Silva Mind Control

Silva Mind Control is a self-help technique for enhancing mental performance that has its roots in New Thought philosophy, parapsychology, and brain-wave research. The technique's founder, José Silva, was born in 1914 in Laredo, Texas, and spent his early life building a successful electronics business. He also studied psychology, Yoga, and Rosicrucianism and experimented with hypnosis to improve his children's IQ. Based on exhaustive research into brain functioning, Silva began teaching a distinctive method of relaxation, visualization, and meditation to a group of thirty-one students—90 percent of whom were women—in Amarillo, Texas, in 1966. By the early 1970s Silva had created a teaching organization and standardized his training into a Basic Lecture Series (BLS) that has remained remarkably consistent over the past thirty-three years. The BLS is currently being taught in more than one hundred countries and in twenty-nine languages; Silva Mind Control International has recorded its fastest growth in Latin America.

Typically, the BLS is presented in four segments over two consecutive weekends. The first two segments teach a method of controlled relaxation designed to slow brain-wave frequency to ten cycles per second, which Silva claims is the most effective frequency for problem-solving, self-healing, and creative thought. In the third segment, students learn to contact inner guides and to visualize mental screens on which to work out problems. The final segment teaches students to heal others with innate psychic abilities. Graduate courses are available for those wishing to teach the BLS as private contractors and for those interested in learning advanced holistic healing techniques. Silva's belief that actualizing human potential will help inaugurate a golden age of spiritual understanding places his organization squarely within the broader New Age movement.

See alsoMeditation; New Age Spirituality; New Thought; Psychology of Religion; Religious Experience; Visualization.

Bibliography

Powers, Analine M. SilvaMindControl:AnAnthropological Inquiry. 1992.

Silva, José, and Philip Miele. TheSilvaMindControlMethod. 1977.

Phillip Charles Lucas