The Silva Mind Control Method

Livre sur une technique de Chamanisme moderne / avec Auto-hypnose et visualisations

Highlights

Chapter 3 How to Meditate

Here is all you have to do to reach the Alpha, or meditative, level of mind:

When you awaken in the morning, go to the bathroom if necessary, then return to bed. Set your alarm for fifteen minutes later in case you drift off to sleep during the exercise. Close your eyes and look upward, behind your eyelids, at a 20-degree angle. For reasons not fully understood, this position of the eyes alone will trigger the brain to produce Alpha.

Now, slowly, at about two-second intervals, count backward from one hundred to one. As you do this, keep your mind on it, and you will be in Alpha the very first time.

Chapter 3 How to Meditate

Once you have learned to reach your level with the five-to-one method in the morning you are ready to enter your level any time of day that you choose. All you need is ten or fifteen minutes to spare. Because you will be entering your level from Beta rather than the light level of Alpha, a little extra training will be needed.

Sit in a comfortable chair or on a bed with your feet flat on the floor. Let your hands he loosely in your lap. If you prefer, sit cross-legged, in the lotus position. Hold your head well balanced, not slumped. Now concentrate on first one part of the body, then another, to consciously relax it. Start with your left foot, then the left leg, then the right foot, and so on, until you reach the throat, the face, the eyes, and finally the scalp. You will be amazed the first time you do this at how tense your body was.

Now pick a spot about 45 degrees above eye level on the ceiling or the wall opposite you. Gaze at this spot until your eyelids begin to feel a little heavy and let them close. Start your countdown from fifty to one. Do this for ten days, then ten to one for another ten days, then five to one from then on. Since you will no longer be limited to the mornings for this practice, establish a routine of meditating two or three times a day, about fifteen minutes a session.

Once you reach your level, what then? What do you think about?

Right from the beginning, from the very first moment you reach your meditative level, practice visualization. This is central to Mind Control. The better you learn to visualize, the more powerful will be your experience with Mind Control.

The first step is to create a tool for visualization, a mental screen. It should be like a large movie screen but should not quite fill your mental vision. Imagine it not behind your eyelids but about six feet in front of you. You will project onto this screen whatever you choose to concentrate on. Later there will be other uses for it.

Once you have built this screen in your mind, project onto it something familiar and simple, like an orange or an apple. Each time you go to your level, stay with just one image; you may change it the next time. Concentrate on making it more and more real—in three dimensions, in full color, in all its details. Think of nothing else.

Chapter 4 Dynamic Meditation

Now, before you go to your level, think of something pleasant—no matter how trivial—that happened yesterday or today. Review it briefly in your mind, then go well into your level and project onto your mental screen the total incident What were the sights, the smells, the sounds, and your feelings at that time? All the details. You will be surprised at the difference between your Beta memory of the incident and your Alpha recall of it. It is almost as great as the difference between saying the word “swim” and actually swimming.

Chapter 4 Dynamic Meditation

Law 1: You must desire that the event take place. ‘The first person I see on the sidewalk tomorrow will be blowing his nose” is so useless a project to work on that your mind will turn away from it; it will probably not work. Your boss will be more agreeable, a certain customer will be more receptive to what you are selling, you will find satisfaction in a task you ordinarily find disagreeable—these are prospects that can engage a reasonable measure of desire.

Chapter 4 Dynamic Meditation

Law 2: You must believe the event can take place. If your customer is overstocked with what you sell, you cannot reasonably believe he will be eager to buy. If you cannot believe the event can reasonably take place, your mind will be working against it.

Chapter 4 Dynamic Meditation

Law 3: You must expect the event to take place. This is a subtle law. The first two are simple and passive—this third one introduces some dynamics. It is possible to desire an event believe it can take place, and still not expect it to take place. You want your boss to be pleasant tomorrow, you know that he can be, but you may still be some distance from expecting it. This is where Mind Control and effective visualization come in, as we will see in a moment.

Chapter 4 Dynamic Meditation

Law 4: You cannot create a problem. Not may not but cannot. This is a basic, all-controlling law. “Wouldn’t it be great if I could get my boss to make such an ass of himself that hell be fired and 111 get his job?” When you are working dynamically in Alpha you are in touch with Higher Intelligence, and from the perspective of Higher Intelligence it would not be great at all. You may trip up your boss and get him fired, but you will be entirely on your own—and in Beta. In Alpha it simply will not work.

Chapter 4 Dynamic Meditation

choose an event that is a solution to a problem, that you desire, believe can come about and, with the following exercise, will learn to expect.

Here is what to do:

Choose a real problem that you face, one that has not yet resolved itself. As an illustration, let us say that your boss has been ill-tempered lately. There are three steps to go through once you reach your level:

Step 1: On your mental screen, thoroughly re-create a recent event which involved the problem. Relive it for a moment.

Step 2: Gently push this scene off the screen to the right. Slide onto the screen another scene that will take place tomorrow. In this scene everyone around the boss is cheerful and the boss is on the receiving end of good news. He is clearly in a better mood now. II you know specifically what was causing the problem, visualize the solution at work. Visualize it as vividly as you did the problem.

Step 3: Now push this scene off the screen to the right and replace it with another from the left The boss is happy now, fully as pleasant as you know he can be. Experience this scene as vividly as if it had actually happened. Stay with it for a while, get the full feel of it.

Now, at the count of five you will be wide awake feeling better than before. You can be confident that you have just put forces to work for you in the direction of creating the event you want.

Will this work always, invariably, without a hitch?

No.

Chapter 5 Improving Memory

Anything you believe you have forgotten is associated with an event. If it is a name, the event is die time you heard or read it. All that you have to do, once you learn to work with your mental screen, is visualize a past event that surrounds an incident you believe you have forgotten, and it will be there.

I say an incident you believe you have forgotten because in reality you have not forgotten it at all. You simply do not recall it There is a significant difference.

Chapter 5 Improving Memory

It is doubtful that we ever really forget anything. Our brain squirrels away images of the most trivial events. The more vivid the image and the more important it is to us, the more easily we recall it.

Chapter 5 Improving Memory

I question whether it is possible ever to be Unconscious. We either can or cannot recall what we experience, but we are always experiencing and all experiences leave memories firmly printed on the brain.

Chapter 5 Improving Memory

we have another way, a sort of emergency method, which will take you instantly to a level of mind where recall of information will be easier.

This method involves a simple triggering mechanism which, once it becomes really yours, improves in effectiveness as you use it Making it yours will require several meditation sessions to thoroughly internalize the procedure.

Here is how simple it is:

Just bring together the thumb and first two fingers of either hand and your mind will instantly adjust to a deeper level. Try it now and nothing will happen; it is not yet a triggering mechanism. To make it one, go to your level and say to yourself (silently or aloud), “Whenever I join my fingers together like this”—now join them—“for a serious purpose I will instantly reach this level of mind to accomplish whatever I desire.”

Do this daily for about a week, always using the same words. Soon there will be a firm association in your mind between joining the thumb and two fingers and instantly reaching an effective meditation level

Chapter 3 How to Meditate

In Mind Control classes students show a variety of reactions to their first experience, from “That was beautiful!” to “I didn’t feel a thing.” The difference is less in what happened to them than in how familiar they were with this level of mind in the first place.

Chapter 3 How to Meditate

If you feel that nothing happened during this first exercise, it simply means you have been in Alpha many times before without being particularly aware of it Simply relax, don’t question it and stay with the exercises.

Chapter 3 How to Meditate

Use the hundred-to-one method for ten mornings. Then count only from fifty to one, twenty-five to one, then ten to one, and finally five to one, ten mornings each.

