A few days ago, I sent you an email about the Silva Centering exercise. I hope you’ve received it but if you haven’t, don’t worry, you can get it now on the sidebar to your left

So today I want to talk to you about using the Silva Method to enhance your creativity levels. I think I may have told you this before but did you know that my father, Jose Silva was once recognized by a community of artists for how his work helped with their creativity levels.

I suppose you’re wondering how this can be done

It can easily be achieved with active powerful meditation.

As I explained before, you can use active meditation to help you achieve anything you desire, as opposed to just going to your alpha level and simply remaining there in a state of relaxed meditation.

With relaxed meditation, you can:

• gain inspirational ideas and thoughts
• program your brain to kick bad habits
• accelerate your natural healing process
• develop your intuition

You can even create coincidences to move you toward your goals while at this level of mind!

Today, I’m going to teach you to gain creative ideas or inspiration while at this level. Once you’ve understood how to do this, you can apply it to all areas of your life, for example, when writing a term paper, creating a marketing plan or even when you want to compose a song! You can do this easily by tapping into your inner source of creativity.

Gaining Inspiration From Within

My father Jose Silva used to hold demonstrations on creativity with the kids of our hometown in Loredo, Texas. He would ask the kids to think of solutions to a particular problem while they’re at the Beta (or waking) level of mind.

He would then guide them to the Alpha (or meditative) level of mind and ask them to come up with other solutions. The results? The kids who were at Alpha level were always able to come up with brighter, creative ideas as compared to when they were at the Beta level of mind.

So the question remains, does your mind function at a more creative level while at the Alpha state of mind?

There are surprising evidence for this, both from first-hand experiences and laboratory evidence. Napoleon Hill, the best-selling author of Think and Grow Rich and The Laws of Success believed that the human mind was capable of tapping into universal fields of intelligence to access ideas and inspiration.

Napoleon Hill writes:

The great artists, writers, musicians and poets became great because they acquire the habit of relying upon the still, small voice that speaks from within, through the faculty of creative imagination. It is a fact well known to people who have keen imaginations that their best ideas come through so-called “hunches”.

Hill talks about how the late Dr. Elmer R. Gates, the renowned inventor from Maryland, used this particular technique to come up with over 200 patents! Gates would sit in his soundproof laboratory with a pad of writing paper, turn off the lights, and ponder on the known factors of the invention on which he was working. He would remain in this position until ideas began to “flash” into his mind in connection with the unknown factors of the invention.

On one occasion, ideas came so fast to Gates that he was forced to sit and write them down for almost three hours. When the thoughts stopped flowing and he examined his work he found that they contained minute descriptions of principles that had no parallel among the known data of the scientific world. Moreover the answer to his problem was intelligently presented in those notes.

The greatest inventor of our time, Thomas Alva Edison, also used a similar technique. Edison was known for taking frequent naps in the middle of the day. It’s likely that during these naps he entered the Alpha level. He would often come out of these naps with the solution to the problems that had been bugging him. Edison was awarded 1368 distinct patents and invented, among other things, the incandescent light bulb, the phonograph, the film projector, and the first motion picture.

Edison was known to have said, “Ideas come from space. This may seem impossible and hard to believe but it’s true. Ideas come from out of space.”

Where Do Ideas Really Come From?

I’m sure you’ve thought about this before. Where do creative ideas really come from? The brain? The mind?

For best-selling author Richard Bach, a former Silva graduate, the idea came from a bird. Yes, a bird.

Bach said this in an interview which was published in the November 1972 issue of Harper’s Bazaar.

“I was walking along one night, worrying about the rent, when I heard this voice say, Jonathan Livingston Seagull. But no one was there. I had absolutely no idea what it meant. When I got home, I suddenly had a vision of a seagull flying along, and I began to write. The story certainly didn’t spring from any conscious invention on my part. I just put down what I saw.”

Silva Instructor Wingate Paine told us the rest of the story during an instructor training session in Loredo not long after the book became a bestseller.

