Tripping Through the Twilight Zone

8/12/2019 Tripping Through the Twilight Zone

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/tripping-through-the-twilight-zone 1/121 THE SILVA ARCHIVES



This particular article talks about the ESP andcase working experiences one gets from SilvaMind Control classes.

A journalist for the Washington post decided toinvestigate the class after hearing many of theclaims about the Silva Method back in 1972.

While the journalist openly admits his initial skepti-cism and raises his objections and concerns in thebeginning of the article, the interesting part comesat the end, when he describes his rst hand ac-count from the journalist about case working:

“Kathy’s analysis of my uncle was, however, to re-

duce the cynicism. With no prompting, her “scan-

ning” of the body identied the head and the brain

as the affected area. “There’s a dark spot or part

removed...it looks like it has been eaten out...”

Later, asked to examine the rest of the body, Kathy

said, “I can only see something pointing to the

section of the brain saying, ‘This is where it is, this

where it is...’” Then she described his movement:

“He’s leaning forward...he’s lumbering like he was

rather over-weight...I get the great impression

he’s favoring one side, the right: he’s not using his

left...I don’t think anything’s broken...”

It was an accurate portrayal of my uncle’s symp-toms.”

If you have been to a recent Silva Method course,you will see fundamental similarities from 1972with today’s current training’s of the Silva Method.

An important point to note about this article is thatits important to enter the seminar with an open

mind.

As you will see from the article, Silva Method train-ing has always been very powerful and efcient in

developing ESP abilities in its students. Althoughthere are a few important changes that havehappened in the last 40 years.

The pricing mentioned and core structure describedthe programs of the 70s, much has changed, th 4days course that is described, is now taught as 2

separate programs - Silva Life System and SilvaUltra Mind System.

Students no longer have to take these programslive - You can study the program at home - for moreinformation go to www.silvalifesystem.com

I loved this article, its important to realize that dif-

ferent instructors have different styles. Not every-one will have the same experience as the writer.

The only thing I didn’t like is that he referred toJose as a former waiter, while he did wait tables atone point, he was also an entrepreneur who ran asuccessful radio technician. honest review fromthe author.

Journalist From The

Washington Post Investigates

The Silva Method



I wanted to make this article available to you be-cause what I like is the objectivity and honest re-view from the author. So read on for the full article.

Better and Better,

Laura Silva Quesada



Tripping Through The Twilight Zone

The ads for Silva Mind Control are not modest: “...through alpha wave function you can learn to con-trol your problems and improve your life...controlyour health, memory, weight, sleep, headaches...get higher grades...tap your creative potential...develop ESP.”

Similarity, during 40 hours of instruction that I at-tended over one week at a cost of $175, Silva

Mind Control was billed as the answer to pso-riasis, trafc congestion, arthritis, oversleeping,

theism, nearsightedness, glaucoma and canceramong other ills. but more than that, the dreamheld before us by the instructors was that SilvaMind Control could turn each of us into function-

ing psychics able to see into the problems of ourfellow mean, yea, verily, and even heal them, OROUR MONEY BACK!

After that week, I don’t want my money back. Wemet in a conference room of the Beltsville Holi-day Inn. Our meditation was disturbed each nightby reverberations from the band in the motel nightclub and by kitchen workers who, from time to

time, would sneak a look at the class.

The instructor, an erstwhile electrical engineernamed Donald Anderson, embroidered on the adsat the Monday introductory lecture, at which some60 outwardly ordinary people had paid $3.00

By David R Boldt, Washington Post Staff Writer



“There were other stories about Mind

Control alumni: The mother who informed

her hot-rodding son that his distributor

casing was cracked-- without ever seeing

the car: a Philadelphia doctor who diag-

nosed his patients before they arrived”

each to hear why they should pay $175 morefor the full course.

Anderson mainly cited case histories, like that ofGeorge, The American University student who,using Mind Control got an A on a sociology testhe hadn’t studied for by literally imagining his pro-fessor dictating the answers to him. (I later metGeorge, an inspiring Mind Control instructor, andhe averred that it was all true. I also met anotherMind Control graduate who had tried George’smethod and got a D for his pains.)

There were other stories about Mind Control alum-

ni: The mother who informed her hot-rodding sonthat his distributor casing was cracked--withoutever seeing the car: a Philadelphia doctor whodiagnosed his patients before they arrived: a Na-tional Institute of Mental Health research psycholo-gist who had come to the course to scoff--and thenhad seen his grandmother rescued from death’sdoorstep, apparently be extrasensory perception(ESP).