Chapter 3 How to Meditate

Even though you will be in Alpha on the very first try if you concentrate, you still need seven weeks of practice to go to lower levels of Alpha, then to Theta

Chapter 3 How to Meditate

The method we use in Mind Control is to say mentally, “I will slowly come out as 1 count from one to five, feeling wide awake and better than before. One two—prepare to open your eyes—three—open eyes—four—five—eyes open, wide awake, feeling better than before.”

Chapter 3 How to Meditate

the very first time you go to your Alpha level, use only one method to come out of it This will give you a greater degree of control against coming out spontaneously.

Chapter 3 How to Meditate

You will establish two routines, then, one for going to your level, the other for coming out of it

Chapter 3 How to Meditate

This brain is too powerful, far too powerful, to leave out of control. Once we learn to use our minds to train it, it will do some astounding things for us, as you will soon see.

Chapter 3 How to Meditate

It is surprising how little command we have over this brain of ours, despite the fine work it sometimes does for us

Chapter 3 How to Meditate

In the meantime, be patient with this simple exercise. Using your mind, train your brain to go quietly into Alpha and to attend exclusively to the job of creating a simple image more and more vividly. In the beginning, as thoughts intrude, be gently forgiving. Slowly push them away and return to the single object at hand.

Chapter 3 How to Meditate

Becoming irritated or tense will bring you right out of Alpha.

Chapter 3 How to Meditate

This, then, is meditation as it is widely practiced throughout the world. If you do this and nothing else, you will experience what William Wordsworth called “A happy stillness of mind,” and more, a deep and durable inner peace.

Chapter 3 How to Meditate

This will come as an exciting experience as you reach deeper levels of mind; then you will take it more and more for granted and the excitement will pass. When this happens, many drop out. They forget that this is not a “trip” for its own sake but the first step in what may well be the most important journey they have ever taken.

Chapter 4 Dynamic Meditation

I prefer counting backward to get you there, because at first it takes some concentration, and concentration is the key to success. Once you have reached your level several times with this method, the method will be associated in your mind with the successful result and the process will become more automatic.

Chapter 4 Dynamic Meditation

Every successful result in Mind Control becomes what we call a “reference point”

Chapter 4 Dynamic Meditation

this is the moment for us to go beyond the passive meditation technique you have just read about and learn to use meditation dynamically to solve some problems. You will now see why the simple exercise of visualizing an apple, or whatever else you choose, on a mental screen is so important.

Chapter 4 Dynamic Meditation

Here is how you can use it:

Think of something you own that is not lost but would take a little searching to find. Your car keys, perhaps. Are they on your bureau, in your pocket in the car? If you are not sure, go to your level, think back to when you had them last, and relive that moment. Now proceed forward in time and you will locate them if they are where you left them

Chapter 4 Dynamic Meditation

Imagine the student who remembers his instructor saying there will be an exam this Wednesday—or did he say next Wednesday? He can settle it for himself in Alpha.

Chapter 4 Dynamic Meditation

Now for a giant leap forward. We are going to connect a real event with a desirable one that you imagine—and see what becomes of the imaginary one. If you operate according to some Very simple laws, the imaginary event will become real.

Chapter 4 Dynamic Meditation

There is plenty of evil on this planet and we humans perpetrate more than our share of it. This is done in Beta, not Alpha, not Theta, and probably not in Delta. My research has proved this.

Chapter 4 Dynamic Meditation

as you gradually increase your skill you will notice that you will be able to believe and expect events that are less and less probable. In time, with practice, the results you achieve will be more and more astounding.

Chapter 4 Dynamic Meditation

When local business is slow, he puts a solution on his mental screen—someone carrying suitcases who wants to go to Kennedy Airport. “First few times I tried it … nothing. Then it happened—a man with suitcases going to Kennedy. Next time, I put this man on my screen, got that feeling you get when things are working, and along came another one for Kennedy. It works! It’s like a winning streak that won’t quit!”

Chapter 5 Improving Memory

Perhaps some Mind Control graduates do use their skills for remembering telephone numbers but, as I said in the previous chapter, desire is important in making things work, and my desire to remember phone numbers is something less than spirited. If I had to cross town every time I needed a telephone number, my desire would perk up.

Chapter 5 Improving Memory

It is basically unsound to use Mind Control techniques for anything but important matters because of that desire, belief, expectancy trilogy

Chapter 5 Improving Memory

Your new ability to visualize and re-create past events while you are in Alpha has a certain carry-over to Beta, so without any special effort your mind may be working in new ways for you. Still, there is room for improvement.

Chapter 5 Improving Memory

We all see television commercials. There are so many of them and they are so brief that if we were asked to list five or ten that we saw during the past week we would be able to cite only three or four at the most.

A major way in which advertising creates sales is by causing us to “remember” a product below the level of awareness.

Chapter 5 Improving Memory

There are sounds and odors, sights in the corner of your eye, perhaps the small discomfort of a shoe that is too tight the feel of your chair, the temperature of the room—there seems to be no end. We are conscious of these sensations but not aware of being conscious of them, which seems like a contradiction until we consider the case of a woman under general anesthesia.

Chapter 5 Improving Memory

You need simply re-create the surrounding event on your Mental Screen, as I have explained, and you will hear the name again. Relax, go to your level, create the screen, experience the event. This takes fifteen or twenty minutes.

Chapter 5 Improving Memory

relax. Realize that you remember and that you have a way of triggering recall.

Chapter 5 Improving Memory

A teacher of fourth-graders in Denver uses the Mental Screen and the Three Fingers Technique to teach spelling. She covers about twenty words a week. To test them, instead of going from one word to another and asking for the correct spelling, she asks the students to write down all the words they studied that week. They remember the words and how to spell them—with their three fingers together, seeing them on their mental screens. “The slower ones,” she says, “take about fifteen minutes with the test”

Using the same technique, she teaches these fourth graders the multiplication table up to the 12’s by November; this normally takes an entire school year.

Chapter 6 Speed Learning

next step, Speed Learning. Briefly, this is how you will progress: You will learn to enter the meditative level; then, at that level, to create a mental screen, which is useful for various purposes, one of which is to recall information. Then, as a shortcut, you will learn the Three Fingers Technique for, among other things, instant recall. Once you have accomplished this you will be ready for new ways of acquiring information, malting recall even easier. Equally important, these new ways of learning will not only make recall easier but will both speed up and deepen your understanding of what you learn.

Chapter 6 Speed Learning

There are two learning techniques. Let’s start with the simpler, though not necessarily the easier, one.

The Three Fingers Technique, once it is so thoroughly mastered that you can instantly reach your level and operate consciously there, can be used while you listen to a lecture or read a book. This will vastly improve concentration, and information will be implanted more firmly. Later you will be able to recall it more easily at the Beta level and more easily still at the Alpha level. A student writing an exam with his three fingers together can almost see the textbook he read, almost hear the instructor as he discussed the lesson in class.

The other technique is not as simple, but you will be ready for it earlier in your practice of Mind Control. It has all the effectiveness of learning at the Alpha level plus the added reinforcement of learning at Beta. You will need a tape recorder for this.

Let us say that you have a complex chapter of a textbook to learn; you must not only remember but understand it. During the first step, do not go into Alpha but remain at outer consciousness, Beta. Read the chapter aloud into the recorder. Now go to your level, play it back, and concentrate on your own voice as it recites the material.

Chapter 6 Speed Learning

As you become more adept, the Alpha level itself will begin to feel different. It will feel more and more like Beta because you will be learning to use it consciously

Chapter 6 Speed Learning

As you progress and recapture the earlier feeling of being at Alpha, you are really going to a deeper level, perhaps Theta.

