Do We Need Our Eyes to See?

When you Google my name, you get:

FRANK ELARIDI ABC (because of my work at ABC News)

FRANK ELARIDI YOUTUBE (because of my YouTube channel)

FRANK ELARIDI SINGLE (because people wanna know!)

And … FRANK ELARIDI THIRD EYE

The reason people might associate me with the third eye is because of a little girl I met a few years ago. I heard about 9-year-old Yogamaatha when she was reading pieces of papers on Capitol Hill… while she was completely blindfolded. I pitched the story to a major news show and for whatever reason they passed on it. But I was still curious, so I decided to shoot it myself and put it on YouTube. The video now has well over 10 million views.

At first I thought maybe this was just an Eastern phenomenon. India is widely known as the birthplace of yoga and meditation, so it was safe to assume this was a strictly indian thing. However, I soon discovered the work of Nicola Farmer, a spiritual teacher Essex, England, and her work with teaching children to see while blindfolded.

By the time I got to the United Kingdom I was aware of the comments people were making on my first video—they suggested that the little girl could have been peeking beneath the blindfold. Of course I knew this was not the case, because I had three layers of blindfold on her and even tried them on myself. I checked her ears and made sure that no one except her mom and one aide— who both stood on the other side of the room— were in the room during our interview. So for the shoot in England, we used these things called Mindfolds, which completely shut out any glimmer of light or vision from every angle.

In fact one of my camera operators, Jo was her name, was so skeptical of the whole thing that she actually interrupted the shoot to try the blindfolds on for herself. By the end of the shoot she wanted to enroll her own daughter. After that video, I started to receive messages from all over the world like Russia and Mexico, from people who said they were doing and teaching the same thing.

I thought a lot about how people would perceive me, after all I was a real journalist for god sakes. I have 4 Emmy awards for telling the stories of others. I traveled to the biggest Syrian refugee camp in the world. I Chased wildfires and tornadoes, I covered nearly every mass shooting in recent history. I was even at dancing with the stars every week for several years! And now here I was talking to people about the third eye. I was so afraid of what that would mean for my career. But this is bigger than all of that. This isn’t a story about me or my little Career, this is a story about Human potential. This is proof that we are capable of more than we ever imagined.

So why is this whole thing so important anyway? It doesn’t seem like anything more than a neat party trick, right? Well according to everyone I spoke to, reading blindfolded is not actually the power— it’s just a side effect of opening your third eye. In fact, they tell me it’s just ONE of the side effects, and the only reason they focus on that is because it’s the one side effect you can demonstrate. What these kids and their parents tell me is that they are ace-ing tests in school without studying – they have this intuition about the answers. They tell me they are able to manifest the things they want in life — meaning they find that they get those toys they’ve been thinking about or suddenly receive those shoes they’ve been desiring.

By then, I thought this was strictly a kid-thing. I was told adults could not learn, because after the age of twelve, the logical mind kicks in and prevents us from learning the ability.

But then I learned about MP USA, a martial arts studio in Utah specializing in hindsight using a technique called Merpati Putih, rooted in Thai culture. They were even teaching blind people to see without using their physical sight! For example, Mike and Tiffany— a blind married couple who after a few classes stopped tripping over their three-year-old’s toys.

I never felt the desire to learn how to do this myself. I already had a superpower. I could talk to anyone whether they were from India or England, rich or poor, I could always connect with them. And as a writer, I could immortalize a person with my word. I could even give them superpowers. In my novel Valley Girl Magic, I gave my characters the ability to go through walls and levitate. But this power—the ability to see while blindfolded—was happening right in front me in real life and I didn’t consider learning how to do it myself.

One day a German engineer named Oliver who translated my videos into German, told me that one of the girls who did the voice for one of the videos wanted to learn how to how to see while blindfolded herself, so her dad found a woman to teach her. That women then invited me to Germany to learn how to activate my third eye, or pineal gland. Make sure to check back for that video in the near future.

This ability is not just for special people or spiritual people, but for all people.

In the end that’s what this entire thing is about … do we continue to believe in our limitations or do we dare to tap into our full potential? It’s the hope of ancient shepherds looking up at the stars for answers, the vision of shamans singing devotion songs around a fire, and the very goal of yogis in ashrams, nuns in the monastery, and monks in temples.

It is the hope of that skinny kid with a goofy smile (me), who believed he could be something great in this world. It’s the hope of a little boy in Essex with big glasses named Sonny who felt like an X-men character with his new ability, and it’s the hope of humanity, because when there is an awakening anywhere, there is an awakening everywhere.