I attended a 9-day "Vision Without Eyes" retreat in Mount Shasta led by Rob Freeman. The basis of his system is on the idea the rational left brain is trying to fool the intuitive right brain. While I can imagine that if you do get this ability, you may have a hard time believing the mask doesn't have a hole, that idea itself is an extremely oversimplified way the brain works and is considered a common myth. I was a little disappointed by this given the website says the training is based on science and psychology, yet the entire premise starts off with a misnomer.

My assessment of Freeman was that he engaged in a lot of "magical thinking" and this made me have a very hard time trusting his instructions and reasoning. The entire time he was also convinced and telling stories about how some sort of invisible or interdimensionial aliens are playing tricks on him. I believe in the UFO phenomenon and believe things of "high strangeness" can happen, but he is literally doing the Ancient Aliens meme of replying that aliens are the first answer to any mildly odd thing in his life. So I had a very hard time trusting that Rob was a rational actor. I also noted that Freeman admitted he does not personally have the "mindsight" ability active, citing that he is too busy, but he claimed he can regain it with practice and did have it at a previous retreat. I just find that to be odd, given what an incredible ability it seems to be and all the years dedicated to it.

However, I was convinced that two other instructors, Dalia and Nikki, possessed a genuine ability to see without their eyes after conducting personal tests on them multiple times. Dalia is known from some small internet fame where she can speak telepathically with her nonverbal autistic daughter like on the Telepathy Tapes, as well as her ability to do mindsight. Nikki was a participant from a seminar four months prior who reportedly acquired the ability almost immediately after putting the on the mask and doing some visualization exercises.

The methodology taught at the retreat involved the following steps:

1. Participants start with some intuitive training on colors and shapes with eyes closed, trying to feel which ones presented to them are accurate with intuition.
2. After participants wear a mask and are instructed to allow a small amount of light in (this was only after participants were having issues with mindsight) to help facilitate the process. Rob didn't personally say this, but this is what was taught by both instructors. Rob didn't give full instructions really, he gave broad overviews and then released us to to attempt exercises with the instructors.
3. Instructions to smile were given during the process, with the rationale that it releases endorphins. I observed that this action also served to lift the mask, creating a larger gap for light and some sight to come through.
4. The training progressed from identifying colors, to shapes, and then to reading.
5. Medical bandages were later added over the eyes, underneath the mask if you were successful reading in the previous step.

I discovered that the process was based on physically peeking. Essentially you get these pinholes through the black foam of the Mindfold brand mask. At first you start with just the mask identifying colors, then shapes, then if you master that, you do the same thing with bandages on the eyes under the mask to make it harder. Essentially the pin holes you see which are supposed to be your mindsight starting to open up, are just the swiss cheese type holes you would see if you magnified the black foam in the mask. You can even see your nose glowing from the light coming in, because all of this is done in the sun or in front of a flash light. This becomes even more pronounced when you smile as instructed.

The bandages part fooled me at first but after messing around with the bandages I realized I could see through them if I lowered the amount of light by squinting and tilting my head back to see through the part of the bandage that didn't have the thicker gauze. I then decided to just observe people who were using bandages. I noticed a distinct pattern with three separate people: to see the object, a person would either tilt their head far back as mentioned or move what they were viewing from in front of their face to a position below the mask, aligning it with the gap by their nose. While looking directly through the bandages in bright ambient light was impossible, this peeking technique, combined with squinting, or in this instance through a small amount of light from the mask leaking, allowed sight through a small portion of the bandage.

Other times people would presumably see through the back of their head, but when I interviewed the student who supposedly did this they said that during that stage they would use translucent colored plastic and the sun would shine through, creating a colored shadow on the participant who had a blindfold that was leaking light and they were not convinced.

This created a conflict for me: the methodology being taught was a form of trickery, yet I remained convinced that Dalia and Nikki’s abilities were authentic, which included seeing behind their own heads while blindfolded. Nikki’s encouragement of the process, stating it was how she learned, added to my confusion. However, from my limited understanding Nikki doesn't necessarily agree with Rob's methodology but I'm not sure to what degree. Both Nikki and Dalia are also really kind people, so I don't think they have any bad intentions but this seem's to be the framework for Rob's process at this point.

On the final day, I observed rather than participated. When I questioned Dalia about her process for teaching blind people, she pulled out her phone and showed me many videos of her work. She described a completely different method that is not based on light leaks obviously but on intuitive exercises. I believe she said she doesn't introduce light for non-blind people as well but honestly I'm not sure. It's something I'm still confused about as she did really seem to encourage loosening the masks. Examples of this activity included having people feel colored fabric to identify the color using intuitive senses, or identifying symbols on cards by putting one's hands near them.

