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Jose Silva was born
August 11,1914, in Laredo, Texas. When he was four , his father died. His mother
soon remarried, and he, his older sister, and younger brother moved in with
their grandmother. Two years later he became the family breadwinner, selling
newspapers, shining shoes, and doing odd jobs. In the evenings he watched his
sister and brother do their homework, and they helped him learn to read and
write. He has never gone to school, except to teach.
Jose’s rise from poverty began one day when he was waiting his turn
in a barbershop. He reached for some thing to read. What he picked up was a
lesson from a correspondence course on how to repair radios. Jose asked to
borrow it, but the barber would only rent it, and that on condition that Jose
complete the examinations in the back in the barber’s name. Each week Jose
paid a dollar, read the lesson, and completed the examination.
Soon a diploma hung in the barbershop, while across town Jose, at the
age of fifteen, began to repair radios. As the years passed, his repair business
became one of the largest in the area, providing money for the education of his
brother and sister, the wherewithal for him to marry, plus eventually some
half-million dollars to nance the twenty years of research that led to Mind
control.
Another man with diplomas, these more conscientiously earned than the
barber’s, inadvertently sparked this research. The man was a psychiatrist
whose job it was to ask questions of men being inducted into the Signal Corps
during World war II.
“Do you wet your bed?” Jose was dumbfounded.
“Do you like women?” Jose, the father of three, and destined one
day to be the father of ten, was appalled. Surely, he thought, the man knew more
about the human mind than the barber knew about radios. Why such stupid
questions?
It was this perplexing moment that started Jose on an odyssey of
scientific research that led to his becoming – without diplomas or
certificates – one of the most creative scholars of his age. Through their writings,
Freud, Jung, and Adler became his
early teachers.
The stupid question took on deeper meanings, and soon Jose was ready to
ask a question of his own: is it possible, using hypnosis, to improve a person’s
learning ability – in fact, raise his I.Q.? In those days I.Q. was believed to
be something we were born with, but Jose was not so sure.
The question had to wait while he studied advanced electronics to
become an instructor in the Signal Corps. When he was discharged, with savings
gone and $200 in his pocket, he began slowly to rebuild his business. At the
same time he took a half – time teaching job at Laredo Junior College, where
he supervised three other teachers and was charged with creating the school’s
electronics laboratories.
Five years later, with television on the scene, his repair business
began to flourish and Jose called a halt to his teaching career. His business
once again became the largest in town. His workdays ended about
nine each night. He would have dinner, help put the children to bed, and when
the house was quiet, study for about three hours. His studies led him further
into hypnosis.
What he learned about hypnosis, plus what he knew about electronics,
plus some F’s on his children’s report cards brought him back to the
question he had raised earlier – can learning ability, the I.Q., be improved
through some kind of mental training?
Jose already knew that the mind generates electricity – he had read
about experiments that revealed the Alpha rhythm early in this century. And he
knew from his work in electronics that the ideal circuit is the one with the
least resistance, or impedance, because it makes the greatest use of its
electrical energy. Would the brain work more effectively too if its impedance
were lowered? And can its impedance be lowered?
Jose began using hypnosis to quiet the minds of his children and he
discovered what to many appeared to be a paradox: He found that the brain was
more energetic when it was less active. At lower frequencies the brain received
and stored more information. The crucial problem was to keep the mind alert at
these frequencies, which are associated more with daydreaming and sleep than
with practical activity.
Hypnosis permitted the receptivity Jose was looking for, but not the
kind of independent thought that leads to reasoning things out so they can be
understood. Having a head full of remembered facts is not enough; insight and
understanding are necessary, too.
Jose soon abandoned hypnosis and began experimenting with mental
training exercises to quiet the brain yet keep it more independently alert than
in hypnosis. This, he reasoned, would lead to improved memory combined with
understanding and hence to higher I.Q. scores.
The exercises from which Mind Control evolved called for relaxed
concentration and vivid mental visualization as ways of reaching lower levels.
Once reached, these levels proved more effective than Beta in learning. The
proof was in his children’s sharply improved grades over a three year period
while he continued to improve his techniques.
Jose had now scored a first – a very significant one, which other
research, principally biofeedback, has since confirmed. He was the first person
to prove that we can learn to function with awareness at the Alpha and Theta
frequencies of the brain.