Chapter 6 Speed Learning

For added reinforcement, let some time pass, several days if possible, then read the material again at Beta and play it back in Alpha. The information will now be firmly yours.

Chapter 7 Creative Sleep

There are three steps to the Dream Control we teach, all involving a meditational level of mind.

The first is to learn to recall our dreams.

Chapter 7 Creative Sleep

When a series of events that is hard to explain leads to a constructive result, we call it coincidence. When they lead to a destructive result, we call it accident

Chapter 7 Creative Sleep

said sleep creates favorable conditions for telepathy. To account for my dream I had to go further and say that sleep creates favorable conditions for receiving information from Higher Intelligence

Chapter 7 Creative Sleep

to help you recall dreams, but you can count on the cumulative effect of programming yourself, while at your level, to remember them.

While meditating just before going to sleep, say, “I want to remember a dream. I will remember a dream.” Now go to sleep with paper and pencil by your bedside. When you awaken, whether during the night or in the morning, write down what you remember of a dream. Keep practicing this night after night and your recall will be clearer, more complete.

Chapter 7 Creative Sleep

During meditation before going to sleep, review a problem that can be solved with information or advice. Be sure that you really care about solving it; silly questions evoke silly answers. Now program yourself with these words: “I want to have a dream that will contain information to solve the problem I have in mind. I will have such a dream, remember it, and understand it.”

Chapter 7 Creative Sleep

When you awaken during the night or in the morning, review the dream you recall most vividly and search it for meaning.

As I mentioned earlier, our method of dream interpretation must be different from the Freudian one because we deliberately generate dreams.

Chapter 8 Your Words Have Power

Imagine that you are standing in your kitchen holding a lemon that you have just taken from the refrigerator. It feels cold in your hand. Look at the outside of it its yellow skin. It is a waxy yellow, and the skin comes to small green points at the two ends. Squeeze it a little and feel its firmness and its weight.

Now raise the lemon to your nose and smell it. Nothing smells quite like a lemon, does it? Now cut the lemon in half and smell it. The odor is stronger. Now bite deeply into the lemon and let the juice swirl around in your mouth. Nothing tastes quite like a lemon either, does it?

At this point, if you have used your imagination well, your mouth will be watering.

Chapter 8 Your Words Have Power

Let’s consider the implications of this.

Words, “mere” words, affected your salivary glands. The words did not even reflect reality, but something you imagined. When you read those words about the lemon you were telling your brain you had a lemon, though you did not mean it. Your brain took it seriously and said to your salivary glands, “This guy is biting a lemon. Hurry, wash it away.” The glands obeyed.

Chapter 8 Your Words Have Power

Most of us think the words we use reflect meanings and that what they mean can be good or bad, true or false, powerful or weak. True, but that is only half of it Words do not just reflect reality, they create reality, like the flow of saliva.

Chapter 8 Your Words Have Power

Many children play a little game at dinner. They describe the food they are eating in the most nauseating possible terms: Butter is mashed bugs, to choose one of the less colorful ones I remember. The object of the game is to pretend not to be nauseated by these new perspectives on food and to push someone else beyond his ability to pretend. It often works, with someone’s appetite suddenly dulled.

As adults we often play this same game. We dull our appetite for life with negative words, and the words, gathering power with repetition, in turn create negative lives, for which our appetites become dulled.

“How are you?”

“Ah—can’t complain,” or “No use complaining,” or “Not too bad.”

How does the brain respond to these dreary views?

Is it a “pain in the neck” to do the dishes? Is it “one big headache” to balance your checkbook? Are you “sick and tired” of the weather we are having? I am convinced that proctologists owe a large part of their income to the words we use. Remember, the brain is no subtle interpreter. It says, ‘This guy’s asking for a headache. Okay. One headache coming up.”

Of course, every time that we say something gives us a pain, a pain does not immediately result The body’s natural state is good health, and all its processes are geared toward health. In time, though, with enough verbal pounding away at its defenses, it delivers up the very illnesses we order.

Two things add power to the words we use: our level of mind, and our degree of emotional involvement with what we say.

Chapter 8 Your Words Have Power

“My God, that hurts!” spoken with conviction offers warm hospitality to pain. “I can’t get a damned thing done around here!” said with deep feeling becomes a truth which adds seeming validity to the feeling.

Chapter 8 Your Words Have Power

At Alpha and Theta our words have enormously increased power. In earlier chapters you have seen how, with amazingly simple words, you can pre-program dreams

Chapter 8 Your Words Have Power

“Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better.” These words have cured thousands of persons of grimly serious illnesses! They are no joke; I respect them and I regard Dr. Coué with awe and gratitude, for I have learned priceless lessons from his book Self-Mastery Through Autosuggestion

Chapter 8 Your Words Have Power

There are two basic principles:

We can think of only one thing at a time, and

When we concentrate on a thought the thought becomes true because our bodies transform it into action.

Therefore, if you want to trigger your body’s healing processes, which may be blocked by negative thoughts (conscious or unconscious), just repeat twenty times in succession, “Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better.” Do this twice a day and you are using the Coué method.

Chapter 8 Your Words Have Power

Since my own research has shown that the power of words is greatly amplified at meditative levels, I have made some adaptations of this method. At Alpha and Theta levels we say, “Every day, in every way, I am

getting better, better, and better.” We say it only once during meditation

Chapter 8 Your Words Have Power

During one operation, when profuse bleeding would normally be expected, the surgeon was amazed: There was only a trickle. Mrs. Mabrey had whispered, ‘Tell your body not to bleed.” She did this before the first incision, then about every ten minutes during the operation.

During another operation she whispered, “When you awaken you will feel that everyone in your life loves you and you will love yourself.” This patient was causing her surgeon special concern. She was a tense, complaining woman to whom every pain was ominous—an attitude that could slow down her recovery. Later, as she awakened from the anesthetic, there was a new expression on her face, and three months later her surgeon told Mrs. Mabrey that this once-anxious patient was “transformed.” She had become relaxed and optimistic and quickly recovered from her operation.

Chapter 8 Your Words Have Power

Mrs. Mabrey’s work illustrates three things that we teach in Mind Control: First words have special power at deep levels of mind; second, the mind has much firmer command over the body than it is given credit for; and third, as I noted in Chapter 5, we are always conscious.

Chapter 8 Your Words Have Power

How many parents brusquely pop into a sleeping child’s room, quickly adjust the covers, and leave, when a pause for a few positive and loving words would help make the child more secure and calm during the day?

Chapter 9 The Power of Imagination

Willpower needs an enemy to overcome before it reaches its goal. It tries to be tough and, like most toughies, it becomes a cream puff when the going gets rocky. There is a gentler, easier way to shuck bad habits—imagination. Imagination seizes directly on the goal; it gets what it wants.

Chapter 9 The Power of Imagination

This is why in earlier chapters I placed so much emphasis on your learning true-to-life visualization at deep levels of mind. If you spur your imagination with belief, desire, and expectancy, and train it to visualize your goals so that you see, feel, hear, taste, and touch them, you will get what you want.

“When the will and the imagination are in conflict, it is always the imagination that wins,” wrote Emile Coué.

Chapter 9 The Power of Imagination

If you think you want to give up a bad habit, chances are you are deceiving yourself. If you really wanted to give it up, it would fade away on its own. What you should want more than the habit itself is the benefit of giving it up. Once you learn to want that benefit strongly enough, you will become free of the “unwanted” habit.

