A team of scientists from the Department of Psychology of Rice University in Houston, Texas, discovered the brain's capacity of seeing without the aid of the visual cortex. Jennifer L. Boyer, Stephanie Harrison, and Tony Ro submitted the findings of their breakthrough experimental research to the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America for publication in their proceedings journal in November 2005.
[link to www.pnas.org]

"In humans, the primary visual cortex (V1) is essential for conscious vision. However, even without V1 and in the absence of awareness, some preserved ability to accurately respond to visual inputs has been demonstrated, a phenomenon referred to as blindsight," reported PNAS. [link to www.pnas.org article]

Ramtha, in his classic teachings on creating personal reality and the difference between consciousness, mind, and the brain, has always taught his students for decades that it is the brain that sees, not the eyes. Ramtha explains the significance of this phenomenon to a beginning class in 1998:

"The brain is what is seeing, not essentially the eyes. It is how you have programmed the brain that gives you the ability to see."
"This is at once both disturbing and enlightening: Only objects and lanscapes are recognized thru the eyes as our brain is programed to recognize and know them. So I want to ask you a question: How many beings and how many lifeforms exist in the empty space between you and I that you can't see? Oh, the eye is looking right at it. Why can't you see that? Because you don't know it."
"Now you begin to understand why the greatest life we can live is a life in pursuit of knowledge. Notice that I didn't say truth, I said knowledge, because had that ancient culture had the knowledge of the galleons and the Spaniards and the epic coming of them, they would have been prepared for what they were looking at. But as it were, they were unprepared and worshipped them as deities."
"So how many things have gone on in your life that you had a hair-raising experience from but couldn't see? How much about your life do you not know? So the eyes are not a judge of reality; they are a confirmation of it. Your eyes do not determine reality; they simply confirm it."
— Ramtha
(Excerpt from: Creating Personal Reality. Beginning C&E® Workshop, May 2-3, 1998. Ramtha's School of Enlightenment. Copyright © 2005 JZ Knight)

A news report by Fox News on this discovery quotes a statement by Tony Ro, the mastermind behind the discovery, that supports Ramtha's point that what we see is filtered out by what we know: "These findings demonstrate that while certain brain areas are necessary for awareness, there is extensive processing of information that takes place unconsciously." [link to www.foxnews article]

Ramtha has consistently defended over the years the brain's capacity for sight perception and other forms of extraordinary perception without using the eyes at all. Ramtha has also devised various training techniques for consciously developing the brain's ability for "blindsight." These techniques involve blindfolding the eyes completely, which resembles the scientists' experiment described in the PNAS report:

"We used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to deactivate V1 [the primary visual cortex], producing transient blindness for visual targets," explained the team of scientists. "Despite unawareness of these targets, performance on forced choice discrimination tasks for orientation (experiment 1) and color (experiment 2) were both significantly above chance. In addition . . . these results suggest a functioning . . . visual pathway that bypasses V1 and can process orientation and color in the absence of conscious awareness," reported PNAS.
[link to www.pnas.org article]

Ramtha goes beyond the scientific experiment and explains the mechanism largely responsible for this extraordinary discovery and the possibility of developing and training in this ability as in the fantastic story of Henry Sugar:*

"The midbrain, the psychic brain, is a term overused with prejudice because all understand it is to gifted people with psychic abilities . Well, that is just balderdash because everyone's midbrain is psychic. You couldn't be alive if you didn't have it. The midbrain's duty is to pick up frequency, frequency that has to do with information and destinies, timelines, coming through the light. And so how does it pick it up? It picks up this frequency and it then interprets that in frequency and sends it onto the yellow brain [the neocortex] for further analysis. But it doesn't come in as a picture; it comes in as a signal. All frequencies carry consciousness and intent with it."
(Excerpt from: The Legacy Teachings. Legacy, February 7, 2003. Ramtha's School of Enlightenment. Copyright © 2005 JZ Knight)

"Moreover, if a person hasn't developed this eye, this midbrain, then the way they usually get the information is they don't get it in pictures; they get it in gut feelings."
"You were taught to do it in the sense of sending-and-receiving, remote-viewing, card finding, colors, The Tank®, blindfolded for days. You were all taught to open up that part of your brain so it could see, it knew what was ahead of you. When the senses were shut down, the eyesight was shut down — in some cases the hearing was shut down in this brain — we were actually forcing the yellow brain to depend upon this information. And when it comes down to it that yellow brain will get all that information and will start processing because that is its job."
"Now the midbrain then can be developed to have what is called long sight. What a great tool for the survival of your life, wouldn't you say? So then the more hits that you get — like in Henry Sugar — the more long sight that you get, the more developed it becomes. So be that."
— Ramtha
(Excerpt from: The Legacy Teachings. Legacy, February 17, 2003. Ramtha's School of Enlightenment. Copyright © 2005 JZ Knight)

* The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More by Roald Dahl
[Available at www.ramtha.com]