Another first, an equally astonishing one, was soon to come.
One evening Jose’s daughter had gone to her “level” (to use today’s
Mind Control terminology), and Jose was questioning her about her studies. As
she answered each question, he framed the next in his mind. This was the usual
procedure, and so far the session was no different from hundreds that had gone
before. Suddenly, quietly, the routine was momentously changed. She answered a
question her father had not yet not yet asked. Then another. And another. She
was reading his mind!
This was in 1953 when ESP
was becoming a respectable subject for scientific inquiry, largely
through the published work of Dr. J.B. Rhine of Duke University. Jose wrote to
Dr. Rhine to report that he had trained his daughter to practice ESP and
received a disappointing answer. Dr. Rhine hinted that the girl might have been
psychic to begin with. Without tests of the girl before the training, there was
no way to tell.
Meanwhile, Jose’s neighbors noticed that his children’s school work
had remarkably improved. At the beginning of his experiments they had been wary
of his probings into the unknown, an unknown perhaps protected by forces that
were best not tampered with. How ever, the successes of a man working with his
own children could not be ignored. Would Jose train their children too?
After the letter from Dr. Rhine, this was just what Jose needed. If
what he had accomplished with one child could be accomplished with others, he
would have chalked up the kind of repeatable experiments that are basic to the
scientific method.
Over the next ten years he trained 39 Laredo children, with even better
results because he improved his techniques a little with each child. Thus
another first was scored: He
had developed the first method in history that can train anyone to use ESP, and
he had thirty – nine repeatable experiments to prove it. Now to perfect the
method.
Within another three years, Jose developed the course of training which
is now standard. It takes only
40 to 48 hours
and is as effective with adults as with children. So far it has been validated
by some 500,000 “experiments,”
a measure of repeatability that no open-minded scientist can ignore.
These long years of research were financed by Jose’s growing
electronics business. No university or foundation or government grants were
available for so far-out a field of research. Today the Mind Control
organization is a thriving family business, with its profits going largely to
more research and to support its accelerating growth. There are Mind Control
lecturers or centers in all fifty states and in thirty-four foreign nations.
With all this success, Jose has not become a celebrity, nor a guru or
spiritual leader with followers or disciples. He is a plain man of simple ways,
who speaks with here soft, almost lost accent of a Mexican-American. He is a
powerfully built, stocky man with a kindly face that creases easily into a
smile.
Anyone who asks Jose what success has meant to him will be answered
with a flood of success stories. A few examples:
A woman wrote to the Boston Herald American begging for some way to
help her husband, who was tormented by migraine headaches. The newspaper printed
her letter, then another letter the next day from someone else, also pleading
for a way to control such headaches./
A physician read these letters and wrote that she had had migraine
headaches all her life. She had taken Mind Control and had not had one since.
“And would you believe it, the next introductory lecture was mobbed.
Absolutely mobbed.”
Another physician, a prominent psychiatrist, advises all his patients
to take Mind Control because it
gives them insights that in some cases would require two years of therapy to
produce.
An entire marketing company was organized as a coop by graduates who
used what they learned in mind Control to invent new products and devise ways of
marketing them. In its third year, the company has eighteen products on the
market.
An advertising man used to need about two months to create a compaign
for new clients – about average in his field. Now, with Mind Control, the
basic ideas come in twenty
minutes and the rest of the work is done in two weeks.
Fourteen Chicago White Sox players took Mind Control. All their
individual averages improved, most of them dramatically.
The husband of an overweight woman suggested she try Mind Control
because all her diets had failed. She agreed, provided he went too. She lost
twenty pounds in six weeks; he stopped smoking.
A professor at a college of pharmacy teaches Mind Control techniques to
his students. “Their grades are going up in all their courses, with less
studying, and they’re more relaxed. . . Everybody already knows how to use his
or her imagination. I just get my students to practice it more. I show them that
imagination is valid and that there’s a form of reality in imagination that
they can use.”
Although Jose smiles easily, when he hears “Jose, you’ve changed my
life!” the smile fades a little and he says, “No, I didn’t do it. You did,
your own mind.” Now, beginning with the next chapter, Jose himself will show
you how to use your mind to change your life.