Chapter 9 The Power of Imagination

Thinking about your habit and firmly resolving to give it up may bind you more tightly to it It is a little like firmly resolving to go to sleep; the very firmness of your resolve can keep you awake.

Chapter 9 The Power of Imagination

If you want to lose weight, your first step is to reason out the problem at the outer level.

Is your problem overeating, under-exercising, or both? It may very well not be overeating, but eating the wrong foods. A diet of foods more suitable to your particular needs may be the answer. Your physician would know.

Why do you want to lose weight? Are you so fat that your health is impaired, or do you simply feel that a slimmer you would be more attractive? Either provides a good reason for losing weight, but you must know beforehand how you expect to profit from the weight loss.

If you already eat the right foods in modest amounts, if you get as much exercise as you reasonably can, and you are only slightly overweight, my advice would be—unless your physician says otherwise—to live with it I do. The alternative is an unnecessary disruption for you. Besides, there are probably bigger problems and more important opportunities in your life to put your Mind Control to work on.

If you are sure that you really want to lose weight and you know why, your next step is to analyze all the benefits you will derive—not general benefits like “I’ll look better” but concrete ones involving, if possible, all the five senses. Example:

Sight: Find a photograph of yourself when you were as thin as you would like to be now.

Touch: Imagine, when you are thin again, how smooth your arms and thighs and stomach will feel to your touch.

Taste: Imagine the flavors of the foods you will emphasize in 3’our new diet.

Smell: Imagine the odor of the foods you will be eating.

Hearing: Imagine what those who are important to you will say about your success at losing weight!

Even the five senses are not enough for thorough visualization. Emotions are important too.

Imagine how elated and confident you will feel when you are as thin as you want to be.

With all this firmly in mind, go to your level. Create your mental screen and project onto it a visualization as you are now. Now let it disappear and from the left (the future) slide on an image (the old photograph perhaps) of yourself as you ultimately want to be and will be when the diet succeeds.

While you mentally gaze at the new you, imagine in as much detail as you can what it will feel like to be this thin. How will it feel when you bend over to tie your shoelaces? Walk upstairs? Fit into clothing that is now too small? Walk on a beach in a bathing suit? Take your time and feel all this. Go through the five senses, one at a time, as described above. How will your attitude toward yourself feel as a result of achieving this goal?

Now mentally review your new diet—not just what you will eat, but how much—and select a few between meal snacks, raw carrot or whatever. Tell yourself that this is all the food your body will need and that it will not send you hunger pangs as a way of asking for more.

This is the end of your meditation. Repeat it twice a day.

Chapter 9 The Power of Imagination

Notice that not once during your meditation was there any image or thought of the foods you should not eat. You eat too much of them because you like them; the mere thought of them will make your imagination lurch in unwanted directions.

Chapter 9 The Power of Imagination

“Positive thinking works beautifully on a reducing diet Never think once about what you are giving up but concentrate on what you are getting.”

Chapter 9 The Power of Imagination

In your weight-loss program, be sure to select a reasonable target for weight reduction; otherwise you will destroy the believability of your project. If you are 50 pounds overweight you cannot reasonably believe you will look like Audrey Hepburn or Mark Spitz next week. To visualize this will do little good.

Chapter 9 The Power of Imagination

Old body messages may come through the first few days to remind you of the delights of a candy bar. During your busy day, when you may be unable to meditate, take a deep breath, put your three fingers together, and remind yourself in the same words you used during meditation that your diet is all your body needs and that you will not have hunger pangs. A quick glance at an old photograph of yourself as you would like to be again will be helpful.

Chapter 9 The Power of Imagination

As you progress with your Mind Control in this and other areas, your total mental state will improve and this in turn will contribute in important ways to better functioning of your body. With a little mental nudging it will more gladly seek its proper weight.

Chapter 9 The Power of Imagination

One man, a factory worker in Omaha, said to himself during his meditations, “I will desire and eat only those foods good for my body.” Suddenly he found a new interest in salads and vegetable juices and a fading interest in high-calorie foods. Result: He lost 40 pounds in four months.

Chapter 9 The Power of Imagination

She organized a workshop for 25 Mind Control graduates to meet once a week for a month. Among the 15 who attended all the meetings, the average weight loss was a little more than 4¾ pounds. All lost weight!

A month later, she checked with these 15 and learned that 7 had continued to lose weight, and 8 were holding steady. None had gained weight!

This was not only a painless experience for these graduates, it was a joyous one, Caroline reports. Not only did they lose weight with no hunger pangs or any other discomfort, but they reinforced many Mind Control-acquired skills.

The average weight loss was about what it would have been had they taken one of the more successful weight-reduction courses. Caroline herself had been a lecturer for one of these courses

Chapter 9 The Power of Imagination

There is no need for reviewing at the outer level why you should stop; the melancholy reasons are familiar enough. What you need is a list of benefits which you later make so vivid that you will want to stop.

You will have more vitality; your physical senses will be sharper; and you will savor life more fully. You know better than I, a nonsmoker, what you will gain.

Go to your level and see yourself on your mental screen in the situation where you normally smoke your first cigarette of the day. Visualize yourself, fully at ease, from that moment until the end of an hour, doing everything you would normally do except smoking. If, for example, the hour is 7:30 to 8:30 A . M . , say to yourself, “I am now and will remain a former smoker from 7:30 to 8:30 A . M . I enjoy being a former smoker during this hour. It is easy and I am used to it.”

Continue this exercise until you are really fully at ease, at the outer level, with your first hour of freedom from cigarettes. Now for the next hour, and soon the third, and so on. Take this slowly—pushing too fast may lead to punishing your own body, which is hardly fair, since your mind, not your body, introduced the habit in the first place. Let your mind do the work through imagination.

Chapter 9 The Power of Imagination

ask yourself each time you reach for a cigarette, “Do I really want this one now?” With surprising frequency the answer is no. Wait until you really want it.

Chapter 9 The Power of Imagination

In controlling the smoking habit, you can add other techniques to this basic method. A pack-and-a-half-aday smoker for eight years, an Omaha man visualized in Alpha all the cigarettes he’d ever smoked—a great heap of them. Then he put them in an incinerator and burned them.

Next he imagined all the cigarettes he would smoke in the future unless he stopped—another great mound of them—and he gleefully burned these too in the incinerator. After having quit smoking many times in the past, this time he gave up cigarettes for good after only one meditation. No craving, no overeating, no side effects.

I cannot, I regret to say, report as much success with smoking as with weight reduction

Chapter 10 Using Your Mind to Improve Your Health

So many think of psychic healing as strange and esoteric—yet what could be stranger and more esoteric than the powerful prescription drugs with their health-threatening side effects? In all my experience with psychic healing, I have never experienced or seen or heard of a single harmful side effect.

Chapter 10 Using Your Mind to Improve Your Health

Many graduates report they use Mind Control in emergencies to reduce bleeding and pain. Example: Mrs. Donald Wildowsky was in Texas on a convention trip with her husband. According to the Norwich, Connecticut, Bulletin, she dived into a swimming pool and ruptured an eardrum.

“We were miles from any town, and I didn’t want to make him leave in the middle of the convention,” she was quoted as saying. “So I went to an Alpha state, put my hand over my ear, concentrated on the pain area and said ‘Gone, gone, gone!’

“The bleeding stopped immediately and the pain left. When I finally got to a doctor, he was speechless with amazement.”

Chapter 10 Using Your Mind to Improve Your Health

In self-healing, there are six fairly easy steps to take.

The first is to begin—in Beta—to feel yourself becoming a loving (and therefore a forgiving) person, and to consider love as an end in itself. This will probably require a pretty thorough mental housecleaning (see Chapter 8).

