PDF Summary:The Silva Mind Control Method, by José Silva

In The Silva Mind Control Method, José Silva teaches his unique method of using the power of your mind to heal your body, sharpen your memory, and solve everyday problems with seemingly superhuman powers.

Silva began his career as an electronics repairman before becoming interested in altered mental states and applying his knowledge of electrical energy to the human mind. The Silva Mind Control Method, published in 1977, is an abridged version of the content taught in the courses Silva developed.

In this guide, we’ll explore how to tap into particular mindsets to unlock your innate psychic power and how to use that power to help yourself and others. Through commentary, we’ll compare Silva’s approach to that of other writers who embrace visualization and manifestation, such as Rhonda Byrne (The Secret) and Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich), and explore what modern science says about the mind-body connection.

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You can use this principle in multiple places in Silva’s visualization technique. In step one, when you picture your current problem, picture it as a static image—this way, the universe won’t get confused and continue creating the problem in your life. In step three, when you picture the problem beginning to resolve, add a bit of motion; for example, you might picture yourself scrolling through the list of homes on your computer. Finally, in step four, when you picture the problem completely resolved, make the image as dynamic as possible. Picture yourself walking through your new home, climbing the stairs, and exploring each new room.

Use the Alpha State to Help Yourself

Once you’ve practiced the basic process of manifesting in the Alpha level, you can use that technique to accomplish specific goals, such as maximizing your learning and memory, having productive dreams, and improving your physical health.

Maximize Your Learning and Memory

Silva argues that you can improve your memory and learning ability using the Alpha state. However, he recognizes that this may not always be practical because it can take several minutes of focused concentration to access the Alpha state. To get around this, Silva recommends “The Three Finger Technique,” which acts as a trigger to instantly access the Alpha state.

To establish the trigger, go into your Alpha level and hold your thumb, your index finger, and your middle finger together. Tell yourself firmly that from now on, holding your fingers in this position will instantly put you into the Alpha state of mind. You may need to repeat this meditation a few times to get the trigger to stick, but once it does, you’ll be able to instantly access a deep Alpha state.

(Shortform note: This technique echoes other traditions that use hand gestures to cue certain mental states. For example, Hindu and Buddhist traditions include mudras, or specific hand and body positions used in spiritual practices like yoga and meditation. The hand shape Silva describes corresponds to the Vaata Naashak mudra, which practitioners believe can help a person overcome forgetfulness, which may aid learning. Similarly, practitioners of neuro-linguistic programming (a particular approach to behavior change) use a technique called “anchoring,” in which they associate a particular hand shape with a particular feeling, such as confidence, until that particular gesture immediately and reliably triggers that feeling.)

Access Memories in Alpha

You can use the above technique to quickly access memories in your Alpha state that your mind has forgotten in the Beta state. For example, if you wanted to remember the name of a film you watched years ago, you’d hold your fingers together to instantly access your Alpha state. Then, you’d call up the relevant memories on your mental screen—perhaps you and a friend at the theater when you first watched the movie. As you replay the memory, your Alpha mind will retrieve more and more details until it eventually unearths the name of the film.

(Shortform note: In addition to improving your ability to access long-buried memories, training yourself to access the Alpha state on demand may improve your short-term memory. One modern study found that training people to access the Alpha state using neurofeedback training (in which people learn to control their brain waves in real time) significantly improved their short-term memory over time.)

Use Alpha to Aid Learning

You can also use your Alpha trigger to aid learning. If you hold the position while you sit in a class or read educational material, your brain will enter Alpha as you encode the material—so you’ll encode it more deeply. Then, if you hold the position again while you’re being tested on the material, you’ll be able to remember the material much better than if you stayed in Beta during the test.

(Shortform note: This technique takes advantage of a psychological principle called state-dependent memory—the idea that it’s easier to remember information when you’re in the same physical and mental condition as you were when you first learned it. This may be why Silva recommends entering Alpha both while you’re learning and being tested on the material—if you learn the material while in Alpha but take the test in Beta (or vice versa), you won’t perform as well.)

Use Your Dreams to Guide You

Another way to use the Alpha state is to generate useful dreams. Silva argues that dreams can contain meaning, and you can proactively access that meaning instead of waiting for it to arrive randomly. You do this by cueing yourself, while in the Alpha state, to have particularly productive dreams.

