Before Jose Silva ever thought of teaching his method to the public, he offered all of his research to the churches. Why did he do this? Because he realized the great value it would have to religious leaders and religions themselves.

"All religions should be teaching this," he explained. "God is not physical, God is spiritual. The mind is not physical. It is said that we were made in the image of the Creator. Image is of the mind, it is not physical, it is spiritual. It does not mean that we all look like God... we all look different. It means that we can do what God did."

"Since God is not physical," Jose Silva told us, "we do not use physical words to communicate with God. We use the mind: visualization and imagination. We use mental pictures to communicate. Everyone can understand a picture, it is the universal language. The more we understand about the mind and the better we are able to use it, the better we can serve God."

"One minister had an interesting report after he had learned the Silva system and practiced it for several months," Silva wrote in the Silva company newsletter. The minister said, "My prayer seems to be much more effective now. I have been a minister for twelve years and I was never really confident that my prayers were doing any good. But now I pray and I usually see results in a very short time. Do you have any idea why that is happening?" the minister asked.

Here is Jose's explanation: "Success in communicating with the other side is a direct result of functioning at the alpha level," he wrote. "It is something like this: We use our objective senses to communicate in the objective dimension. That is, we use our eyesight, our ability to talk and listen, our senses of touch, taste, and smell to communicate with one another physically. But to communicate with the other side the physical senses are useless. The other side is the place that we came from when we were born and is the place that we go back to when we leave this planet."

"That spiritual dimension cannot detect our physical dimension directly. Spiritual means non-physical. So we must find a way to make a connection with the spiritual dimension, and convert our information from a physical form to a spiritual form," he continued. "If you attempt to communicate with the other side while you are functioning only in the physical dimension, you will not make the connection. When you enter the alpha level, you make a connection with the spiritual dimension."

It is in the nature of human beings to be apprehensive about change. It is part of our survival programming - we never know whether the unknown will be beneficial, or a threat to our survival. Whenever somebody suggests something new, this automatically triggers the survival mechanism. Some people use this energy to explore and discover ways to improve conditions on the planet, while others take a defensive posture.

This was true in Jesus' day, when the religious establishment opposed the brash young man who dared to suggest that there was new knowledge that could be beneficial to humanity.

About 450 years ago, shortly after Columbus sailed to America and proved that the earth is round, a scientist named Galileo proclaimed that he had confirmed what Copernicus had figured out - that the earth and the other planets rotate around the sun. This would explain why planets sometimes appear to go backwards in the sky.

However, the religious leaders of the time believed that the earth was at the center of the universe. It had to be so, they reasoned, since man was a divine creation. This had become part of their doctrine, their dogma. Galileo's assertion upset church leaders so much that they tortured him to force him to recant. But this did not change the reality that the earth in fact does revolve around the sun.

In the mid-20th Century a scientist named Jose Silva ran into similar opposition from leaders in the church, as well as scientists, and even leaders in the business community. Many of us who wanted to explore this new science with him also ran into opposition.

Jose didn't claim to know it all. He described his research findings as "semi-conclusions" because more will surely be added later. Perhaps he has discovered half of the truth. New research will find even more of it. Here is how he explained it at a Silva International Convention...

"We learned how to activate our brain within the subconscious by guiding the mind to look for a different brain frequency and to learn to use it," he said. "That's what psychorientology means - orienting the psyche, your mind, to look for and find that specific dimension, and then to use it." "Science is open-ended all the time," Jose continued. "It is like a telescope - if you get a better telescope, you discover more planets, more solar systems, more galaxies. If you discover a better microscope, you go further within matter."

Surely someone will get a better "telescope" some day and learn even more in this field. It will not negate what Jose Silva found. When scientists figured out that there was some kind of body that was influencing the orbits of the outermost planets, they predicted that there was one more planet on the outskirts of our solar system. They did not have a powerful enough telescope at the time, but when they got one, they could actually see the planet Pluto.

The discovery of Pluto did not change what scientists had already discovered. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and the other planets were still there. Scientists had simply gone farther. Jose Silva always insisted that he was not trying to hurt religion or replace it. He simply wanted to add some knew discoveries to what was already known.

The experiences of millions of people during the last decades, since Jose Silva began his research, certainly indicate that his discoveries have tremendous value.

Rev. James R. Murray is a Silva UltraMind ESP System Instructor.

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