Wingate said that Bach had written the first two-thirds of the book from a “dream-like” state where a big seagull appeared to him and said,

“Take dictation, I have a story for you.“ But the bird faded away before the completion of the story. Wingate said that Bach told him he did not know how to get the bird to come back so that he could finish the book… until he took the Silva course.

That was when he learned to get to that “dream-like“ level and invite Jonathan Livingston Seagull to this creative level to tell him the rest of the story.

Bach said in the Harper’s Bazaar article that even before taking the Silva training, he’d come to assume that “there are certain ‘hidden’ capacities and powers which can be taught, “I think there is a terrifically pleasant principle behind existence – do what you love to do and you’ll be guided. It’s a lot like flying a plane: You have to trust what you can’t see.”

Jonathan Livingston Seagull was an immediate hit. The book was a bestseller, and the movie based on the book was also a huge hit. In fact, Jonathan Livingston Seagull and the books that Bach wrote afterwards helped bring about a spiritual awakening on the planet and helped people to understand and accept their own spirituality.

Intuition in the Business World

Some of you may be wondering, can this concept be applied in the business world?

Professor John Mihalasky, Professor Emeritus of Industrial Engineering at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, seems to think so. In experiments he performed with CEOs of various companies, he observed that the CEOs who performed best in intuition tests also tended to be the ones with the best success rates at running their business (measured in terms of 5 year profitability growth).

Prof. Mihalasky’s experiment results are summarized in the table below.

Note that the CEOs with the greatest profitability increases (by 100% or more) also had the greatest number of correct “guesses” in intuition tests. 81.5% of them performed above chance results. On the opposite end, of the CEOs with the poorest results, none scored above chance in the intuition test. Of CEOs with mediocre numbers the results were consistent with statistical chance results.

What does this mean?

Perhaps Napoleon Hill was correct when he suggested in his book “The Laws of Success” that the most successful people of his time, had learned to tap into their sixth sense.

“A genius”, Hill said “is a man who has discovered how to increase the intensity of thought to a point where he can freely communicate with sources of knowledge not available through the ordinary rate of thought”.

This concept of tapping into a universal source of ideas can also be applied in the world of science and technology.

A research director at NDM (New Foundations in Medicine) took a Silva course while working on a project to develop artificial arteries. He had come up with 4 different formulas while at Beta level, but none of them worked. Silva instructor Ken Obermeyer explained what happened next.

The NDM researcher used a technique he learned in class and programmed himself to have a dream that would contain information that he could use to solve the problem he had in mind—the best formula for artificial arteries.

“He awakened sometime during the night,” Obermeyer said, “and wrote out a formula,” then he went back to sleep.

“When he awoke in the morning, he read the formula, went into the laboratory, put a sample together, and found that the human body would accept his plastic.”

“One interesting note about this creative solution was that the chemist said that if he had considered this formula on his Beta information, he wouldn’t have believed it to be a formula the body would accept. He would not have come up with this solution through reason and logic,” continued Obermeyer.

Isn’t it amazing? Here’s what you can do to practice your active meditation and obtain results immediately:

The Basic Technique

1. Go to your alpha level using the meditation techniques I sent you a few days back.
2. When you’ve reached your Alpha level, think of the problem you wish to solve.
3. When you quiet your personality during meditation,you open the channel for higher wisdom and guidance to come to you through your intuitive mind.
4. Analyze the problem from all aspects and bring to mind all points of information or data you have on the problem. Frame the specific questions in your mind.
5. Now let your mind wander. Jot down any interesting ideas or thoughts that come to you. The answer may come to you through words, mental pictures or feelings.

Oh, and I have to let you know this… If you share the ideas that you get while at Alpha level, you will increase your ability of doing better and better at every single new meditation that you go into.

Try it out and let me know what you experienced! I would love to read all about what you’ve accomplished from the exercise above.

Better and Better

Laura