The NIMH psychologist, Dr. Richard Green, Saidin an interview later that “very little” of what wasclaimed for Mind Control could be scientically

demonstrated.

But he added that he would be “charitable” in as-sessing Silva Mind Control. “Setting aside the my-thology involved in the course, most researchersagree on the validity of ESP events. Mind

Control does get you to a state where these canoccur.”

Green said that during the course, a fellow studenthad warned him during a psychic drill session thathis grandmother was having a near-fatal seizureTo be safe, Green had called an aunt, who lived

near the grandmother, and asked her to check onthe 94-year-old woman.

When the aunt arrived she was barely in time tocall help. The old woman had fallen on the oor,

her face becoming blue and twitching, in agonyfrom pain in her leg- -just the symptoms Green’sclassmate had stipulated and all more or less asDon Anderson told our class.

There was also a part of Green’s story that Ander

son hadn’t covered. “About a month later,” recallsGreen, “I went back for a sort of refresher courseMy grandmother had been brought back from thehospital, but was bedridden, and couldn’t even situp. The doctors didn’t expect her to live.” “I gaveher name as a case again. The woman who didthe case said that she could see clots in the grand-mother’s left lung and that the woman was havingtrouble breathing.

“...through alpha wave function you can learn

to control your problems and improve your

ife...control your health, memory, weight, leep,

headaches... get higher grades...tap your rea-

tive potential...de velop ESP.”



I asked her if she could send help, and she didso in a sort of childish way, imaging that she waspatting the clots with a cloth and saying, “Pat, pat,all pink.’”

“When I got to my grandmother’s apartment shewas sitting up for the rst time. She said she felt

much better. Today she’s alive, as active and alertas she was before the rst attack.” Green said he

now feels his grandmother had a blockage of theleft lung that cured itself on the day the Mind Con-trol classmate was saying, “Pat, pat, all pink.” I cansay it wasn’t a coincidence...I can only saythat is happened.”

At the Monday night lecture, Anderson alsogave us a glimpse at the methodology--noequipment,

just the logging in of “ying time” in a self-

induced pleasurable state of relaxationwhile building up the ability to visualize andimagine--and a gloss of the scientic in-terpretations of why it all happens. “We’renot going to get too heavy on this,” said

Anderson, explaining that the basic idea is

that in a condition of relaxation, the mindgenerates more alpha brain waves. Whengenerating these waves, he said, it healsitself better visualizes more easily, and ismore open to ESP.

We also received a thumbnail sketch ofJose Silva, the Mexican-American ex-wait-er with three years of formal education whoparlayed his parapsychological methodol-

ogy into a nation wide franchise system that turnsout psychics almost as fast as McDonald’s turnsout hamburgers. Almost 50,000 persons have tak-en the course in ve years, 14,000 of them in the

Washington area. Fifteen of us signed up for thefull course that night.

The four week night sessions-- Tuesday, Wednes-day, Thursday and Friday---stressed lectures

maintaining that Nils Bohr, Albert Einstein, Tho-mas Edison and others had, wittingly or not, usedMind Control techniques to gain insights. Severatimes each night we also descended by stagesinto the mood of relaxation to the 10-cycle- per-second beat of an alpha wave-like buzz played on

Anderson’s portable cassette tape recorder.

The “calm state of relaxation”--also known as “Lev-el 1” from the 3-2-1 countdown procedure usedto get there--was just sort of an eyes-closed, day-dreaming state, made more relaxing and pleasur-able and allegedly alphawave producing (“deep-ened”) byvisualization of idyllic scenes and otherexercises.

“the “calm state of relaxation”--also knownas “Level 1” from the 3-2-1 countdown pro-

cedure used to get there--was just sort of an

eyesclosed, day-dreaming state, made more

relaxing and pleasurable and allegedly alpha-

wave producing (“deepened”) by visualiza-

tion of idyllic scenes and other exercises.”



In one exercise we imagined a clock on our “men-tal screen.” We could, Don said, use the body’ssubconscious awareness of time as an alarm clockby mentally setting the clock’s hands at the hour

wewished to wake up, and then pulling the alarmbutton Also while “at level” we could suggest toourselves that a headache, if we had one, was go-ing away; through similar suggestion procedure,he said, we could also “program ourselves” to stopovereating or smoking--indeed, eradicate virtual-ly any malady. There seemed to be no problem,not even nearsightedness or procrastination, forwhich help was not offered.

