The Silva Method has impacted on people’s lives in a colos­sal, immea­sur­able way. One key thing we hope this blog will cover in depth is real life sto­ries of peo­ple wak­en­ing up to the virtues of the Silva Method and the incred­i­ble and uplift­ing expe­ri­ences they have encountered.

This great story fol­lows one per­sons dis­cov­ery of the Silva Method from it being prac­ticed in India. As you know the teach­ings of Jose Silva are a world­wide phe­nom­e­non and fea­ture in over 100 countries.

Arund­hati tells the story of her first Silva Method sem­i­nar and the delight of her dis­cov­ery is clearly evident.

Intu­ition and ESP can now take a back­seat. The Silva Method promises all that and more with a voli­tional con­trol of the mind

by Arund­hati Mitra

 “Most peo­ple go through life using only a small frac­tion of their brains,” says Bimol Rak­shit, head of the Indian chap­ter of the Silva Method of Mind Con­trol. Pre­dictably, this method teaches you how to use more of the mind-for increas­ing mem­ory, hon­ing men­tal skills or even heal­ing and spir­i­tual growth.

When I first met Rak­shit, I had just read The Silva Method of Mind Con­trol by Jose Silva and Philip Miele. The book makes inter­est­ing claims about the brain’s capac­ity and the ener­gies emit­ted by it. Mea­sured by an elec­troen­cephalo­graph (EEG) in cycles per sec­ond (cps), it is this energy that deter­mines our state of wake­ful­ness or sleep.

There are four lev­els of this energy emis­sion: between 14 to 21 cps is beta level, from 7 to 14 is alpha, 4 to 7 is theta and less than 4 cps is delta. Sci­en­tists claim that of the four lev­els, we can con­sciously expe­ri­ence only the beta level because it is the only one in which we are awake. The alpha level is the sub­con­scious or, as the Silva peo­ple say, the inner con­scious level. The state just after falling asleep or just before wak­ing up is the alpha state. Theta and delta are realms of the uncon­scious and deep sleep.

So far, so good. But then the Silva Method goes on to claim that it’s pos­si­ble to stay awake at alpha and the deeper lev­els as well! Jose Silva, who cre­ated this method, explains in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, I Have A Hunch, how he once con­sciously entered and stayed in the alpha state at the Uni­ver­sity of Texas, San Anto­nio. All the while, he solved math­e­mat­i­cal prob­lems even as the EEG ver­i­fied he was in alpha.

This imme­di­ately opens up many inter­est­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties. The right hemi­sphere of the brain, the seat of cre­ativ­ity and intu­ition, is believed to become active mostly at the lower lev­els. The Silva Method teaches you how to con­sciously go to alpha and use more of the brain’s right side, which often makes the cru­cial dif­fer­ence between great­ness and genius. There were a thou­sand ques­tions on my mind. But to all of them, Rak­shit returned one answer: “Do the course and you’ll know for yourself.”

With a mix­ture of excite­ment, appre­hen­sion and incredulity, I approached Hotel Le Meri­dien in New Delhi on a cold gray morn­ing for the two-and-half-day course. Gen­er­ally, Rak­shit con­ducts a course when­ever there are suf­fi­cient num­bers of par­tic­i­pants. In India, there are just three other instructors—Raka Rak­shit, Dr Kalpana Desai and Jayesh Patel. Some oth­ers are under training.

The course started by ‘going to level’ together. This meant con­sciously low­er­ing the brain’s energy from beta to alpha level. Lights were dimmed. We closed our eyes, took a deep breath and began the jour­ney into our mind.

It was a curi­ous sen­sa­tion. I was aware of the peo­ple around me, but it seemed they didn’t phys­i­cally exist. My head felt heavy. I could dimly hear Rak­shit telling us we were now in alpha level. In the back­ground was play­ing a tape that sounded like a mov­ing train.
Day two was spent on mem­ory con­trol and prob­lem solv­ing. Most of these exer­cises involved strong visualization.

We were asked to cre­ate a men­tal screen and project var­i­ous objects on it. These were then exam­ined minutely, some­times chang­ing their shapes and color, and feel­ing their tex­ture, odor and taste. I could actu­ally smell the var­nish of a newly pol­ished chair and taste a sug­ary sweet apple-vivid details to which I had paid no atten­tion in my daily life.

Rak­shit says: “No sci­en­tist has been able to invent a com­puter like the human mind. From the time a per­son is born, he records every­thing that he sees, hears, smells or tastes. The key lies in being able to tap the mem­ory at will.” This is what mind con­trol is all about. Accord­ing to Silva, a per­son can do this best when he is in alpha level.

An impor­tant exer­cise in the course involved set­ting and meet­ing tar­gets. “Go to level every­day and tell your­self that within a set time you will meet your tar­get,” Rak­shit announced. Many in the room claimed this had worked for them. A. Sawh­ney, an Indian busi­ness­man and one of the many grad­u­ates repeat­ing the course, said he had first done the course 20 years ago. He used to smoke heav­ily then, he said, a habit that Silva helped him kick.

