room and look at everything just as clear and flat and hard as it ever was. He doesn’t need any mechanics. He certainly has to be able to be it, and have it. In other words, he has to be able to occupy the middle of something, and he has to be able to do a lot of things before he can even see something. But all of these things adjust on straight havingness.

Havingness will change vision and special perception. That is something nobody can argue with, but the whole problem of glasses is the problem of confronting.

I once had a bomb go off in my face with some authority some time or another, because I was standing in a place where I shouldn’t have been standing at all, a total miscalculation on my part. The startlement that I could miscalculate to this degree did me in. After that I couldn’t see. Finally my eyesight turned on a bit and got way up to 3120, 4/20 — that in the Service is “what wall?” I was doing combat service and navigation and every other thing I was supposed to do, with that kind of eyesight, clear through until 1946. After the war was over I was still wearing black glasses. I was trying to write books, and “what piece of paper” in “what typewriter.”

My instincts are very good and I was perceptive enough and wasn’t unwilling to confront things to such a degree that I ran into doors or did embarrassing things, but I was rather upset because my marksmanship was way off. I shot too many bullets into too many forbidden directions, I guess, or something of the sort — that used to be a great hobby of mine.

So I wore glasses, contact lenses, trying to increase my vision. I found out that vision increased only when you diminutivized the subjects you were looking at. In other words, the more powerful the glasses become, the smaller they make the objects you look at appear. Think that over for a moment in terms of confrontingness and it will amuse you. Of course, the world isn’t quite as formidable if it gets that small.

A very high-powered pair of glasses reduces the size of the face you are looking at by about half. People who are wearing glasses are very often not aware of this. But if you put a new pair of glasses on somebody’s nose and put him in a car and tell him to drive, he does some of the most fantastic things. In other words, confrontingness is altered by glasses. I don’t know that sight or lines or clarity of vision is altered, but certainly confrontingness is altered by a pair of lenses.

The moment I found that out, I was vastly amused because I didn’t want things to be that small, and my eyes were simply recovering from having been torn up, which was an interesting state of affairs. I got some processing, ran out a lot of these things, and my eyes came back up and flickered all over the place — they got anywhere from 15/20 to 25/20, which means they were above normal sometimes and way below normal at other intervals. I found one day whilst reading a report that I couldn’t make out anything. The printing was all blurry and going askew. There were ghost letters riding above every line and I just couldn’t make head or tail of the report. I was thinking that I’d better use a monocle or a magnifying glass. I suddenly realized that I was reading an AMA report with a total unwillingness to confront it. I threw it aside, picked up a novel and the print was perfect.

So I can sympathize with those who wear glasses because I have been over the jumps. I have been all the way at the bottom of not even being able to find the door, to almost being able to find the door, on up to being able to find two doors.

Where is the havingness of the person located in terms of the body? A scholar has a fixed vision point at a certain distance from his eyes. He has had havingness in that point and then he hasn’t had havingness. If you make somebody “keep a book from going away” at that distance his eyesight will change all over the place. Just have him “open a book and keep it from going away,” “Now leave it uncontrolled,” “Now keep it from going away.” He gets headaches, eyeburn, his eyes practically bleed before you get through because you are restoring the havingness at the exact distance where it was fixed and lost.

You get all sorts of phenomena of this character, but it isn’t really a problem of how good are the optic nerves. Of course, you shove an icepick through a person’s eyes like the psychiatrists do — he is not going to be able to see well because he has already got “now I am not supposed to see with the thing.”

I have an awfully hard time with blind people on this “Now I am supposed to.” I can get them to see, get them to do everything. Then they suddenly realize that they were not supposed to be able to see — and they shut off their sight again, but you process some more, and so on. But any time you have a vagary in the adjustment of sight, it is a vagary in the adjustment of havingness.

There must be something there to observe. The havingness goes by quantity. Don’t get the idea that people are afraid of seeing anything. You’re figuring right along with the type of figure-figure that has never worked for anybody in any time or place. He is just afraid to look at things, so we will take him out and make him confront things. If, by some necromancy, he is able to have that thing or some part of it, then he will be able to see it and will not be afraid of it. If we can get him to confront, then his fears will change. People know this. But this other thing, that people are afraid of things, that they have irrational terrors and all that, is all pretty well resolved on just this one basis. There is something there to confront, then there isn’t anything there to confront. This is a loss of havingness. If their havingness goes down far enough, i.e. their idea of quantity falls far enough out of adjustment, they will begin to detest seeing it. They won’t quite like to see it. Now there can be too much of it or too little of it. In either case the scarcity or importance or responsibility factors alter and they get so that they cannot confront it. They are perfectly willing to listen to a radio, but are they willing to listen to a radio 24 hours a day? They finally say, “This is too much, I cannot confront it,” and they turn off their hearing in some fashion.

You can actually fool your considerations to this degree. You say, “Look at all the books I’ve got to write or read. Look at that — a tremendous number of them there.” You got one little book which is not going to last you two hours. Actually, you can have much too little to read. It is quite fascinating. The variations in confronting are a tremendous study.

Astigmatism, a distortion of image, is only an anxiety to alter the image. You get an astigmatic condition when a person is trying to work it over into a substitute, if he possibly can. Here again it is a case of not enough — he didn’t have enough.

Some men’s wives just disappear right in front of their faces. Just a black statue will be standing there. That’s visual occlusion, or the woman will disappear entirely. She will have no midriff or something like that. Only they don’t tell anybody about it, for this means, of course, that they are mad — or something wrong there with his havingness of his wife and his willingness to confront or not to confront that girl.

There is another factor that enters in. He would actually be in love with Martha but be married to Jane. So Jane gets blurry because he is trying to see Martha and he will do it on an axis. He will twist all things over.

There is another whole class of sight disabilities which are not allowed by or listed by the bulk of ophthalmologists. These people do not really go in for these things. They say these are bizarre effects and they doubt that anybody really sees them, which is a fascinating way of dodging out from presented phenomena.

A thetan with a buffer in front of him feels that he cannot receive various wavelengths and he knows there are some dangerous ones. He thinks they are dangerous to him and he has a tremendous number of considerations about this.

The considerations are utterly fabulous in quantity concerning the amount of protection one has to have, the conditions under which one can do things. This degenerates to a point where a man can only see well when he is wearing a certain pair of carpet slippers. It can get this far removed — I got this from a writer once — he could only write when he was wearing a certain pair of carpet slippers. I talked this over with him and all of a sudden discovered that he could only see when he was wearing that pair of carpet slippers.