Second, go to your level. This alone is a major step toward self-healing because, as I mentioned much earlier, at this level the negative work of the mind—all its guilts and angers—is neutralized, and the body is set free to do what nature designed it to do: repair itself. You may, of course, have very real feelings of guilt and anger, but we have found that these will be experienced only at the outer, or Beta, level and they tend to disappear as you practice Mind Control.

Third, mentally speak to yourself about step one: Express your desire to achieve a thorough mental housecleaning—to use positive words, to think positively, to become a loving, forgiving person.

Fourth, mentally experience the illness that is troubling you. Use the mental screen and see and feel the illness. This should be brief; its purpose is simply to focus your healing energies where they are needed.

Fifth, quickly erase this image of your illness and experience yourself as completely cured. Feel the freedom and happiness of being in perfect health. Hold on to this image, linger over it enjoy it and know that you deserve it—know that now in this healthy state you are fully in tune with nature’s intentions for you.

Sixth, reinforce your mental housecleaning once again, and end by saying to yourself, “Every day in every way I am getting better, better, and better.”

How long should this take and how often should you do it?

My experience is that fifteen minutes is about the best length of time. Go through this exercise as often as you can, no less often than once a day. There is no “too much.”

Chapter 10 Using Your Mind to Improve Your Health

You may have heard that meditation is a fine thing but that you must be careful not to become so enchanted by it that you do too much. This, it is said, can lead to a withdrawal from the world and an unhealthy preoccupation with yourself. Whether this is true or not, I do not know. This is said of other meditative disciplines, not Mind Control. Our emphasis is on involvement with the world, not withdrawal from it—not with transcending practical problems or ignoring them, but with facing them head-on and solving them. You cannot do too much of this.

Chapter 10 Using Your Mind to Improve Your Health

One of my patients was a Mind Control graduate, and for about a year she’d been suggesting I go with her to Mind Control. I always told her I didn’t believe in that nonsense. Then one day I saw her on about the fourth day of a headache and I must have been looking green and she said, “Isn’t it about time you took Mind Control? There’s a new course starting next week … why don’t you come along with me?”

I signed up for the course and went faithfully every single night, and sure enough, I didn’t have a headache that week. But a week after I finished the course I woke up with a terrible headache and a chance to see whether my programming would work. I went through one cycle and counted out … no headache … felt great. It was a miracle! Five seconds later the headache came back even worse. I didn’t give up, so I did another cycle, and the headache momentarily went away, then came back again. I had to go through about ten cycles, but I kept it up and didn’t take migraine medication. I told myself I was going to do it, and the headache finally did go away.

I didn’t have a headache for a while, but the next time three cycles relieved it I had headaches off and on for about three months after that, but I didn’t even need to take an aspirin. Since I took Mind Control I haven’t taken an aspirin. It really works!

Chapter 10 Using Your Mind to Improve Your Health

Here is another, from a nun, Sister Barbara Burns of Detroit, Michigan. I select this one because Sister Barbara has made ingenious use of her own triggering mechanism.

For twenty-seven years she had worn glasses because of nearsighted astigmatism. As her nearsightedness increased, her lenses were made stronger, which reduces distance acuity. Before the improvement of her eyesight, bifocals became necessary. Then, in July 1974, she decided to use Mind Control. In deep meditation she told herself, “Every time I blink my eyes, they will focus accurately, like the lens of a camera.” During each meditation she repeated this, and in two weeks she began to live without glasses, though she still needed them for reading. She consulted Dr. Richard Wlodyga, an optometrist (and Mind Control graduate), who told her that her cornea was slightly misshapen. Sister Barbara inserted the cornea correction into her meditation for the few weeks’ interval before another examination by Dr. Wlodyga.

The following is part of a letter to us from Dr. Wlodyga, which Sister Barbara asked him to write:

Sister Barbara Burns was first examined by me on 20 August 1974 …

I examined Sister Burns again on 26 August 1975. She had not worn her glasses for one year …

[The] patient has had a reduction in the amount of manifest myopia to a level where glasses have become unnecessary.

Chapter 10 Using Your Mind to Improve Your Health

Let us take a look at what is probably the most feared disease of all, cancer.

You may have read about the work of Dr. O. Carl Simonton, a cancer specialist. Marilyn Ferguson described some of it in her recent popular book The Brain Revolution, and in January 1976, Prevention Magazine published an article about him, “Mind Over Cancer,” by Grace Halsell. Dr. Simonton, who was trained in Mind Control techniques, has successfully adapted some of these to treating his patients.

When he was in charge of radiation therapy at Travis Air Force Base near San Francisco he studied a rare but well-known phenomenon: persons who, for no reason known to medicine, recover from cancer. These are known as “spontaneous remissions,” and they constitute a very small percentage of all cancer patients. If he could learn why these patients recovered, Dr. Simonton reasoned, perhaps he could find a way to cause remissions to occur.

He found that these patients had something very important in common. They were often positive, optimistic, determined people.

In an address at the Boston Convention of Mind Control in 1974, he said:

The biggest single emotional factor identified by investigators in the development of cancer in general is a significant loss six to eighteen months prior to the diagnosis of the disease.

This has been shown in several long-term studies by independent investigators with control groups. … We see that it is not just that loss that is a significant factor, but it is the way that loss is received by the individual.

You see, the loss has to be sufficient to cause a feeling of helplessness and hopelessness that persists on the part of the patient Thus, it would seem that his basic resistance goes down, allowing the malignancy to develop clinically.

Chapter 10 Using Your Mind to Improve Your Health

In another study at Travis Air Force Base, reported in the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology (Vol 7, no. 1, 1975.), Dr. Simonton rated the attitudes of 152 cancer patients in five categories, from strongly negative to strongly positive. Then he rated their responses to therapy, from excellent to poor. For 20 of these patients, results of their treatment were excellent—though the condition of 14 of them was so serious they would have had less than a fifty-percent chance of living five years. What tipped the balance was their positive attitudes. At the other end of the scale, 22 showed poor results from the treatment; none of these had positive attitudes.

Chapter 10 Using Your Mind to Improve Your Health

In his Boston speech, Dr. Simonton quoted the President of the American Cancer Society, Eugene Pendergrass, who said in 1959, “There is some evidence that the course of disease in general is affected by emotional distress. It is my sincere hope that we can widen the quest to include the distinct possibility that within one’s mind is a power capable of exerting forces which can either enhance or inhibit the progress of this disease.”

Chapter 10 Using Your Mind to Improve Your Health

“You see, I began with the idea that a patient’s attitude played a role in his response to any form of treatment and could influence the course of his disease. As I explored this, I found that Mind Control—biofeedback and meditation—concepts gave me a tool to use in teaching the patient how to begin the interaction and become involved with his own health process. I would say that it is the most powerful single tool that I have to offer the patient emotionally.”

Chapter 10 Using Your Mind to Improve Your Health

One of the first steps Dr. Simonton takes in training his patients is to banish fear. Once this education is begun, “we realize that cancer is a normal process going on in all of us, that we have cancerous cells developing malignant degeneration all the time. The body recognizes and destroys them the way it handles any foreign protein… . It is not simply a matter of getting rid of all the cancer cells, because we develop cancer cells all the time. It is getting the body back winning again, handling its own processes.”

Chapter 10 Using Your Mind to Improve Your Health

Most people .. . visualize a cancer cell as being a very ugly, mean, insidious thing that can sneak around and is very powerful; once it gets started there is nothing the body can do. In reality a cancer cell is a normal cell that has gone crazy. …

It is a very stupid cell—it reproduces so rapidly that many times it will encompass its own blood supply and starve itself. It is weak. You cut into it, or radiate it, or give it chemotherapy, and if it gets sick at all, it can’t regain its health. It dies.