Before you can take full advantage of your dreams, you first need to know that you’ll remember the productive dreams you have. If you don’t already regularly remember your dreams, train yourself to do so by telling yourself before bed (preferably while in the Alpha state) that you will remember your dreams. Then, as soon as you wake up, write down as much of your dreams as you can remember. The more often you do this, the more of your dreams you’ll remember. This ensures you can glean any wisdom they might offer.

(Shortform note: Sleep experts recommend additional ways to ensure you remember your dreams. Start by getting enough sleep: Dreams most often occur during REM sleep, and you’ll enter the REM stage more often the longer you’ve been asleep. To help with this, avoid anything that might impair the quality of your sleep, such as alcohol or drugs. Finally, when you wake up in the morning, spend a few moments reflecting on your dreams before getting out of bed or looking at your phone. This will help cement the memories so you can write them down later.)

Once you regularly remember your dreams, you can use them to ask for wisdom about specific problems. To do so, before sleep, picture the problem you’d like to solve on your mental screen. Then, tell yourself that you intend to have a dream that gives you some piece of wisdom that will help solve your problem. When you wake up, write the dream down and look for any clues it may offer about how to solve your problem.

(Shortform note: Silva argues that you can solve problems while dreaming, but there may be another way that dreaming can help with problem-solving. One study showed that people who are lucid dreamers (meaning they’re able to control the narrative of their dreams) have better problem-solving skills while they’re awake than non-lucid dreamers. Similar to Silva’s advice to set an intention for your dreams to present solutions to your problems, if you want to try lucid dreaming, experts recommend setting an intention that you’ll recognize that you’re dreaming, which is the first step to controlling your dreams.)

Improve Your Physical Health

You can also use Alpha state visualization to improve your physical health. Silva reports that this method is effective for chronic illnesses like asthma and migraines and can even improve outcomes for cancer patients when it’s used in conjunction with traditional treatments.

(Shortform note: Silva’s claims about the health benefits of his method are primarily based on personal experience and anecdotal evidence. Few peer-reviewed studies exist examining the potential benefits of the method, and the studies cited in the book were conducted prior to 1977, when the book was published. However, medical experts say that mind-body therapies (like the Silva method) can reduce stress and help treat the conditions that Silva describes.)

To improve your physical health or encourage healing from illness and injury, Silva recommends practicing this six-step process for 15 minutes every day:

1) The first step of the process is to make your mind a gentler, more positive place in general, as this will increase your power to heal yourself. To do this, Silva recommends focusing on the words you use while in both Alpha and Beta states because your choice of words can trigger real-life outcomes. The more often you speak positively about your life and your health, the more you’ll trigger measurable positive changes. For example, if you constantly complain that your life is difficult, you’ll make it even more difficult; but if you tell yourself every day that you’re in great health, your body will get the message and improve your health over time.

(Shortform note: The idea that our thoughts and words can influence reality is well-documented. In The Expectation Effect, David Robson explains that our expectations about our lives and health trigger specific processes in the brain that impact those outcomes. For example, people who associate aging with illness and frailty are more likely to suffer from cardiovascular problems as they age than people who see aging as a positive change. Additionally, like Silva, other experts have found that the specific words we use influence these expectation effects—studies show that negative words increase our perception of pain, while positive words can improve performance and mood during physical tasks.)

2) Second, go into the Alpha state. Silva writes that it’s not possible to feel anxiety, anger, or guilt while in this meditative state; therefore, training yourself to get into that state and stay there will help you limit those negative feelings and their impact on your physical health.

(Shortform note: Modern science confirms that emotions like anxiety are triggered by high-frequency Beta activity, and entering the Alpha state calms those same emotions in the brain. As Silva argues, calming those negative emotions can help avoid their physical health effects, including cardiovascular disease and asthma.)

3) Once in your Alpha state, remind yourself that you’re committed to creating a positive mindset through your language.

4) On your mental screen, picture the illness you’d like to heal. Briefly allow yourself to feel its effects on your body.

