by Napoleon Hill
Available in 122 free installments
Owner:
During the next six months four delicate surgical operations were performed ? two on each eye. For days George lay in the darkened hospital room with bandages over his eyes.
And finally the day came for the bandages to be removed. Slowly, carefully, the doctor unwound the gauze from around George's head and over his eyes. There was only a blur of light.
George Campbell was still technically blind!
For one awful moment he lay thinking. And then he heard the doctor moving beside his bed. Something was being placed over his eyes.
"Now, can you see?" came the doctor's question.
George raised his head slightly from the pillow. The blur of light became color, the color a form, a figure.
"George!" a voice said. He recognized the voice. It was his mother's voice.
For the first time in his 18 years of life George Campbell was seeing his mother. There were the tired eyes, the wrinkled, 62-year-old face, and the knotted and gnarled hands. But to George she was most beautiful.
To him ? she was an angel. The years of toil and patience, the years of teaching and planning, the years of being his seeing eyes, the love and affection: that was what George saw.
To this day he treasures his first visual picture: the sight of his mother. And, as you will see, he learned an appreciation for his sense of sight from this first experience.
"None of us can understand," he says, "the miracle of sight, unless we have had to do without it."
Seeing is a learned process. But George also learned something that is very helpful to anyone interested in the study of PMA. He will never forget the day he saw his mother standing before him in the hospital room, and did not know who she was ? or even what she was ? until he heard her speak. "What we see," George points out, "is always an interpretation of the mind. We have to train the mind to interpret what we see."
This observation is backed up by science. "Most of the process of seeing is not done by the eyes at all," says Dr. Samuel Renshaw, in describing the mental process of seeing. "The eyes act as hands which reach 'out there' and grab meaningless 'things' and bring them into the brain. The brain then turns the 'things' over to the memory. It is not until the brain interprets in terms of comparative action that we really see anything."
Some of us go through life "seeing" very little of the power and the glory around us. We do not properly filter the information that our eyes give us through the mental processes of the brain. As a result we often behold things without really seeing them at all. We receive physical impressions without grasping their meaning to us. We do not, in other words, put PMA to work on the impressions that are sent to our brain.
Is it time to have your mental vision checked? Not your physical vision ? that is a matter for the medical specialists. But mental vision, like physical vision, can become distorted. When it does you can grope in a haze of false concepts... bumping and hurting yourself and others unnecessarily.
The most common physical weaknesses of the eye are two opposite extremes ? nearsightedness and farsightedness. These are the major distortions of mental vision, too.
The person who is mentally nearsighted is apt to over-look objects and possibilities that are distant. He pays attention only to the problems immediately at hand and is blind to the opportunities that could be his by thinking and planning in terms of the future. You are nearsighted if you do not make plans, form objectives, and lay the foundation for the future.
On the other hand, the mentally farsighted person is apt to overlook possibilities that are right before him. He does not see
the opportunities at hand. He sees only a dream-world of the future, unrelated to the present. He wants to start at the top rather than move up step by step ? and he does not recognize that the only job where you can start at the top is the job of digging a hole.
They looked and recognized what they saw. So, in the process of learning to see, you will want to develop both your near sight and your far sight. The advantages to the man who knows how to see what is directly in front of him are enormous. For years the people in the little town of Darby, Montana, used to look up at what they called Crystal Mountain. The mountain was given this name because erosion had exposed a ledge of a lightly sparkling crystal that looked something like rock salt. A pack trail was built directly across the outcropping as early as 1937. But it wasn't until the year 1951 ? 14 years later ? that anyone bothered to stoop down, pick up a piece of the sparkling material, and really look at it.
