Silva Method

According to its proponents, the Silva Method (Silva Mind Control, Remote viewing) is a self-empowerment system to shape beliefs, augment personal success and view distant objects or locations and connect with a higher intelligence for guidance. José Silva developed pseudoscientific explanations of brain function and its relationship with a higher consciousness in the 1960s.

Technique
According to its proponents, the technique aims to reach and sustain a higher state of mental functioning, called alpha state, where brainwave frequency is eight to thirteen Hz. The method also uses visualizations and affirmations. Advocates attest to healing, better attainment of goals, ESP and cure from addictions.

José Silva, founder of the Silva Method, claimed to have developed a program that trained people to enter certain brain states of enhanced awareness. He also claimed to have developed several systematic mental processes to use while in these states allowing a person to mentally project with a specific intent. According to Silva, once the mind is projected, a person can allegedly view distant objects or locations and connect with higher intelligence for guidance. The information received by the projected mind is then said to be perceived as thoughts, images, feelings, smells, taste and sound by the mind. The information obtained in this manner can be acted upon to solve problems.

J. B. Rhine, long-time parapsychology researcher at Duke University, coined the term, Extra-sensory perception (ESP). He thought that the psychic senses were an extra sense that only a few very special people had. Silva modified the phrase "Extra-sensory Perception" to "Effective Sensory Projection". Silva kept the same initials, ESP, but the revised meaning suggests that it is a more dynamic activity.

In 1953, Silva believed he had trained his daughter to be psychic, and he introduced his training methods to Rhine with his daughter as proof. Rhine's response was that Silva's daughter was a natural psychic and he just hadn't noticed it before. Subsequently, Silva began working with another subject. This time, he tested his subject first to be sure he was not functioning as a psychic. Over the next ten years, Silva claimed to have trained thirty-nine more subjects to be psychics.

Another discovery claimed as successful is remote viewing. Rather than passively waiting for impressions to be perceived, a person projects him- or herself mentally and remotely views what is going on in a process similar to lucid dreaming.

Alleged successes with his methods convinced Silva that everyone has such abilities and can be taught to develop them, and that it is not an extra sense at all, but an unneeded—therefore undeveloped—sense. Everything happens first in the mind, he reasoned, then happens in the body. A person mentally decides to pick up a glass of water and drink it, then does it physically. Your life is the manipulation of the set rules of this universe, the trick is learning how to manipulate the rules right.

The Silva Method is now a multi-million dollar business with thousands of Silva Method instructors teaching the system over several days to groups of students in numerous countries worldwide.

The system has also spawned many books, some of them authored or co-authored by José Silva, with many others based on the basic principles of the method but spreading into other areas of awareness and application whilst in the alpha state.

The Silva Method is one of a number of therapeutic techniques sometimes grouped under the name Human potential movement.