On a Monday morning, just three weeks ago, the universe responded to my pleas for a way out from all the stress and overwhelm associated with online writing.

I was watching Tim Urban’s TED Talk when a sponsored video interrupted it. Normally, I would quickly click ‘Skip Ad’ and get back to the video, but this time I kept listening because the story was very interesting.

I watched the video for 23 minutes and bought the course the speaker was selling. Then I watched two more videos, by the same speaker, and bought another course and membership to the community.

For three weeks, I have been learning and testing the concepts and meditation exercises taught by the course. My stress is gone, my productivity has quadrupled and my future looks brighter than ever.

Before I go any further with the benefits, I am observing I want to share with you Jose Silva’s story I heard in the sponsored video three weeks ago.

In the early 40s, a guy by the name of José Silva, developed an interest in psychology to see if it could help him increase his children’s IQ. He had ten children and like any parent he wanted them to do well.

José Silva was an electrician in the US Army. Once, while going through a routine army mental health checkup, he noticed a psychologist was assigned to ask all army recruits a series of questions. It was just a routine thing, but he grew fascinated and started reading more and more books on psychology.

As an electrician, he knew if a wire has more resistance less electricity flows through it but if you reduce its resistance, more electricity can flow through it.

Jose wondered if the same principle would apply to the brain.

What if we could reduce the resistance in the brain, can our brains operate more efficiently?

It was the early 60s, and scientists had come up with the theory that there were four levels of brain frequency — beta, the waking state; alpha the more relaxed or slightly sleepy state, theta when dreams and vivid imagery occur and delta the slowest brain wave frequency when healing and regeneration occur.

Jose wondered whether moving into the alpha or theta level was the way of reducing resistance.

He started experimenting with his daughter.

He developed a script to take his daughter to a relaxed state. His script was something like guided meditation except back in the 60s, the word guided meditation didn’t exist.

So, Jose Silva would put his kids into a guided meditation and then read her important elements from their school textbooks. He found she could remember better when she was in this alpha or slightly relaxed level of mind with her eyes closed and when he would ask her questions and she could recall better.

It is a well-known fact today that you can remember and retrieve information faster in the alpha level of mind.

Then something curious happened.

His daughter would answer him while he was still formulating a question in his mind. She somehow knew the question he was going to ask her even before he could verbally speak it.

He was a devout Christian. He couldn’t figure out how his daughter could so-called read his mind. So he wrote to Joseph Banks Rhine, of Duke University. JB Rhine was the famous doctor who pioneered research in extrasensory perception and formed parapsychology as a branch of psychology.

He told JB Ryan he had figured out a way to train children to be intuitive. JB Ryan dismissed it. He said, your daughter was probably intuitive, to begin with.

Jose Silva disagreed. So he then trained all the kids to be intuitive.

Then he trained all the neighbor’s kids. The neighbor got fascinated. Their kid’s grades were going up. What’s this man doing with them? So they asked Jose if he can teach them as well. So Jose started teaching little classes in Laredo, Texas.

Jose found it wasn’t just intuition that went up with his technique, but people’s pain disappeared and their happiness levels went up. One person had migraines for a long time and after learning from Jose Silva his migraine disappeared. He wrote about it in the local newspaper and his next class was completely swamped.

The Silva Method was born.

A path to reducing mental resistance? He called it a centering exercise.

It spread across America through the 70s and 80s. Soon it was being used by the Chicago White Sox, and famous celebrities of the time, like opera singer Margarita Piazza. The New York Times and The Washington Post featured articles on the Silva Method. Jose Silva wrote a book, The Silva Mind Control Method which sold well over a million copies.

And the Silva method, as it spread globally, ended up graduating some 10 million students over three to four decades.

But the story doesn’t end there.

A Weird Coincidence

There was a point in Jose’s research when he almost gave it up.

Jose Silva was finding his work very fulfilling, but it wasn’t making him any money. To feed his large family, he knew he had to give it up and go back to just running his electrical business. One night, as he tells in his biography, he grew so frustrated, he flung his psychology book across the room and went to sleep, promising himself that he would never dabble in this again because he needed to earn a living.

That night, he had a weird dream. He saw a figure of Mother Mary who gave him a four-digit number.

He wondered, what is this four-digit number? And the first thought was it must be the license plate number of a car, and he needed to meet the person who owns that car.

So Jose Silva decided to keep his mind open for any car with a four-digit number. As he was going to his radio repair business, a friend came to him and said, “Jose, I’m about to swing across the border to Mexico to pick up some goods. You want to come with me?” Jose said, “Sure.” It was not a busy day and Jose saw no harm in accompanying his friend across the border.

So they got into the car and drove across the border to Mexico. And as they were driving across the border to Mexico, Jose told his friend about the four-digit number and the dream. They went to a shop to buy goods in Mexico. And as Jose was picking up his goods, his friend called him over and his friend said, “Jose, look, they’re selling a lottery ticket here. Isn’t this the number that came into your dream?” And it was.

Jose bought the lottery ticket, and he ended up winning $10,000. That money allowed him to keep doing his research.

Jose wrote, look at the weirdness that happened. It wasn’t just a dream. His mind didn’t just give him a number, it showed him an image to reinforce that it was coming from a higher power. It then caused synchronicity to happen when a friend came to invite him to Mexico because the winning lottery number wasn’t on the US side. It was on the Mexican side.

Another coincidence happened when his friend saw the lottery number while he thought it was a car license plate number. All of these strung together were like a ripple of reality to give him the cash infusion needed to take the Silva method forward. It was then he realized he was on to something.

I have been going through a 28-day program and recording my progress in a journal after each day.

I have gone through many self-development programs, but never I have seen so much growth in so little time.

I am meditating three times a day, five to fifteen minutes for each instance. It is not the normal relaxation kind of meditation I was familiar with. Instead, it is an active meditation designed to help turn problems into projects.