Toward the latter end, Don would read a series ofaphorisms, while we were “at level,” such as, “I willnever allow myself to develop...arthritis...diabetes...glaucoma...or the disease knownas cancer,”and, “...my increasing faculties are for serving hu-manity better...Every day in every way I’m gettingbetter and better and better...”

“Try it, you’ll like it,” urged Don after explainingeach procedure. I tried the headache remedy and,to my stupefaction, exorcised one of the throbbing

sinus headaches I get, which usually don’t suc-cumb to anything but a massive dose of aspirin.My mental clock, however, turned out to be run-ning almost exactly a half hour behind EasternStandard Time, resulting in several mornings ofhavoc. I have had no appropriate opportunity yetto test another procedure called “glove anesthe-sia,” which is reputed to halt severe pain and evenbleeding.

We were told(“programmed”) by Anderson to ex-

punge malevolent thoughts by saying “cancel,cancel.” That was to erase them from our brains(“multi-million-dollar computers”). This clean think-ing (“elimination of negative programming”) andthe aphorisms were our introduction to the fer-vently moral, and ultimately religious, harmonicssurrounding the Mind Control message. Andersoncame on strong with the pitch Wednesday night,

exhorting us to go forth from Silva Mind Controand de-pollute rivers, reform our education sys-tem, and bring peace to Vietnam and peace toUlster, among other items.“We’ve got to take astand,” he said. “It’s got to start with us.” “It’s got tostart with us.”

Mixed with the ethics were increasing illustra-tions from Biblical depictions of Christ as faith-healer and Mind Controller. Christ,Andersonparaphrased, had told his followers to be as littlechildren, meaning, to Mind Control acionados

that we should recover the easy use of the alphabrain wave state that children have for visualiza-tion and imagination.

Christ also taught that the “Kingdom of heavenis within,” a reference, Anderson would have us

believe, to the octave of brain cycles in the alpharange. But it was left to Ron Williams, area coordi-nator for Silva, to really spell it out as we preparedfor the ESP exercises on Saturday. “Christ told usto go forth and cleanse the lepers and heal thesick. Well, I don’t know about you, but that’s notwhat they were doing in my church.” Mind Controworld, he said, bring us back to the meaning ofreligion that Christ had proclaimed.

During the week the 15 students got to know eachother and compared notes on why we’d comeCarol had come with a “terrible sense of urgen-cy” after hearing about the course from friendsShe hoped it would help her understand her step-daugther. She and her husband George drovedown to Beltsville each night from Annapolis.

Ted a government microbiologist who was goingthrough the course a second time, hoped it wouldhelp him learn to play the organ (it hadn’t the rst

time). Beverly was there with Michael, who hadtaken the course be fore. Mind Control, they said,had brought them together via an ESP messagethat Michael sent. For Marcia, who was at thecourse with her husband and high school-agedaughter, the course tied with her work on a mas-ter’s degree in art history that had dened West-ern artistic tradition as



devotee who amazed hotel guests by standing onhis head in the hallway during class breaks.

When Anderson asked at the introductory lec-

ture how many had read books by or about EdgarCayce, the Kentuckian who claimed to have curedpeople by going into a hypnotic trance and thenprescribing for them, fully half the hands in thehouse went up.These were people who were ready to believe,

and by Thursday my continuing cynicism was be-ginning to grate on some of my classmates. “Areyou still skeptical?” one girl asked as I tried to puta few questions to Anderson.

The answer is that I was and I wasn’t. I’d come on

an assignment. I was looking for quackery. But byweek’s end I was hoping with everyone else thatit did work. Not that I really expected to be vouch-safed against cancer or to gain a knack for mira-cle cures. It would be enough, I thought, if I justlearned how to concentrate a little better, havesomewhat faster recall of anecdotes and statisticswhile writing, and maybe just enough ESP sensi-

tivity to probe a bit more effectively when question-ing news sources.

The Saturday setting was surreal--the pool loungeof the Sheraton Silver Spring, where we werecombined with another class. Out the 9th oor

windows, beaded with early morning rain, the

Maryland countryside met the sky at a misty ho-rizon. Through another glass wall was the limpidsplashless, aquamarine pool. During his introduc-tory homily against the sin of skepticism, Don toldus that we would only be convinced by our ownexperience. “I could walk across that pool and itwouldn’t mean anything to you if you couldn’t doit yourself. In fact, I have walked on water.” Theclass looked at him, at the pool and back at himWas he going to? “Of course,” said he, droppingthe punch line, “It was very cold out on the dayI did it.”The mixture of the madcap and the mystical wasa constant feature of the course, used to weavein the theme that Mind Control was not, in Ander-son’s terms, “Far out...kooky.” It was the method ofpresentation led us to believe, a middle-road ap-proach, between palmistry and astral projection tothe more extreme side, and yet ahead of the un-enlightened who were as yet unwilling to concedethe mind’s true powers.