Now compare that to a healthy cell. We know that in healthy tissue you can cut your finger, and if you do nothing more than put a Band-Aid on it, it will heal itself. We know that normal tissues can repair themselves … they don’t devour their own blood supply. Yet look at the mental image we have of those things. You can see the power we ascribe to the disease by our fears and the mental imagery we use in our fears

Chapter 10 Using Your Mind to Improve Your Health

Referring to the relaxation and visualization techniques they use along with radiation therapy, Mrs. Simonton said:

Probably the single most valuable tool we have is the mental imagery technique.

There are three basic things we ask patients to do. We ask them to visualize their disease, visualize their treatment, and to visualize the body’s immune mechanism.

[In our group sessions} what we talk about is picturing what we want to come about. Before we believe it will come about It seems to be important to picture it that way.

One of the main things we talk about is the meditation. How often are you meditating? What are you doing in your meditation?

Chapter 11 An Intimate Exercise for Lovers

The best foundation for a marriage, I believe, is intimacy—not an invasion-of-privacy kind of intimacy, but the sort that comes from deep understanding and acceptance.

Chapter 11 An Intimate Exercise for Lovers

Mrs. Simonton spoke of the many stresses in life which, if not handled properly, can lead to illness

Chapter 11 An Intimate Exercise for Lovers

to deliberately create a very comfortable intimacy that only years of living together could otherwise achieve. The result will be stronger and deeper than the one our students experience in classes.

Here is what to do:

Select a place where you both feel happiest, most relaxed. It might be a place where you vacationed together, any place with especially pleasant memories you share. It can even be a place neither of you has ever seen—you can create it together. Do not, however, select a place where only one of you has been. This will skew the symmetry of the experience and reduce the sense of sharing.

Sit comfortably, close, facing each other. Relax and let your eyes close.

One of you will say to the other something like this: “Fm going to count slowly from ten to one, and with each count you will feel yourself going deeper into a pleasant, meditative level of mind. Ten—nine—feel going deeper—eight—seven—six—deeper and deeper—five—four—deeper still—three—two—one. You are now relaxed, at a deep, pleasant level of mind. With your help, I will join you there.”

The other will say, “I will count slowly from ten to one, and with each count well come closer in a deep level of mind. Ten—nine—feel going deeper with me—eight—seven—six—deeper and deeper together— five—four—deeper still and closer—three—two—one. We are now both relaxed, at a pleasant level of mind. Let us go deeper together.”

The first person will say, “All right, let’s go very deep together. Let’s experience our place of relaxation together. The more we experience this, the deeper we will go. Notice the sky… “

“Yes … it’s clear, with a few drifting clouds.” Each of you will slowly, spontaneously, describe the scene you are experiencing together—the temperature, the colors, the sounds, all the pleasant details.

Chapter 11 An Intimate Exercise for Lovers

recommend it only for a man and woman seeking a deeper, richer, more durable commitment to each other.

Chapter 11 An Intimate Exercise for Lovers

Too many couples read how-to-do-rt sex manuals and, with a certain perfection of technique, think they are living a good sex life. To deliberate each step, with each step leading logically to the next keeps what could be a deep experience on the superficial, conscious level of Beta. More important is to flow with the experience, with the mind relaxed, at a meditative level.

Becoming psychically sensitive can enrich and improve a marriage immensely. Even without training, long and happy marriages can result in a deep psychic understanding between partners.

Chapter 12 You Can Practice Esp

in Mind Control we do not simply perceive, we actually project our awareness to where the desired information is.

Chapter 12 You Can Practice Esp

In Mind Control classes students are close to operating psychically by the end of the second day, and on the third they actually do operate psychically—to project their awareness outside their bodies.

They begin with a simple exercise in visual imagination. In very deep meditation they project themselves in front of their own homes by imagining they are there. They carefully note everything they see before they enter by the front door to stand in their living room facing the south wall. They see this room at night with the lights on, then in the daytime with sunlight coming through the windows, and study every detail they can remember. Then they touch the south wall and enter it. This may sound outlandish to you, but it is perfectly natural to those who have gone through intensive training in visualization.

Inside the wall they are where they have never been before, so they “test” their new environment by noting the light, the odors, the temperature, and, by knocking on the inside of the wall, the solidity of the materials. Outside the wall again and facing it, they change its color to black, red, green, blue, and violet, then return it to its original color. Next they hold up a chair— weightless in this dimension—and study it against the wall as they change its color again. They do this with a watermelon, a lemon, an orange, three bananas, three carrots, and a head of lettuce.

Chapter 12 You Can Practice Esp

When this session is completed, the first important step has been taken to put the logical mind in the back seat and the imaginative mind up front where the controls are. In the kind of exercises I am describing now, the logical mind tells the student, “No, don’t tell me you’re inside a wall or some other outlandish place. You know that can’t be; you’re sitting here.”

But the imaginative mind, now strengthened by a series of visualization exercises, is able to ignore this. As the imagination grows even stronger, so do our psychic powers. It is the imaginative mind which holds them.

Chapter 12 You Can Practice Esp

During the next session the students mentally project themselves into cubes or cylinders of metal—stainless steel, copper, brass, and lead—where, as they did inside the walk they test for fight, odor, color, temperature, and solidity, all at a pace rapid enough to keep logic out of the way.

Working their way up from the simple to the more complex arrangements of matter, they begin their projection into living matter with a fruit tree. They examine a fruit tree in all four seasons against a sequence of colors on their mental screens, then project into the leaves and the fruit.

Now for a giant step forward: projection into a pet The students have been so successful up to this point that “Can I really do this?” is a question that crosses very few minds. They confidently examine a pet from the outside against their mental screens, with colors changing; then, just as confidently, they mentally enter the skull and living brain. After a few minutes of reconnaissance inside the pet’s head, they emerge once again to examine him from the outside, this time focusing on the chest Now inside the chest to examine the rib cage, the spine, the heart, the lungs, the liver; then out again, now armed with points of reference for what will probably be the most dumbfounding day of their lives, the fourth day, when they will work with humans. However, there is preparatory work to do beforehand.

In an especially deep level of meditation, sometimes well into Theta, Mind Control students—in their now well-trained imaginations—construct laboratories of whatever size, shape, and color they are comfortable with. These will include a desk and chair of their own design, a clock, a calendar containing all dates, past, present, and future, plus filing cabinets. Nothing unusual so far.

Chapter 12 You Can Practice Esp

Imagine a fine sieve for filtering impurities from blood; a delicate brush to sweep away the white powder (calcium) that can be seen psychically in cases of arthritis; lotions for fast healing; baths for washing away guilt; a hi-fi set with special music for calming the distressed. Every student makes up his own armamentarium; no two sets of tools are exactly alike. They come from where all is possible, from deep levels of mind, and many graduates come to realize that the work they do with them has consequences in what we call the objective world.

Chapter 12 You Can Practice Esp

Counselors can be very real to Mind Control graduates. What are they? We are not sine—perhaps some figment of an archetypal imagination, perhaps an embodiment of the inner voice, perhaps something more. What we do know is that, once we meet our counselors and learn to work with them, the association is respectful and priceless.

Chapter 12 You Can Practice Esp

As you will soon see, a Mind Control graduate, mentally in his laboratory, confidently consulting his counselors, is a person with an immense power to benefit himself and others. At this point in Mind Control training, this is understood but not yet experienced.