5) Replace that image with an image of yourself perfectly healthy and free of the symptoms that are troubling you. Make this image as real as possible, and try to feel that healthy state in your body. (Shortform note: Today, some medical experts practice a form of this visualization in the field of psychoneuroimmunology (PNI). However, rather than picturing the literal body in its current and future states, PNI patients often visualize metaphorical images, such as an army of antibodies gunning down cancer cells, then celebrating their victory on the battlefield.)

6) Once again, repeat your intention to become a more positive, loving person. (Shortform note: In steps one, three, and six of this exercise, Silva reiterates the importance of becoming a positive person. However, taking this advice to extremes may lead to toxic positivity, in which you deny and suppress emotions like anger or sadness in pursuit of 100% positive thinking. Over time, this approach can backfire, causing the negative emotions to grow stronger. Instead of denying those negative emotions, psychologists recommend allowing yourself to feel them without judgment.)

Use the Alpha State to Help Others

In addition to improving your own health and well-being, you can use Silva’s method to help others by remotely diagnosing and psychically healing illnesses and injuries, even in people you’ve never met. Silva reports that his most experienced students can reliably and accurately diagnose medical conditions given only basic information about a person (such as their name and where they live).

(Shortform note: A 1975 study tested these claims by asking Mind Control course graduates to remotely diagnose someone. In the double-blind condition (in which neither the experimenter nor the participant knew the actual health status of the person being diagnosed), the Mind Control graduates were no more accurate with their diagnoses than they’d be by just guessing. However, under nonblind conditions (meaning the experimenters—who, in this case, were fellow Mind Control graduates—knew the correct diagnoses), the results were significant. This implies that the graduates gave correct diagnoses not because they have psychic powers but because the experimenters themselves were subtly and unknowingly cueing the correct answers.)

Silva recognizes that this sounds impossible, but he argues that everyone has the psychic abilities that make these feats possible—you simply have to be trained to access them. (Shortform note: Not everyone agrees that everyone has psychic abilities. One prominent parapsychology researcher argues that psychic abilities are normally distributed, meaning most people have a moderate ability, while some people have extreme ability or none whatsoever.)

In the following sections, we’ll explore Silva’s advice for how to achieve these seemingly impossible results.

Prepare to Psychically Heal Others

To sharpen your psychic skills to the point that you can remotely diagnose and heal others, you first need to train your visualization abilities even further. To do so, you’ll need to practice picturing more and more foreign scenes on your mental screen, beginning with a wall in your own home and eventually progressing to the inside of the body of a person you’ve never met. With each scene that you project on your mental screen, visualize as much detail as possible and trust your intuition. Silva notes that you may feel like you’re simply imagining things, but don’t let that dissuade you from fleshing out the details. What feels like imagination may actually be you projecting your consciousness into the scene on your mental screen.

(Shortform note: Is it really possible to project your consciousness to a location outside your body? Some people believe so. Many people from different spiritual traditions practice astral travel, or the act of projecting the nonphysical “astral body” out of the physical body and to another location along the astral plane. A similar technique for projecting consciousness is remote viewing, or the act of describing locations without knowing anything about them. The US government even studied remote viewing as an espionage technique during the Cold War; while the subjects of these experiments did sometimes correctly describe the locations they were presented with, the results of the studies were not statistically significant.)

Once you master visualizing increasingly unfamiliar scenes and environments, you’ll need to prepare the mental space where you’ll work on diagnosing and healing people: Silva calls this your “laboratory.” While in the Alpha state, picture a room where you’ll do your psychic work (the room can look however you want it to look). The room should include your usual mental screen and a space for you to do your work, like a desk. Additionally, you should imagine a set of custom tools that will help you symbolically heal the illnesses you diagnose in others: for example, you might imagine a fan that you’ll mentally use to cool the hot, irritated skin of someone with a rash.

(Shortform note: While Silva says your mental laboratory can look however you like, you may want to start by following the same principles that make for a productive physical workspace. Experts recommend you start by adding the color green to your laboratory—studies show that green helps you be more imaginative. You may also want to situate your desk so that your back is to a wall in your imaginary space, which can help you feel more settled in the space. But what about your tools? In Steal Like an Artist, Austin Kleon recommends dividing your workspace into zones based on the tools you use (in his case, analog and digital). In your laboratory, you might similarly divide your tools into zones based on the type of condition they treat.)

