About the Author
José Silva was born in Laredo, Texas, and built a successful electronics-repair business which he maintained for forty years. He began experimenting with psychic abilities and brain wave activity in the 1940s, eventually developing The Silva Mind Control Method and numerous instructional courses and programs. The Silva Method continues to be taught in seminars and events by accredited instructors, and in home-study courses. He died in 1999.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1. Using More of Your Mind in Special Ways 1 Using More of Your Mind in Special Ways
Imagine coming into direct, working contact with an all-pervading higher intelligence and learning in a moment of numinous joy that it is on your side. Imagine too that you made this contact in such simple ways that for the rest of your life you need never again feel helplessly out of touch with something you always suspected was there but could never quite reach—a helpful wisdom, a flash of insight when you need it, the feeling of a loving, powerful presence. How would it feel?
It would be a peak experience not too different—perhaps not different at all—from spiritual awe.
This is what it feels like after four days of Silva Mind Control training. So far, more than a half-million people know; they have been through it. And as they become more accustomed to using the methods that produce this feeling they settle down into a calm, self-confident use of new powers and energies, their lives richer, healthier, freer of problems.
Shortly José Silva will explain some of these methods so that you will be able to start using them yourself. First let’s look in on the beginning of a Mind Control class and see what takes place.
To start off, there is an introductory lecture of about an hour and twenty minutes. The lecturer defines Mind Control and outlines the two decades of research that led to its development. Then, briefly, he describes ways the students will be able to apply what they learn in improving health, solving everyday problems, learning more easily, and deepening spiritual awareness. A twenty-minute break follows.
Over coffee the students become acquainted. They are from widely varying backgrounds. Physicians, secretaries, teachers, taxi drivers, housewives, high-school and college students, psychiatrists, religious leaders, retired people—this is a typical mix.
After the break there is another hour-and-twenty-minute session beginning with some questions and answers, then down to business with the first training exercise, which will lead to a meditative level of mind. The lecturer explains that this is a state of deep relaxation, deeper than in sleep itself but accompanied by a special kind of awareness. It is in fact an altered state of consciousness used in virtually every meditative discipline and in intensive prayer.
No drugs or biofeedback machines are used. Mind Control lecturers speak of entering this state as “going to your level,” or sometimes “going into Alpha.” In a thirty-minute exercise they lead the student there gently, giving instructions in plain English. In fact all of Mind Control is in plain English: no scientific jargon or Far Eastern words.
Several of the students may already have learned to meditate before coming to class, some using methods that take a few weeks to learn, others after months of determined effort. They are amazed at a simple exercise that takes only thirty minutes.
One of the first things students hear is, “You are learning to use more of your mind and to use it in a special manner.”
This is a simple sentence they hear and internalize at the outset. The full meaning of it is nothing less than stupefying. Everyone—no exceptions—everyone has a mind that can easily be trained to exercise powers that beginners openly doubt they have. Only when they actually experience these powers do they come to believe.
Another thing that students are told is, “Project yourself mentally to your ideal place of relaxation”—a pleasant, calming, remarkably vivid exercise, which both strengthens the imagination and leads to deeper relaxation.
A word about meditation: In everyday speech it means thinking things over. If you set this book aside for a moment and consider what to have for dinner tomorrow, you are meditating.
But in the various meditative disciplines the word has a more specific meaning, referring to a special level of mind. In some disciplines, reaching this level is an end in itself, clearing the mind of all conscious thought. This produces a pleasant calm and goes a long way toward relieving and preventing illnesses caused by tension, as countless studies have proved.
But this is passive meditation. Mind Control goes far beyond this. It teaches the student to use this level of mind for solving problems, little nagging ones as well as larger, burdensome ones. This is dynamic meditation; the power of it is truly spectacular.
We hear more and more about Alpha nowadays. It is one of the brain-wave patterns, a kind of electrical energy produced by the brain, and can be measured by an electroencephalograph (EEG). The rhythms of this energy are measured in cycles per second (CPS). Generally, about fourteen CPS and up are called Beta waves; about seven to fourteen are Alpha; four to seven Theta; and four and below are Delta.
When you are wide awake, doing and achieving in the workaday world, you are in Beta, or “outer consciousness,” to use Mind Control terminology. When you are daydreaming, or just going to sleep but not quite there yet, or just awakening but not yet awake, you are in Alpha. Mind Control people call this “inner consciousness.” When you are asleep you are in Alpha, Theta, or Delta, not just Alpha alone, as many believe. With Mind Control training you can enter the Alpha level at will and still remain fully alert.
You may wonder what it feels like to be in these different levels of mind.
Being in Beta, or wide awake, does not produce any one particular feeling. You might feel confident or fearful, busy or idle, engrossed or bored—the possibilities in Beta are endless.
In the deeper levels the possibilities are limited for most people. Life has taught them to function in Beta, not Alpha or Theta. At these deeper levels they are pretty much limited to daydreaming, the edges of sleep, or sleep itself. But with Mind Control training, useful possibilities begin to multiply with no end in sight. As Harry McKnight, Associate Director of Silva Mind Control, wrote, “The Alpha dimension has a complete set of sensing faculties, like the Beta.” In other words, we can do different things in Alpha than we can do in Beta.
This is a key concept in Mind Control. Once you become acquainted with these sensing faculties and learn to use them, you will be using more of your mind in a special manner. You will actually operate psychically whenever you want to, tapping in on Higher Intelligence.
Most people seek out Mind Control as a way to relax, to end insomnia, to find relief from headaches, or to learn to do things that cost great efforts of will, such as stopping smoking, losing weight, improving memory, studying more effectively. This is what most of them come for; they learn much, much more.
They learn that the five senses—touching, tasting, smelling, hearing, and seeing—are only a part of the senses they were born with. There are others, call them powers or senses, once known only to a gifted few and to mystics who developed them over lifetimes removed from the active world. The mission of Mind Control is to train us to awaken these powers.
What this awakening can mean was well put by Mademoiselle’s beauty editor, Nadine Bertin, in the March 1972 issue:
“The drug culture can have its mind-expanding pills, powders and shots. I’ll take mine straight. Mind Control does expand your mind. It teaches you HOW to expand it. It is aptly named because, unlike drugs or hypnosis, you are in control. Mind expansion, self-knowledge and helping others through Mind Control are only limited by your own limitations. ANYTHING is possible. You hear about it happening to others. And suddenly, you see it happening to you.”
