SILVA
Mistaken at times as ‘silver’ or ‘Sylvia’, the name of the course is derived from the man who founded and developed SILVA, the method.
Jose Silva was born nearly 80 years ago, in southern Texas, in a small town called Laredo, near the border of Mexico. An American of Mexican ancestry, he was four when his father died, leaving him to help care for two younger brothers and a sister. Jose became a newsboy at four and a shoeshine boy at six and was already gathering experiences that would serve him well for the rest of his life. He lived with an uncle, who helped him keep the files of separate lists of customers who wanted newspapers or shoeshines or both, to enable him to anticipate needs and thus to render better service. As early as then Jose was learning to use the logical left side of the brain for record keeping activities as well as the creative and intuitive right side to come up with more innovative ideas for earning more money and serving his customers better. As he grew older, he took on more business activities such as distributing advertising circulars of grocery stores, office cleaning and window washing, lawn mowing and gardening, chauffeuring wealthy land ladies on their collection. He also helped build a hamburger stand which became the Brown Derby, one of the biggest and best-known restaurants in Laredo. Earning more than his uncle did, he became the main provide of the family. He never had a single year of formal education.
When word of Silva’s effective training spread, his neighbors started volunteering their children for him to train. He was soon working with hundreds of children. His research sparked his renewed interest in parapsychology and led to an invitation to lecture to members of the Avea Arte Association in Amarillo, Texas. That was in 1966. It was Silva’s first time to discourse in public, and on his method. The date marked the official birth of the Silva Mind Control Method. Silva was then 53 years old. At an age when most thought of retiring, he had begun a new career.
Today, the Silva Mind Control Method has been propagated in some 100 countries all over the world, translated into 29 languages, and has benefited over ten million people.
The techniques have been proven and tested not only in 22 years of research and experimentation but also in 27 years of sharing with millions of practitioners the world over, of different races, cultures and creeds. And the bottom line is “Silva works!” It works for everybody with no exception. The only prerequisite is that people who attend “have a mind” and want to use it. Having a mind certainly doesn’t guarantee that one automatically uses it correctly and effectively.
METHOD
The Silva Method refers to a system, a scientific step-by-step process of developing and using the mind effectively.
Silva Method is not a religion, and it does not go against any religion. Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Buddhists, Baptists and people of other denominations have taken the training and no one has thought the learnings to be contrary to their creeds or faiths. Interestingly enough, many have said thay they have been spiritually deepened by the experience. They appreciate and value their relationship with their Creator more after the course and thus pray more fervently. They have become more devout.
Silva is not a cult. Nor does it worship any deity or revolve around a single personality. It is not necessary to know the details of Jose Silva’s life, for example, to lead a better life. It is only necessary to use the techniques under given conditions to achieve the desired results. The is no blind
allegiance to personal promulgations nor a rigid adherence to group norms or rituals. There is no obvious or subtle intent to control the members. Furthermore, there is no imposition of tithing or obligatory reciprocation of favors.
Silva does not dwell in the occult. It does not deal with black magic of witchcraft and other fraudulent practices commonly associated with occultism. It does, however, demystify the understanding of the functioning of the human brain and the mind. An estimated eighty-five percent of everything we know about the human brain and mind today came from only the last twenty to thirty years of research. Prior to that, it was ensconced in ignorance or mysticism. What people didn’t know or understand, they attributed to supernatural or paranormal forces. To the caveman, lighting was a supernatural phenomenon. And modern day humans would have regarded it the same way if there had been no knowledge to liberate and enlighten him.
The Silva method is admittedly hypnosis-like but it is definitely not hypnosis. In hypnosis, the subject is at the complete mercy of the hypnotherapist while in Silva Mind Control, the subject retains full control and complete dominion over his sensory faculties.
MIND
In language, the mind is often interchanged with the brain. However, the two are not synonymous. The mind is likewise equated with the psyche or behavior, yet is it neither.