Chapter 12 You Can Practice Esp

When he signals that he is ready—at his level, in his laboratory, in the presence of his counselors—the Psychorientologist tells him the name, age, sex, and location of the person whose name is on the card. The psychic operator’s job is to find out what is wrong with this person he has never met and never heard of until this moment. He examines this person’s body, inside and out, in the orderly way his imagination has been trained to do, consulting with his counselors when necessary, perhaps “speaking” to the person himself.

Chapter 12 You Can Practice Esp

The psychic operator is urged by his Psychorientologist to report findings as he goes along, to “keep talking, even if you feel you’re guessing.” Typically, a session would sound like this (the following is based on a real case):

Psychorientologist: “The name of the person I have listed here is John Summers. He is forty-eight years old, lives in Elkhart, Indiana. One, two, three—John Summers of Elkhart, Indiana, is now on your screen. Sense it, feel it, visualize it, imagine it, create it, know he is there, take it for granted he is there. Scan the body with your intelligence from where you know the head to be to where you know the feet are, up and down, up and down, once a second.

“While scanning the body in this manner, allow your imagination to select the three areas of greatest attraction. Maintain the rate of scanning at once a second and mention to me the areas of attraction as they come to you. You will feel as though you are making it up, so tell me everything that enters your mind.”

Psychic operator: “He carries his right shoulder a little lower, a little forward . …Everything else seems okay except maybe the left ankle…. Let’s look inside the chest…. Everything’s warm…. a little cooler on the right….cooler and darker….His right lung is gone…. Now to that ankle….Seems okay, just a little jagged white line there…. hurts in damp weather….must have broken it sometime….I guess that’s all….Wait, my female counselor is turning the guy around for me, pointing to a spot behind his ears….yes, terribly deep scars there….he had a mastoid operation, very deep….Okay, that’s all.”

Chapter 12 You Can Practice Esp

Psychorientologist: “Very good. He is missing his right lung and there is a deep scar behind one ear. I have no information about the ankle. Now review the feelings you had when you told me about the right lung and the scar behind the ear. Review your feeling and use this as a point of reference next time you work a case.”

After a moment’s pause the psychic returns to Beta, smiling. “Wow! That’s crazy!”

Chapter 12 You Can Practice Esp

The Mind Control student, when he functions psychically for the first time, feels that he is “just imagining” what he sees. This is why the Psychorientologist tells him to “keep talking, even if you feel you are just guessing.” If he were to stop talking, his logical mind might tempt him to start reasoning things out, stifling his psychic powers, just as it does in everyday life.

After his first direct hit, the Mind Control student knows he is not “just imagining.” He is imagining and learning to trust the first thing that comes to mind. This is his psychic gift coming through.

Chapter 12 You Can Practice Esp

Yes, it is crazy. It violates everything we have experienced in this sane world. However, there is nothing unusual about this scene I have just described. Some miss a little on their first case, some miss altogether on the first, second, even third case; but as the day draws to an end, virtually everyone has scored enough direct hits to know it is not “just coincidence”—something very real is at work here.

Too often we think of the imagination as an irresponsible creator of nonsense. Often it is. But works of art are the products of trained imaginations; psychic results are also the product of imaginations trained in a very special way

Chapter 12 You Can Practice Esp

The psychic energy which people send out is strongest when their survival is at stake. This is why so many cases of spontaneous ESP involve accidents and sudden death.

It is for this reason that our final exercise is case work with severely ill people. The graduate who conscientiously practices his case work learns to pick up weaker and weaker psychic signals until one day he is able psychically to connect with anyone he has in mind, whether or not the person is in trouble. With practice we become more and more sensitive.

Chapter 13 Form Your Own Practice Group

Begin by mentally projecting yourselves into metal. You will not have cubes or cylinders of metals as we have in our classes; you can use dimes and pennies for silver and copper, a ring for gold, a small magnet for iron. You should all examine these objects carefully, then go to your level and imagine one object at a time—picturing it several feet in front of you, above eye level. Imagine the object expanding until it is almost the size of the room, then enter it and perform the various tests.

Do the same with fruits and vegetables, and finally a pet You can consider these exercises a success when everyone has felt a distinct difference between his examinations of one object and another. It is not necessary that results of each test be clear and detailed, only that the total experience of each object be distinct from the experience of other objects

Chapter 13 Form Your Own Practice Group

I mentioned that you should do this under carefully controlled conditions. Here is what I mean:

Select a quiet place where you are unlikely to be interrupted or disturbed.

Be sure that every member of the group has practiced all the exercises in this book, in proper order, and has been successful with them.

Agree beforehand that there will be no ego trips. someone in the group will probably succeed more spectacularly than the rest at first tins does not mean that he is the best or in any sense superior he has simply succeeded first some may not begin to operate psychically until the fifth or sixth meeting but the slowest often turn out to be the best psychics.

If you know a Mind Control graduate, ask him to join you. If he has kept up with his Mind Control, he will be of immense help. If he has let it slip, a brief refresher with this book or another go-around with a Mind Control class (he can do this free of charge) will bring him back.

Chapter 14 How to Help Others With Mind Control

Obviously there is an energy involved in mental projection, an energy aimed by the intentions of our minds. Change these intentions from information gathering to healing and we change what the energy does.

How do we link our intentions to this energy so that it accomplishes what we want? The intention alone, in its pure form, is something like the will. As I said in the chapter on habit control, the will alone is of very little use. Just as we detect abnormalities by visualizing them, we visualize conditions as we want them to be— without the abnormalities. This is psychic healing. It’s as simple as that.

Chapter 14 How to Help Others With Mind Control

I began healing work long before I had developed Mind Control, and in fact long before I had an organized methodology for healing. I tried one method after another, with varying results. The important thing is that I did not wait and a significant number of healings did take place—enough, in fact that I developed a certain renown as a healer in my area of the U.S-Mexican border. Many thought I had special gifts or unusual powers; but I had simply read and experimented until I got the hang of it.

Chapter 14 How to Help Others With Mind Control

During the more-than-an-hour chat we were both alert and relaxed, two conditions helpful in healing. The subjects we discussed gave him added confidence in parapsychology. In psychic work, confidence is as important as faith is in religion. Meanwhile I began to visualize him in better health and, just as important learned to like him more and more. Love is a tremendous power; I wanted that on our side, too.

I did one more thing in preparation for what I would later do that night. To help visualize him later, I studied the priest—his face, the feel of his handshake, his various expressions and mannerisms, the sound of his voice, the overall feeling of being in his presence. This was the “initial work.”

Chapter 14 How to Help Others With Mind Control

I had learned that psychic energies are transferred most effectively when survival is at stake, as I mentioned in die last chapter. Instead of going to my level, as I would today, I held my breath while picturing the priest in perfect health. Long minutes went by, until my body screamed for breath. Still I held on to my image of the priest in perfect health. Meanwhile my brain, in a sort of psychic scream, cried out and the energy of the scream carried the carefully held image of perfect health exactly where it was supposed to go.

Finally I breathed, convinced the job was done, and it was. The method I teach and use today is much easier on the operator and just as effective

Chapter 14 How to Help Others With Mind Control

Simply learn to use the mental screen vividly, with confidence. Let me outline the procedure for you, step by step.

It is helpful, though not necessary, to know the condition of the person you are about to heal. You can learn this psychically or objectively; it does not matter.

Go to your meditative level and project this person onto your mental screen as he is, with whatever ailment is troubling him. Place another image on the screen to the left, showing something being done to correct the problem. (If you have not met the person and are not yet ready for case work, try to learn beforehand what he looks like to make your visualization as accurate as possible.)