The Silva book is replete with exam­ples of peo­ple who have been able to cure headaches, migraine and insom­nia, lose weight or get pro­mo­tions. One of the first-timers, Dev Ashish, told the remark­able story of his aunt who had been diag­nosed with a tumor—which later dis­solved by reg­u­lar prac­tice of the Silva method!

The course also included a dream con­trol exer­cise. Rak­shit pointed out that dreams are com­mu­ni­ca­tions from the sub­con­scious and have unique sym­bolic sig­nif­i­cance. He asked us to go to level, pro­gram our­selves to remem­ber a dream and write it down in the morn­ing. The Silva Method claims that by inter­pret­ing our dreams, we can explore our inner con­scious­ness and solve prob­lems. This involves going to level, stat­ing the prob­lem and ask­ing for a solution.

That’s about as far as the first work­shop goes. For a deeper under­stand­ing of the Silva Method, there are two advanced courses—the Ultra Sem­i­nar, con­ducted once in three years by instruc­tors cho­sen by Jose Silva, and the 12-day Ulti­mate Sem­i­nar, which Silva him­self con­ducts at his Psy­chori­en­tol­ogy Insti­tute in Laredo, Texas, head­quar­ters of the Silva orga­ni­za­tion. For both, you have to be a Silva grad­u­ate. The Laredo cen­ter also con­ducts reg­u­lar research to keep improv­ing the Silva Method. The Silva course mate­r­ial has been suc­cess­fully trans­lated into 29 lan­guages across 106 countries.

Accord­ing to Silva, the intu­itive fac­ul­ties devel­oped through his method are not extrasen­sory but effec­tive sen­sory per­cep­tions. The chap­ter on ESP in The Silva Method of Mind Con­trol explains the sub­sti­tu­tion thus: “Extrasen­sory means out­side… our sen­sory appa­ra­tus. This seems to deny the exis­tence of a sen­sory appa­ra­tus other than the five senses, though obvi­ously one exists, since we do sense infor­ma­tion with­out the use of them.” Silva teaches an indi­vid­ual to project his aware­ness to acquire knowl­edge with­out either using the five senses or los­ing con­trol, as hap­pens with intuition.

Dur­ing the last ses­sion of the sec­ond day, Rak­shit held a live demon­stra­tion to explain how this is done. He called a first-timer to the podium and asked her to go to level. Another girl, Pooja, wrote down her mother’s name, age and address on a piece of paper and handed it to Rak­shit. Also men­tioned on the paper were a few ail­ments her mother was suf­fer­ing from.

Rak­shit read all the infor­ma­tion, except the ail­ments bit, aloud to the per­son at level and asked her to visu­al­ize Pooja’s mother. He asked her to exam­ine the visu­al­ized body minutely and tell him wher­ever she felt some­thing was wrong. The answers were part accurate.

More con­vinc­ing was Anoop Murari, a grad­u­ate repeat­ing the course. He asked Pooja if her mother had prob­lems with her arms. A stunned Pooja admit­ted that her mother’s arms some­times got paralyzed—a prob­lem not men­tioned on the paper. Appar­ently, Murari had also gone to level while study­ing the case. “When I visu­al­ized the woman,” he explained, “I sud­denly saw she had no arms.”

Dur­ing the course, first-timers are paired with grad­u­ates to do case stud­ies. In our case, both mem­bers of the team were asked to prac­tice by turns as the psy­chic (the per­son at level try­ing to guess the ail­ments) and the ori­en­tol­o­gist, sup­ply­ing rel­e­vant data to the psy­chic. Rak­shit stressed the impor­tance of fol­low­ing our instincts. “The moment you feel some­thing is wrong with some part of the body, no mat­ter how insignif­i­cant, voice it,” he said.

This bit of advice proved invalu­able when I was the psy­chic. Of the four cases I stud­ied, the first two were my biggest suc­cesses. I could vividly visu­al­ize both peo­ple and was right on every count. Once, the moment I was given the rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion, I visu­al­ized a crip­ple walk­ing with a stick. It turned out that the con­cerned person’s legs were deformed.
In the ulti­mate analy­sis, it’s a bit dif­fi­cult to draw con­clu­sions. The human mind is still uncharted ter­ri­tory. It is sug­gestible, it can be hyp­no­tized. Is that the secret of Silva? Maybe. Though, unlike hyp­no­tism where a per­son is led to do some­thing, Silva gives you the capac­ity to act voli­tion­ally. In any case, Silva’s mind con­trol has def­i­nitely exploded some myths about the mind and opened up a future where mind truly rules over matter.

Source

Liked this story? you should read about How Sci­ence Came to Rec­og­nize Jose Silva. The Silva Method can be a great dis­cov­ery in your life just like t was for Arundhati.