We spent the rest of the day trying to imagine our-selves inside different metals, inside plants, insidea pet animal, and then inside a human system. Wepictured our mental projection of ourselves on our“mental screens”: Some, the imagining came hard

“I didn’t see a thing,” conded one woman during a

break. But for others it was all stunningly real--fan-tastic voyages through the tinkling atoms of stain-less steel, for instance. Inside the plants, for some

the pulpy cells became tangible; others claimedeven to experience the musty humidity of a green-

“I’d come on an assignment. I was looking

for quackery. But by week’s end I was hop-ing with everyone else that it did work”

“Mind Control is confusing to me. I’m

always surprised when it works. But it

does work.”



house. But it was the Saturday night session thatfor most of us marked the departure from the ex-plicable to the uncanny. Our teacher was Peter

Kline, who, when not on a Mind Control Podium,passes on the more mundane discipline of Englishliterature at Sidwell Friends School in Washington.

He later was to put it the way many of us were tofeel it; “Mind Control is confusing to me. I’m al-ways surprised when it works. But it does work.”

The night’s project was to build our “psychic labo-ratories” in which we would work “cases” tomor-

row. The “cases” would be names of relatives andfriends with grave health problems. The rationalebehind this had been presented carefully. ESP canbe demonstrated by having people try to transmit,for instance, the number and suit of a playing card.But such trivial matters don’t generate ESP signalswith anything like the amplitude of a human whosesurvival is endangered. Our goal would be to de-cipher what was wrong, and attempt to send helppsychically. For some this would be done by imag-ining an operation, or the affected area.

The initial construction phase was easy: the vis-ualization of a room, with a view if desired, andequipped with a desk, chair, medical equipment,le cabinets, other furniture and seats for our

“counselors.” Counselors? Yes, counselors. Petertold us we would summon a male and a femaleperson, identities unknown, to serve as our “advis-ers.” They would be geniuses in all elds, universal

persons, he said. They would appear in our labo-ratories while we were in our relaxed state via aspecial imaginary elevator in which the door wouldopen downward from the top, revealing the coun-selor feature by feature. We, or our consciousminds, were to watch our unconscious minds cre-ate.

It was eerie. One woman who had taken the coursebefore told me she had been badly shaken when

her male “counselor” arrived wearing an animamask. She nally got him to take it off, she said

and it turned out to be her one-time analyst.

We lowered our imaginary elevator doors to thesequence Peter read out of the course book. “..now you can see your counselor’s hair...its color..

the way it is combed...now the forehead...you arebeginning to get an idea of the counselor’s age..and now the face, feature by feature by feature...”it has been eaten out...”

The level of excitement rose. Helen, a middle-agedformer nurse, told me later that as her imaginarydoor was descending “my heart was throbbing---felt high.” Her “counselors,” she said, were stran-gers. For some people, none appeared. Others

said they witnessed the arrival of next-door neigh-bors, ex-roommates, old ames. Carol got Ida Lu-pino; Danny Kaye turned up for another studentMy own “counselors” turned out to be the lateRobert F. Kennedy and a girl I had known 12years ago.

The “cases” were to start on Sunday afternoon,and during the morning the class peppered Peter with questions. Does it matter if the age and ad-dress of the “case” are only approximate? No. In

fact, the name isn’t really necessary. What if you

“But diagnosing people I knew amazed me

less than my own diagnosing of others. In

the case of a 94 year old man, I saw his eyes

beside his head and said that meant he was

losing his eyesight (he had glaucoma). I

found myself literally asking him if anything

else was wrong. I can’t explain it”

don’t see anything--should you make it up? Yesin fact, everyone who does it will feel like they aremaking it up. What if you get things wrong? Don’tworry, you will. Lots of things. But you will get morethings right than you can possibly anticipate. Whenthe afternoon session started, Kathy, Helen and



formed a group. We would take turns being the“psychic,” who does the diagnosing, the orientolo-gist, who presents the case, and the recorder, whowrites down what both say.

