What Is The Best We Can Hope For?

 This is something else I want to share from my inbox. A friend, who I will keep anonymous, send me this comment in an email today:

"I was mentioning self-tonometry to one of my parents. I said that, at the very best, we can hold off (or even reverse) loss for ever. And at worst, we can delay the trajectory of the disease by a decade or more. Would you agree?"

Here is my reply:

I'm more optimistic than that. Glaucoma is the best thing that has ever happened to me in my life. Nothing bad can come from this. Everything that happens from this point forward is the best thing that could happen, so I have nothing to worry about. From one perspective -- the most real perspective as far as I am concerned -- I do not have a disease. And I (usually) have no concerns about delaying the trajectory of this disease because I do not think of it as a disease

Obviously, I do not disagree with the doctors when they talk about my glaucoma diagnosis. However, I understand it differently. I have optic nerve and trabecular meshwork damage in my eyes that is the result of my poor lifestyle in the past. At this point in time, my intraocular pressure reflects my state of consciousness. So I can say that I do not have "a disease", I simply have moments when my state of consciousness is not settled. But I also have a tremendously powerful teaching tool for advancing toward more settled states of consciousness: intraocular pressure and self-tonometry. For a person interested in enlightenment, senstive IOP is a blessing. The eye is the window into the soul, and intraocular pressure changes are a powerful way to know when your consciousness is flowing toward enlightenment.

I guess the best we can hope for is enlightenment through self-tonometry. The worst experience we could have would be not appreciating the blessing we've been given: this gift of glaucoma as a chance to gain insights. (If you haven't read "Embrace-Evolve-Exceed" -- which is about glaucoma -- please click that link now.)