Meet Jose

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 something to read. What he picked up was a lesson from a correspondence course on how to repair radios. Jos6 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, bis 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 finance 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?” Josi, 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 Jos6 on an odyssey of scientific research that led to his becom- ing—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 questions 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 Jos6 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 re- pair 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 each24 I THE SILVA MIND CONTROL METHOD 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? Jos6 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 low- ered? 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 ener- getic 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 Jos6 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. Jos6 soon abandoned hypnosis and began experi- menting with mental training exercises to quiet the brain yet keep it more independently alert than in hyp- nosis. 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 vi- sualization 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 con- tinued to improve his techniques.

Jos6 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 Jos6 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 dif- ferent from hundreds that had gone before. Suddenly, quietly, the routine was momentously changed. She an- swered a question her father had not yet asked. Then another. And another. She was reading his mind! This was in 1953, when ESP was becoming a re- spectable subject for scientific inquiry, largely through the published work of Dr. J. B. Rhine of Duke Univer- sity. 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, Jos6’s neighbors noticed that his chil- dren’s schoolwork had remarkably unproved. At the be- ginning of his experiments they had been wary of his probings into the unknown, an unknown perhaps pro- tected by forces that were best not tampered with. How-26 ever, the successes of a man working with his own children could not be ignored. Would Jos6 train their children too? After the letter from Dr. Rhine, this was just what Jos6 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 chil- dren, 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 his- tory that can train anyone to use ESP, and he had tliirty-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 chil- dren. 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 Jos6’s growing electronics business. No university or founda- tion or government grants were available for so far-out a field of research. Today the Mind Control organiza- tion 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 tins success, Jose’ has not become a celebrity, nor a guru or spiritual leader with followers or dis- ciples. He is a plain man of simple ways, who speaks with the soft, almost lost accent of a Mexican-Amer- ican. He is a powerfully built, stocky man with a kindly face that creases easily into a smile. Anyone who asks Jos6 what success has meant to Meet ]os6 I 27 him will be answered with a flood of success stories. A few examples: A woman wrote to the Boston Herald American beg- ging for some way to help her husband, who was tor- mented by migraine headaches. The newspaper printed her letter, then another letter the next day from some- one else, also pleading for a way to control such head- aches. 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 co- op 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 campaign 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 are28 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 Jos6 smiles easily, when he hears “Jos6, 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, Jos6 himself will show you how to use your mind to change your life.