The rst case was a disaster. I gave Helen the

name, age and address of a friend of my wife’swho was nine months pregnant, a fairly severeperiod of trauma it had seemed to me. “Wouldyou believe,” Helen nally said, “that I’m drawing

a complete blank?” There was some switchingaround after the rst case. Kathy and I ended up

moving into a group with one of the graduates ofan earlier course back for a refresher.

The initial lack of success had been deating, and

as I began to give to Kathy the case of an uncle, avictim of the mysterious unravelling of the brain’saction to the muscles known as multiple sclerosis,my skepticism was on the rise. After all, I was think-ing, if you know the age and sex of the subject, the

range of possibilities is considerably reduced.

An educated guess might be right a good per-centage of the time, especially if a few clues weredropped. The “orientologist” was allowed, for ex-ample, to suggest a check of a certain system, likethe circulatory system, or let the person function-

ing as psychic know when he had identied an af -fected section of the body.

Kathy’s analysis of my uncle was, however, to re-duce the cynicism. With no prompting, her “scan-ning” of the body identied the head and the brain

as the affected area. “There’s a dark spotor partremoved...it looks like it has been eaten out...”

Later, asked to examine the rest of the body, Kathysaid, “I can only see something pointing to the

section of the brain saying, ‘This is where it is, thiswhere it is...’” Then she described his movement“He’s leaning forward...he’s lumbering like he wasrather over-weight...I get the great impressionhe’s favoring one side, the right: he’s not using hisleft...I don’t think anything’s broken...”



It was an accurate portrayal of my uncle’s symp-toms. But what was to be more remarkable wasthat she didn’t portray them as clearly or quicklyas other students would later. And she had, in fact,seen some things that to the best of my knowl-edge aren’t correct. (She thought he was a heavysmoker and overweight.)

a 94 year old man, I saw his eyes beside his headand said that meant he was losing his eyesight (hehad glaucoma). I found myself literally asking himif anything else was wrong. I can’t explain it, but Iactually thought I heard him say, “I can’t eat.” Hisgrandson, who had given me the case, said theold man was constantly losing his false teeth andcomplaining about what he had to eat when hedidn’t have them.

“What does it all mean to

me now, two weeks later? I

haven’t taken an aspirin and

my weight is now under 175

lbs. for the rst time in four

years. I think I’m sleeping bet-

ter. But no miracles. I’ve had

only marginal success with

a technique touted by some

graduates for turning trafc

lights green and nding park-

ing places.”

Neither problem, to be sure, would be an unlike-

ly occurrence. What surprised me more was mystrong (and correct) feeling that he was otherwisein excellent health, free of heart trouble, arthritiscirculatory ailments, intestinal problems or motor difculties. I missed that he was senile.

During the case of a boy with speech defectscaused by brain damage, my tongue lolled in my

The most poignant moment I witnessed came

when Sally, a later partner, tried to “send help” toa longtime friend of mine whose case she had im-mediately pin-pointed as paralysis of most musclefunctions. “It’s so sad, she said, tears slipping outof her closed eyes.

But diagnosing people I knew amazed me lessthan my own diagnosing of others. In the case of


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mouth, my right eye twitched--the subject’s exactsymptoms. A hysterectomy appeared to me as anabdominal tube with a ribbon bow on it. A couple

of times I could accurately describe the people in-volved, including acne scars and age blotches; acigar smoker appeared pufng on one.

I wonder if any of the “help” sent was received. And I nd the thought that I am wondering it, when

before I would have rejected the possibility out of hand, amazing.

What does it all mean to me now, two weeks later?I haven’t taken an aspirin and my weight is now

under 175 lbs. for the rst time in four years. I thinkI’m sleeping better. But no miracles. I’ve had onlymarginal success with a technique touted by somegraduates for turning trafc lights green and nd-ing parking places.

There is no research, of course, demonstrating thatSilva Mind Control alumni have better health, lesscancer, fewer headaches or greater command ofESP. Nor have scientic verications been made

of the efforts of graduates to apply their powersto horse racing, the Mexican national lottery andbridge.

When a former classmate called and asked if I’dbe interested in following up on my mind controlby joining a “graduate group,” I said I would, and Iasked her what, if anything, the course had meantto her. She said it had been the concept of offeringhelp to other people, even if the act might seemimaginary. “I like people better,” she said. I nev-

er did nd out if another classmate got what shehoped for out of mind control. “I want some proof,”she said, “that life is more than what Shakespearesaid, “a tale told by a fool, signifying nothing.’”

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Tripping Through the Twilight Zone