The Silva Mind Control Method

The revolutionary program that teaches you how to use meditation and visualization to change your life.

First published in 1978, The Silva Mind Control Method has helped millions of people create better, happier, and more successful lives. Based on the extraordinary course pioneered by Jose Silva in the 1960s, this accessible guidebook uses meditation and visualization to help you alleviate stress, overcome bad habits and emotional insecurity, increase creativity, develop concentration, harness your dreams, and deepen your relationships. Featuring transformative advice and fascinating case studies, this revolutionary book teaches you to use your mind at a deeper and more effective level and reveal its extraordinary power.

Auteur
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.

Échantillon de lecture

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 thi