#123: Jose Silva's Method

In the early 40s, a guy by the name of José Silva, developed an interest in psychology to see if it could help him increase his children's IQ. He had ten children and like any parent he wanted them to do well.

As an electrician, he knew that if a wire has more resistance less electricity flows through it but if you reduce its resistance, more electricity can flow through it. 

Jose wondered if the same principle would apply to the brain.

What if he could reduce the resistance in the brain, can the brain operate more efficiently?

It was the early 60s, and scientists had come up with the theory that there were four levels of brain frequency - beta, the waking state; alpha the more relaxed or slightly sleepy state, theta when dreams and vivid imagery occur and delta the slowest brain wave frequency when healing and regeneration occur.

Jose wondered whether moving into the alpha or theta level was the way of reducing that resistance.

He started experimenting with his daughter.

He developed a script to take his daughter to a relaxed state. His script was something like guided meditation except that back in the 60s, the word guided meditation didn’t exist.

So Jose Silva, would put his daughter into a guided meditation and then read her important elements from her school textbooks. He found that she could remember better when she was in a slightly relaxed level of mind. He would ask her questions and she could even recall better.

Then something curious happened.

His daughter would answer him as he was formulating a question in his mind. She somehow knew the question he was going to ask her, even before he could verbalize it.

Jose couldn’t figure out how his daughter was able to read his mind. So he wrote to JB Rhine, of Duke University. JB Rhine was the famous doctor who pioneered research in extrasensory perception and formed parapsychology as a branch of psychology.

Jose told JB Ryan that he thought he figured out a way to train children to be intuitive. JB Ryan dismissed it. He said Jose’s daughter was probably intuitive, to begin with. 

Jose Silva disagreed. So he then trained all the kids to be intuitive.

Then he trained all the neighbor’s kids. The neighbor got fascinated. So they asked Jose if he can teach them as well. So Jose started teaching little classes in Laredo, Texas. 

Jose found that it wasn’t just intuition that went up with his technique but people’s pain disappeared and their happiness levels went up. One person had migraines for a long time and after learning from Jose Silva his migraine disappeared. He wrote about it in the local newspaper and his next class was completely swamped. 

The Silva Method was born.

A path to reducing mental resistance.

Silva method spread across America through 70s and 80s. It was being used by the Chicago White Sox, and famous celebrities of the time, like opera singer Margarita Piazza. The New York Times and The Washington Post featured articles on the Silva Method. Jose Silva wrote a book, The Silva Mind Control Method which sold well over a million copies.

Silva Method ended up graduating some 10 million students over three to four decades.

But the story doesn’t end there.

There was a point in Jose’s research when he almost gave it up.

Jose Silva was finding his work very fulfilling but it wasn’t making him any money. To feed his large family, he knew he had to give it up and go back to running his electrical business.

One night, as he tells in his biography, he grew so frustrated that he flung his psychology book across the room and decided to go to sleep, promising himself that he would never dabble in this again because he needed to earn a living.

That night he had a weird dream. He saw a figure of Mother Mary who gave him a four-digit number. He wondered, what is this four-digit number. His first thought was that it must be the license plate number of a car, and he needed to meet the person who owns that car. So Jose Silva decided to keep his mind open for any car with that four-digit number.

Now, as it happened, he was going to his radio repair business and a friend came to him and said, “Jose, I’m about to swing across the border to Mexico to pick up some goods. You want to come with me?” Jose said, “Sure.” It was not a busy day and Jose saw no harm in accompanying his friend across the border.

So they got into the car and drove across the border to Mexico. And as they were driving across the border to Mexico, Jose told his friend about the four-digit number and the dream.

They went to a shop to buy goods in Mexico. And as Jose was picking up his goods, his friend called him over and his friend said, “Jose, look, they’re selling a lottery ticket here. Isn’t this the number that came in your dream?” And it was.

Jose bought that lottery ticket, and he ended up winning $10,000. That money allowed him to keep doing his research.

Jose wrote, look at the weirdness that happened. It wasn’t just a dream. His mind didn’t just give him a number, it showed him an image to reinforce that this was coming from a higher power. It then caused synchronicity to happen when a friend came to invite him to Mexico because the winning lottery number wasn’t on the US side. It was on the Mexican side. Another coincidence happened when his friend happened to see the lottery number. Jose kept on thinking that it was a car license plate number.

All of these strung together, it was like a ripple of reality to give him the cash infusion needed to take the Silva method forward. It was then he realized he was on to something.

I feel a similar string of coincidences is happening with my writing too. Within this month, I discovered Dean Wesley Smith’s single draft and cyclic writing method, Robert A. Heinlein’s 6 business rules, and Dan Manning’s storytelling techniques. If that wasn’t enough, Silva Method appeared in my feeds while watching a YouTube video that told me about Jose Silva’s story that I just shared with you.

I am now learning the Silva Method to bring down resistance in my mind.

I am no stranger to meditation or visualization. But Silva's method is different. It is the most structured meditation process I have ever learned. It is not about sitting down, calming your mind, and watching your breath. Rather it is about actively using your brain to tap into inspiration.

It has only been four days but I am already less stressed and more creative. Just the other day, I used five-minute meditation to work on a scene in the novel I am writing. I visualized the scene and watched it unfold in front of my eyes.

Something that would have taken me hours to write, came to me, fully formed, within minutes. That is the beauty of tapping into the creative realm.

It is just the early days, I will tell you more about it program as I experience it in the coming days.

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Can you believe whom I found on Substack?

Drumroll!!!!

Margaret Atwood!

Yes, you read it right. She started writing on Substack on 23 November 2022 and already has received hundreds of likes on her posts.

If you want to subscribe to her newsletter, here is the link.

That’s all from me this week.

Neera Mahajan

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