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HALL OF FAME:

José Silva

by Annalisa & Giampiero Cara

Here's the portrait of a pioneer in the study of human mind's extraordinary potential. His revolutionary research developed into Silva Mind Control, an effective method for personal growth, still very popular all over the world today, after his inventor's death.

"Is it possible, using hypnosis or similar techniques, to improve people's learning ability, and even raise their I.Q.?"

This is the question that, in 1944, spurred the research of a man who was about to revolutionize parapsychological studies and the lives of many people, becoming an important herald of the New Age.

We're talking about the late José Silva, born 11 August 1914 in Laredo, Texas, from a family of Mexican origins. The story of his life, before his death a couple of years ago, proves how no external circumstances, however extreme, can stop a man who has something important to achieve.

Discovering the power of the mind

After his father's death in 1918 (when he was only four years old), José soon became the family breadwinner, shining shoes, selling newspapers and doing odd jobs. He didn't go to school -- in fact, he never entered a classroom in his life, except as a teacher -- but when he came home at night, he watched his younger brother and sister do their homework, and they helped him learn to read and write.

To improve his financial situation, he took a correspondence course to learn how to repair radios. In a few years his repair business became one of the busiest in town, allowing him to marry, to pay for his brothers' further education, and to finance twenty years of research in a field where no grants were available at the time. He researched on the most complicated of all electric appliances: the human brain.

At the time -- we were in the Forties -- it was believed that a person's I.Q. was an innate quality. But José had a different idea, and wanted to prove it. Therefore, he started a series of experiments finalized to improve his eleven children's memory and learning skills.

He used hypnosis at first, but then he dropped it, because it didn't allow independent thought on the subject's part. So he devised some mental training exercises designed to quiet the brain yet keep it more independently alert than in hypnosis, in order to improve memory combined with understanding and hence reach higher I.Q. scores.

By practicing those exercises, his children began not only to get better grades, as José intended, but also, unexpectedly, to develop their intuitive faculties to the point of manifesting extra-sensorial perceptions (ESP).

One day, in 1953, José began questioning his daughter about her studies, after relaxing her mind and body through a technique that would become essential to the Silva Mind Control Method. As she answered each question, he formed the next in his mind. But suddenly she began answering questions even before her father expressed them verbally. She was reading his mind!

To demonstrate the validity of his extraordinary experiments to the public, over the next ten years Silva trained 39 Laredo children, obtaining even better results with his ever improving techniques. All the 39 children became clairvoyant, which meant that he had created the first method in history that could train anyone to develop ESP.

The Silva Mind Control Method

Within another three years, Silva developed the course of training that is now standard. He then continued to perfect his method alone until 1966, when a group of people from Amarillo, Texas, asked him to teach them the method. It was the first public Silva Mind Control Method course.

For two years, José Silva was the only instructor, but in 1969 he began training other instructors, and the Method began spreading in the US and in other nations. As of today, it has been translated in 18 languages and taught in more than a hundred nations, where more than 7 million people practice it.

Of course, given its popularity, there are several documented studies on the effectiveness of the Silva Mind Control Method, which has been tested by prominent scientists and psychologists. Its principles are, in fact, scientific -- more than philosophical and spiritual -- in nature.

Scientists know that the brain emits electric waves that can be measured by the electroencephalogram (EEG). These waves are related to the mental states and activities of each individual. When we are in the waking state and our senses are activated, the brain produces mostly Beta waves, while the Alpha, Theta and Delta waves are mainly associated with increasingly deep sleeping states, which correspond to increasingly low frequencies -- from about 20 cycles per second in Beta level to 0,5 CPS in Delta.

The Silva Method teaches how to control the brain's electrical activity with relaxation and meditation, so that you can be conscious and mentally active when Alpha waves -- commonly associated with the semiconsciousness of drowsiness -- are dominant. That is important because Alpha waves promote mind-body healing, allow to regain energies more easily and to boost "normal" faculties like memory, intuition, creativity and imagination, as well as less "normal" ones, like ESP and distant healing powers.

All these things are possible because, at the Alpha level, we hover between the "objective", physical world -- controlled by our brain's left hemisphere, which is logical and rational -- and the subjective, causal and creative world, corresponding to our right hemisphere. This hemisphere represents our creative nature, which is mainly unconscious in most of us because, since childhood, we were taught to repress it, instead of expressing it.

By controlling the Alpha state consciously, and practicing creative visualization techniques while we are in it, we can then use both our brain hemispheres, in order to bring to our conscious attention a power that normally we use only at the unconscious level. In other words, the Silva Mind Control Method allows us to use our unconscious consciously.

As we all know, most of our unconscious conditioning, which greatly influences our current behaviour, was absorbed during childhood.

That's very important, in relation to the Silva Method, because until we are about seven years old, our brain functions mostly at the Delta and Theta levels, and than settles at the Alfa level until we are 14. This means that, if we can learn again to "function" consciously at levels deeper than Beta, we can change our old conditioning and insert "new instructions" at the same level in which the old ones were originally recorded.

This way, it would be possible not only to re-discover our "inner child", but also to reassure him, helping him become conscious of a long-denied power.

Copyright © 2000 Annalisa & Giampiero Cara