The Silva Method of Mind Control

About thirty years ago I went through a phase where I read all these wonderfully odd little books meant to change your life and your worldview.  Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Dianetics, books on Alexander Technique and Rolfing, the Feldenkrais Method, Super Learning, and The Silva Method of Mind Control.  All of these things promise the impossible, but wrap it up in a nice semi-logical sounding package.  I recently re-read The Silva Method of Mind Control.

Silva starts off with advising that everyone should meditate, morning and night and add the Émile Coué affirmation Everyday, in Every way, I’m getting better and better.  John Lennon liked this affirmation so much that he included it in the lyrics of Beautiful Boy on Double Fantasy.  So far, so good.  Meditation has a very long history and I had been meditating for years by the time I picked up the mind control book.

Then he veers off into time travel, thought projection, remote healing, changing reality, and precognition.  I still love the idea that meditation can alter the fabric of reality, and it has always had the effect of making me feel a lot more positive about life.  But like Dianetics, the real purpose of The Silva Method of Mind Control book seems to be to get you to go and take a class-which, of course, costs a lot more than a paperback.

There are only a handful of techniques here, Meditation, Creating and Using a Mental Screen, Improving the Future, Using Dreams, Healing the Sick, and Healing Yourself are the big ones that spring to mind.  One of the side effects is Total Recall using the Three Finger Method, which is a post hypnotic suggestion that is designed to bring you back to that level of mind where you know and recall everything you have ever experienced.  A neat trick, since recent studies have shown that we don’t recall everything and that our brains are more like hard disks which erase old information and write new information constantly.

Still, it is fun to read the Lesson Chapters and follow along.  I used it to get out of Jury Duty the other day, or maybe that was more a Law of Attraction kind of thing.  Changing the future involves seeing an event as it is and then replacing that event with one which is better.  The new event has to be possible and likely to occur and you have to expect it to occur.  While I was sitting around the Courthouse for four hours, I worked a little Mind Control magic for me and the other couple of hundred people who got to go home.

José Silva likes to coat his pseudoscience with real science-so that his alteration of reality sounds reasonable, likely, and in line with empirical science.  He talks about the four main levels of consciousness that the brain tends to be in at any given time.  Alpha-relaxed, Beta-alert, Delta-deep sleep, and Theta-drowsiness.  He doesn’t mention Gamma brain waves that I recall.  The whole point of Mind Control is to be awake in deeper and deeper levels of awareness.

Like a lot of New Agers, he works on the premise that Reality is a shared dream-and we all have the ability to shape that dream if we just reach the correct level.  No one can explain the Matrix to you, you have to experience it for yourself.

If The Silva Method of Mind Control was nothing but the exercises, it would be a pretty amazing little book. Unfortonately about half the book is taken up with the authors patting themselves on the back with stories about how great the Silva Method is and how YOU need to find a class to take your ESP powers to the next level.  It is an older book and there is a bit of talk about ExtraSensory Perception-which gives the whole thing a nice 1960s kind of vibe.

As with so many self help books that advise the development and use of unusual skills-the authors advise that you spend several hours everyday working on your Mind Control abilities, talking to your Mental Counselors, using your Mental Screen, and studying your dreams.  In short, to get the most out of Mind Control you have to turn your entire life over to using the new skills.

José Silva does say that if you do nothing but Meditate daily your life will be better.  I can’t argue with that.  And, once in while, things do seem to go my Mind Control way.  For me the problem has always been the big payoff, I’m just not that impressed with getting better parking spaces.  Though the whole jury duty thing was kind of cool.

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