The mind is referred to as a life force – the life force that enters a person at the time of conception and the same life force that leaves him at the time of death.
The mind is best described by its functions in processing information. It is awareness, reflection, focus of attention It is also thinking, imagining, and perceiving. It is the master sense, the sensor of the intelligence.
Imagine a submarine. It has the adaptability to travel in and out of water. To gather information when partially submerged, it uses its periscope which is above the water and which feeds the input into the processing center. To derive data when completely submerged, the submarine utilizes sonar equipment for navigating a course.
The brain is similar to the submarine. It has the periscopic five physical senses to pick up information from the outside environment. For information at deeper levels, sonar-equivalent equipment are resorted to for picking up information beneath the surface.
Of what use are the equipment if there is no person desiring the information? The intelligence is the information seeker that tunes into its sensory channels, the periscopic five senses or the sonar type instrument to search out bits of information above or beneath the surface to solve particular problems. The mind is the sensor of the intelligence.
Why study the mind at all?
To most people, the mind is intangible and too abstract to grasp. Not a few consider the study of the mind as an intellectual exercise in futility indulged by scholars and academicians. On the contrary, it is a fundamental, factual and practical reality that children as young as six years old are exposed to and taught.
Man is characterized by MIND/BODY or BODY/MIND. It is not right to say mind and body as if these were two separate, distinct entities. They are one – integrated and whole. The body does not move without the direction, regulation, and control of the mind. It is a mere extension of what the mind thinks and feels.
If you will pause from reading this page and look around you, you will note that the book you are holding, the chair you are sitting on, the objects and furnishings you observe in your surrounding are made by people – first as ideas. Before any physical thing came to be, it was first conceived in the mental realm.
It is written in Genesis: “In the beginning, God created heaven and earth. The earth was without form, and void: darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”
If we think about the creation, we will realize that it is actually a mental act – an idea, a concept made manifest. The physical universe is evidence of that which has already taken place in the act of creation—in the mind. The world we live in is truly a mental world.
Everything we see around us, our buildings, bridges and roads, airplanes, ships and spacecraft, procedures and laws, were all ideas brought into being through the process of creative visualization. That there appears to be an orderly arrangement of things in the universe attests to an intellect, a primary source, that permeates every atom, every aspect of life in the
infinite universe. Everything in some respect is a product or creation of that universal mind. There is no physical reality unless there is first a mental reality. The mind is the fundamental dimension in which everything first takes form before it is manifested in the physical world.
CONTROL
The words MIND CONTROL sound sinister. They are erroneously associated with brainwashing, much like what people think the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the United States or the communists to do their enemies. Or others may have the misconception that they can learn to control other people’s minds, such as their spouses’, to deter them from destructive vices. Nothing is farther from the truth. It is challenging enough to control our own mind without having to think about and be bothered with the control of other people’s minds.
Mind control means learning to control our own mind to control our own body and control our own life. Control starts with our thoughts which influence our feelings and affect our actions.
The primary law in the universe is that of control…mind control. The amount of mental health we enjoy is directly proportional to the degree of control we feel we have. When we experience mental well-being, which means we feel harmonious and good about ourselves, we are in control of our lives. When we feel low and depressed and suffer from disharmony, we inevitably have lost control of ourselves.
“I’ve got lots of problems.”
Many complain. I’ve got problems. You’ve got problems. Everyone’s got problems. If people have no problems, they may as well be dead. For as long as we are alive, there are and will be problems. That’s what living life is all about, coping and solving, learning and being.
When people feel a loss of control over themselves and their destiny and just hope that somehow things will turn out right for them, they are living according to the law of accident. They regard themselves as helpless victims of circumstances in which they have little or no control over the developments. Consequently, they wallow in negativity, misery, depression and unhappiness. Chance, accident and predestined fate are not responsible for the things that happen. They are mere unexplained or incomprehensible causes.