Dalia stated this process takes about three days, at six hours per day, for which I believe she was referring to both blind and sighted person in a full blackout mask, to begin visualizing in any strong manner that would be considered mindsight and not just intuition. I witnessed Dalia begin this process with another student, who then started to correctly identify colors and shapes with his eyes closed, patched, and blindfolded at a very high rate, maybe 80% or so over 20 or so trials. So it seemed with some people she was combining this method with the peaking method. Rob's course did include some intuitive exercises as well just to clarify, but they weren't exactly the same type of thing and felt very disconnected from the other exercises where you are actually supposed to see rather than intuit. In contrast, Dalia's method the way she describes it seemed very cohesive and overall just logically made a lot more sense, as it builds upon itself in a natural order.

A good handful of the students would just say they felt like they were peaking, because they were. Rob would always say not to trust the lying left brain when it says that, which to me seemed like a way to say ignore this obvious glaring issue and just believe you can do it. One issue though I see is that many people are fooled in this program, and those are the people on camera giving testimonials. Essentially as something is happening a camera man who is there the entire time may come over and interview you about your experience. To me this gives a false impression for people viewing this on YouTube as well as others in the class.

I believe the idea was that we were supposed to peak to fool ourselves to help with the belief of mindsight, which might be a prerequisite for mindsight. It makes sense that you have to believe it to be possible to do it. For instance if we struggled for 4 days straight maybe we would doubt mindsight. The problem with this approach is it has some ethical issues, namely that students were never told that this was the approach, so many people who believed they had mindsight were just looking through a loose mask, and even worse celebrating it on camera which are essentially acting as VWE testimonials/proof which is very unethical. This method may work, but it is bound to cause a lot of confusion (I certainly was very confused) and it has the issue of telling people they are experiencing mindsight when they aren't.

My final hypothesis is that Nikki, who practices at least an hour of meditation daily, Qigong, and other visualization techniques, likely had the ability or prerequisites for the ability prior to the seminar and perhaps attributed more of her success to the method than is warranted. However, I do think the intuitive color and shape exercises that were similar to Dalia's technique could have helped her advance. So perhaps not all of Rob's methodology is wrong, but large parts seem to be for me. I don't see any other explanation for her being able to pick up the ability almost instantly and to a very convincing degree, which no other student in my cohort of 30 or so people did. For instance a student brought swimming goggles that were completely blacked out and suctioned to your face quite strong. Nikki had no problem with using this device which she did not know a student was going to present and challenge her with.

Moving forward I will discard the Vision Without Eye's methodology and will instead attempt to learn using the intuitive process that Dalia uses to teach the blind with no light leaks. I do believe after testing Dalia and Nikki that this ability is real. There is also a good book called "Seeing Without Eyes Is Possible" which goes through over 100 years of scientific tests and studies of blind people demonstrating this phenomenon, so I do believe it there is validity to mindsight. I will work on replicating what Dalia told me at home to see any progress can be made.

EDITS:

since this was brought up to me, I will add while this is a 9 day retreat, the last day there is no programming and I left one day early. So I did 7 out of the 8 days with actual programming. Some people may feel it's not fair for me to post this by leaving 1 day early, but I think 7 out of 8 days is sufficient personally.

Somehow I didn't really elucidate the fact that with both me and other students when they were having trouble, we were told to loosen our masks. I responded to a comment about this that I'll paste below:

Yes I had my mask on tight in the beginning and couldn't see anything. I was having trouble seeing anything with mindsight so I asked for help on the second day, and Dalia told me to loosen my mask so I did. After I mentioned light was leaking in after loosening it, she assured me that was ok. We were also outside in the direct sun. I saw multiple students be told to loosen their masks as well when they had trouble. This still confuses me, because Dalia doesn't use any light leaks in her own practice so I think this is something Rob must have told the instructors.

When the mask is loose and you are doing the smiling action while trying to see stuff you can definitely peek through the foam in the direct sun, but it does take a little bit of trial and error to understand exactly where you need to look, how to tilt your head, where to hold the object, and how to see through the foam. To read I had to face directly away from the Sun so that the thing I was reading was directly in light, and tilt my head at a certain angle. Eventually I figured that out I could read every time, and I was told this was mindsight. But if I slowly lifted my mask I could see it was just peeking. I could tell I was seeing through the nose area of the mask just by opening and closing one eye back and forth and I could see my nose glowing red in the sun. Likewise if I just put my index finger on my nose it closed that foam gap there and I could no longer read and light no longer came into the mask at the same degree.

One student on the last day said they had light coming in around the entire mask because Dalia loosened it to a large degree, and the student just kept saying that they felt like they were cheating because tons of light was coming in and had an incredulous look on their face after lifting their mask from doing an exercise when people were waving neon colored paper that was reflecting bright sun on it and they were getting it right. The instructor was saying things like "great job you're getting it" but you could tell the student was getting really annoyed because they had light coming in around the entirety of their mask with bright neon paper reflecting in the Sun coming in around the edges as part of the testing.

I will also add that since this came up in the comments about seeing through a pinhole not being easy, I would point again to the Seeing Without Eyes Is Possible book. In that book they mention peaking through pinholes because of a phenomenon known as "the pinhole effect", also known as the stenopeic effect, where seeing through a pinhole actually creates a clearer image than without the pinhole. You can find various pinhole glasses for sale to help with your vision because it reduces light noise and helps with depth of field.