Next, you’ll staff your laboratory with the mental image of two assistants—one male, one female. These assistants may be historical or famous figures, or they might be ordinary people. Note that you shouldn’t try to consciously choose these assistants—simply prepare your laboratory and welcome whichever figures show up to help you. You’ll continue consulting these assistants every time you do remote healing work in your laboratory.

(Shortform note: In Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill also describes calling on imaginary assistants to help tackle difficult problems. However, Hill actively chose his assistants—all famous historical figures—rather than waiting for them to appear to him. He also relied on nine assistants rather than two and did not have any female assistants.)

Remotely Diagnosing Others

Once your psychic laboratory is prepared, you’re ready to practice remotely diagnosing and healing others in the Alpha state. To diagnose someone, you’ll need to know their name, age, gender, and where they’re located

Silva warns that it’s important, at this stage, to only practice diagnosing people who are physically removed from you and who you don’t know (you can ask friends to supply information about people they know who are sick or injured). Unless you are that person’s doctor, you are not legally qualified to diagnose them with a medical condition. In fact, if you discover a medical problem while mentally scanning someone you know personally, Silva says you shouldn’t tell the person at all—simply do your best to heal them in your psychic laboratory.

(Shortform note: Silva is primarily concerned with the legal implications of psychically diagnosing and healing someone. However, there may also be practical risks to diagnosing or healing someone you know or telling them about your attempts to heal them. Studies show that faith healing (a similar practice to Silva’s method) can cause harm when it leads to a sick person delaying traditional medical treatment for their illness because of their strong belief in the faith healer’s power. Similarly, if you tell a loved one you’re working to psychically heal them, they may delay getting treatment they need, ultimately harming their health.)

Once you know who you’ll be diagnosing, conjure up an image of them on your mental screen (since you don’t know what they look like in real life, this is where your advanced visualization skills come in). Begin scanning the image of their body on your screen, asking your assistants for help as necessary—for example, one of your assistants might point to a particular body part on the person you’re scanning. As you scan the person, Silva recommends you continuously describe, out loud, what you’re observing. Keeping up a monologue of what you see on your mental screen will crowd out your mind’s doubts and criticisms about whether what you’re seeing is real.

(Shortform note: In addition to bypassing your doubts and criticisms, speaking your observations out loud may have other benefits. Some researchers note that speaking aloud to yourself (rather than just speaking in your mind) forces you to fully flesh out your thoughts, which in turn enables your mind to connect those thoughts to others and form creative insights. To take full advantage of this effect, consider walking or pacing while you talk—studies show that moving can enhance your ability to think clearly.)

As you scan, make note of which areas of the body you’re drawn to—for example, you might note that the person’s left knee seems to be flashing more brightly than the other body parts, maybe because of an injury. Trust your instincts and try not to second-guess yourself; remember, even if it feels like you’re making everything up, that doesn’t mean that you are.

(Shortform note: Some psychologists make the opposite claim: The fact that something feels true doesn’t mean it is true. For example, if your spouse sighs, you might think they’re upset with you. The thought might feel entirely true, causing you to wonder what you did wrong. In reality, your spouse could just be reflecting on an argument they had at work—the sigh might have had nothing to do with you, no matter how true the thought felt.)

Remotely Healing Others

Once you’ve diagnosed the problem, you can begin trying to remotely heal the person. To psychically heal someone, first, go to your Alpha level. On your mental screen, call up a detailed picture of the person in need of healing. On the screen to the left (because, as we discussed, the left represents the future), create a new image that represents the person being healed somehow. (Shortform note: Silva doesn’t specify, but presumably, this is the step in the process in which you’d use the imagined “tools” in your laboratory to heal the person.)

Finally, on the far left of the screen, imagine the person entirely healed. Try to genuinely believe that this healed version of the person is now reality—just like when you’re manifesting positive outcomes for yourself, you must want the outcome, believe it’s possible, and fully believe that it will happen.

(Shortform note: The practice of remote healing has become even more popular in the digital age. Practitioners use various techniques, but most claim that they’re able to heal people remotely by manipulating the energy in the person’s body, which quantum physics shows isn’t necessarily impossible to do from a distance. However, academic research on whether these remote healing practices actually work has had mixed results. Different techniques and practitioners have different results, and some studies are not methodologically sound, making it hard to draw conclusions from their results.)