Now project onto the screen—still farther left—a vivid image of the person in perfect health, filled with energy and optimism. In deep meditation you are acutely receptive to what you say to yourself. This particular moment is crucial to developing a conviction that the happy image you now have of the person is the real one —not that it is becoming real or that it will be real, but that it is real. The reason for this is that at this meditative level, at Alpha and Theta, your mind is in league with causes; at Beta it deals more with results.. By visualizing with conviction in Alpha and Theta you are causing. Never mind what you seem to be doing to time by substituting “is” for “will be.” Time is something else at this level. Visualize the results you want as being already achieved.

Chapter 14 How to Help Others With Mind Control

Among the laws of the universe there seems to be a sort of cosmic Bill of Rights which guarantees that all of us, no matter how high or low, no matter how bright or dull, can take part in causing lawful things to happen through the firmness of our desire, belief, and expectancy. This was said earlier, and better, almost 2,000 years ago, as reported by Mark in the New Testament: “What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall receive them.”

Chapter 14 How to Help Others With Mind Control

While you visualize this person in perfect health there will come an instant, a very pleasant one, when you know that you have done enough. It is pleasant because it is a feeling of accomplishment Count yourself out to Beta, one to five, “feeling wide awake and better than before.”

Chapter 14 How to Help Others With Mind Control

The more you practice this technique, the more beautiful coincidences will occur and the more firm will be your belief, which in turn will produce even more beautiful coincidences. As soon as you learn to use your mental screen you can begin to spark this chain reaction.

While the techniques of faith and psychic healing may be different I believe their principles—and results—are the same. Rituals of faith healing differ from one culture to another, but they have the same twofold effect: to induce a deeper level of mind, and to buttress belief and expectation.

Chapter 14 How to Help Others With Mind Control

Many healers use methods which exhaust them. They are drained of energy and sometimes lose weight in a single sitting. This is not necessary. In fact Mind Control methods have the opposite effect Once we sense that feeling of accomplishment we experience a lift— not a subtle one; it is quite strong—and we do awaken “feeling better than before.” Healing others, we find, is good for the healer.

Many healers believe they cannot heal themselves. Some feel that if they even try this they will lose their “power.” We have proved this to be untrue, over and over.

Chapter 14 How to Help Others With Mind Control

One small observation: Notice that in our folklore, when we make a wish—with a wishbone or when we see a star fall or when we blow out birthday candles— we are admonished not to reveal our wish. This secrecy is probably more than mere child’s play; I think there is some wisdom behind it. Keeping our wish—or, more to the point, our visualization of a healing—bottled up in secrecy seems a way to avoid dissipating its energy, maybe even to add to its energy. For this reason, I and many of our lecturers advise students to keep their healing work to themselves

Chapter 15 Some Speculations

The best definition I ever heard of reality is that it is the one dream we all share. We have only the faintest hints of what it actually is. What we perceive, the way we see things, is largely for our own convenience. Things at a distance are not really smaller, and solid things are not really solid.

Chapter 18 Your Self-Esteem Will Soar

most of us are imprisoned by narrow ideas of who we are and what we can do. You will soon experience the exhilaration of smashing these confines and finding new freedoms outside them. When you see what you are capable of, your self-esteem will soar.

Chapter 18 Your Self-Esteem Will Soar

There is another condition that involves shattered self-esteem, not as self-imposed as drug or alcohol addiction, but even more widespread—poverty

Chapter 18 Your Self-Esteem Will Soar

It is generally a state of mind, a damaged self-image, that puts a person in prison, and that coarsens and brutalizes him while he is there; and it is a state of mind that often ensures his quick return once he is “free.”

Chapter 19 Mind Control in the Business World

Imagine believing in Murphy’s Law—“If anything can go wrong, it will, and at the worst possible time”—then suddenly discovering that there is no such law but, instead, the cosmic Bill of Rights that José wrote about

Chapter 19 Mind Control in the Business World

I’m convinced that good things really happen when you look at life positively. It’s amazing how much warmth flows between two people when you are pleasant and tolerant of each other

Chapter 19 Mind Control in the Business World

separating clouds so I could shoot aerial photos without shadows on the ground

Chapter 19 Mind Control in the Business World

psychic, a licensed locksmith in the Midwest, is often called upon to open safes for owners who cannot recall their combination.

Chapter 20 Where Do We Go From Here?

Mind Control is a very careful selection of mental exercises and techniques that reinforce each other. To ignore one because it does not work as well for you as another is to pass up the opportunity of truly full development. Dream Control reinforces your ability with the Mental Screen; the Mental Screen makes Dream Control more reliable and vivid. The course, and Josh’s chapters here, are all of a piece; the whole is much greater than the parts.

Chapter 20 Where Do We Go From Here?

William Blake:

To see a world in a grain of sand And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour.

Appendix I The Mind Control Course and the Organization Behind It

The second afternoon begins with an explanation

of one of the key problem-solving techniques

of Dynamic Meditation, the Mirror

of the Mind-an elaboration of the Mental

Screen. In addition, a deepening exercise, Hand

Levitation, and a method for controlling pain,

Glove Anesthesia, are discussed

Appendix I The Mind Control Course and the Organization Behind It

breaks have several important functions in the training. One is to allow students time to reflect on what they have experienced. Another is to give them plenty of unstructured time to become acquainted. This is part of the way a powerful group spirit develops

Appendix II Silva Mind Control and the Psychiatric Patient

Some of the patients who had been psychotic found that their illness had enhanced their ability to function in an altered state of consciousness, and this added meaning to their prolonged illness and meaning to their lives.

Appendix II Silva Mind Control and the Psychiatric Patient

There was a greater relaxation and lessening of anxiety. Patients learned to rely on their own inner resources to understand, cope with, and solve problems, and being able to do so gave them more self-confidence.

Appendix II Silva Mind Control and the Psychiatric Patient

It is our experience that acute psychotic illness has an early origin, with a pathological mother-infant relationship in the first two years of life, often reinforced by subsequent trauma. This predisposition requires a precipitating factor in the person’s current life situation to cause him to regress and re-experience the feelings and reality of the distant past Usually the precipitating factor is a severe rejection or separation from an important person

Appendix II Silva Mind Control and the Psychiatric Patient

All psychotics we have treated became ill as a result of a rejection, separation, threatened loss (real or imagined), diminished attention, etc., triggering an unconscious fear of abandonment.

Appendix II Silva Mind Control and the Psychiatric Patient

The mind has great capabilities, but at its normal level of functioning it is constantly bombarded by various stimuli at once: thoughts, wishes, needs, desires, noises, lights, pressures, conflicts, stresses of all sorts; it is not free to direct more than ten percent of its attention to any one thing. At the relaxed level it is.

Appendix II Silva Mind Control and the Psychiatric Patient

Positive thinking is always valuable, but positive thinking in the relaxed state is immeasurably more so.

Appendix II Silva Mind Control and the Psychiatric Patient

Relaxation diminishes anxiety and therefore decreases symptomatology. A person cannot be in a relaxed state of mind and body and be extremely anxious or conflicted at the same time.

Introduction

There is a special way to read this book: first read it as you would any other, from beginning to end. However, during your first reading, do not begin to practice any of the exercises. Then reread chapters 3 to 14 to get an even clearer, overall picture of the roads you are about to travel. Next read Chapter 3 and practice the exercises in it—and only those exercises—for a few weeks. When you know you are ready, go on to Chapter 4, and so on.

When you reach Chapter 14 you will already be an experienced practitioner of much that Mind Control graduates have learned. To further enrich your experience, you may wish to form a small group of friends who have practiced the same exercises. Chapter 13 tells you how to do this.