Silva Mind Control – Program 2

By: Jose Silva, Dr. George DeSau, Dave Hunt, Dr. John Weldon; ©1986

If you could have any one you wanted throughout history as your counselors and guides throughout your life, who would you choose? How would you contact them?

Pick Your Counselors

Ankerberg: Welcome. We’re talking about the Silva Mind Control Method that over six million students have taken. And the Silva Mind Control course guarantees that if you go through their four-day course, 48 hours, they will guarantee you will come out as a psychic, clairvoyant. In part of the course, actually in the third day, every student is introduced to the use of “counselors” or “psychic guides” that they introduce into their mind. Actually, how this goes is on the third day—and you can correct me if I’m wrong on this, Jose—but the students are asked to pick two counselors that they would like to have as their counselors. The lecturer explains how to invoke them. And in the last session, during meditation, two counselors appear in the laboratory of the mind of the student that they have created, and they are to be available from that point on whenever the student needs them. And in your book you say pointblank, that “even though the counselors have been picked by the students, that’s not necessarily who they get when the counselors show up.” And you also say—and I want to find out why—that a Mind Control graduate, mentally, in his laboratory where he is in this altered state of consciousness with his counselors, is a person with an immense power to benefit himself and others. Now, Jose, in order for us to get this information, you must have experienced it yourself. Do you have psychic guides?

Silva: First of all, John, I still have some pending things with Dave here, though. I didn’t know if I could jump in and answer whatever he said, you know.

Ankerberg: Well, I thought we could get back to it, but do you have psychic guides in order to teach all these people?

Silva: Okay, I go with it, but let me not forget what I need to…..

Ankerberg: Okay, I’ll come back to it.

Silva: Because I’ve got it in back of my mind, and I’ve got to get it off….

Ankerberg: Okay.

Silva: Now, about these psychic guides, we need to make some corrections in the way you explained it. You see, they are supposed to—the student in his lab—to create a person that he would like to see in his lab. He is going to create the person—color of eyes, hair, whatever—and this person will be here to help the clairvoyant, our student, to be able to solve problems.

Ankerberg: They are supposed to pick out two, correct?

Silva: That’s right. Male and female.

Ankerberg: Can they have more than two.

Silva: No. We only recommend one of each. We don’t need any more than that.

Ankerberg: Okay.

Silva: We see there are geniuses in every field, so what do we need, just like a telephone. Dial the numbers. Why do we need two telephone different numbers, or whatever, different colors? We need female and a male, okay? The same thing we do for several other things, male and female. Like the Bible does, you know. He came first with a male and a female, in that order. Anyway, they create their own counselors, okay?

Ankerberg: Okay, got the counselors.

Silva: So whenever they have a problem, if they don’t know what to do, they consult with a counselor and see what ideas come into their mind and use them.

Ankerberg: Okay. And these counselors give them information that helps on their problems.

Silva: That is correct. Now, all we’re doing here, John, is for solving problems. We think we were created for that purpose alone.

Ankerberg: Okay. Do you have those psychic guides? Did you have them? How did you come across them?

Silva: I’ve had them all my life. I didn’t know that.

Ankerberg: Do they talk to you?

Silva: This is why I got the idea to pass them on to others, because I was being helped from this source.

Ankerberg: Where did you first encounter the psychic guides or the counselors?

Silva: In my research for 42 years, okay, all over the world. We have psychic surgeons in Mexico, Central America, the Macumbas, you name them, I’ve been there. I’ve been researching for 42 years now, okay? Now, my personal concepts are quite different from the common concepts that I see people responding to.

Ankerberg: I am just curious, because if somebody had to teach you, how did you find out about these guides?

Silva: This is interesting, because when we went to University on the problem of psychophysiology to be able to prove our method, before and after, with medical students and so forth—and it is scientifically proven now, a paper came out—the scientists looked at me and said, “Jose, have you ever taken your own course?” I hadn’t really thought about that. I hadn’t taken my own course. I just put it together for somebody else. But then put me under with EEG and so forth to see if I could do what the students were able to do, and I could. I was a natural. I was one of those 10 percenters he called it, using both brain hemispheres.

Ankerberg: Okay, so you’re a natural. So you’ve had these psychic guides or counselors that have been helping you formulate this course since day one.

Silva: That is correct.

Ankerberg: Okay. And they also help you in the psychic healings…

Silva: They do, yes.

Ankerberg: They give you information about the future…

Silva: Any time that you find yourself with a problem and you do not know what to do next, you can consult them. But if you know what to do, you go ahead and do what you already know. They are here not to do the work for you, they are here to help you evolve, become like as good as they are, whoever they are.

Ankerberg: Why is it we don’t get the counselors we ask for?

Silva: It’s because,… actually, the way I feel about that, John, is because you do not know your own make-up. You do not know your reserve information that’s programmed within you that is needed to solve problems with. So I’m saying, the empathy between people, just like, you like some people and some people you don’t like and you don’t know why, or something like this. There must be an empathy between the counselor and the student, yes.

Ankerberg: Okay, Dave, in your book you say that, “Man’s spirit is intended by God to function within his body which operates in the physical space, time, matter universe and is subject to the laws that determine order in the realm. We are forbidden to attempt to make contact with disembodied spirits, whether angels, demons, or spirits of the dead.” You say, “They live in another dimension that is bound by its own laws which we can neither measure with our scientific instruments nor understand on the basis of our material experience, nor manipulate by formulas or rituals.” I think that’s almost what Jose was saying, you don’t measure it, okay? When these entities intrude into the physical world in forms of psychic phenomena, you have said, “The things they do seem like supernatural miracles to us but are as natural to that spiritual dimension of nature they inhabit as everyday events in the physical world are to us.” Do you think that these spirit guides, these counselors, these psychic guides, if you want, that Jose is introducing people to, are they the demonic?

Hunt: I think they could very well be. They may not be in every case, but I think they are opening themselves to this possibility. Now, Dr. DeSau talked about control, and yet he said, “What we have to do is control our minds.” And they seem to think that everything comes from their mind. But you are getting information that is not in your mind. I was talking, for example, with a former director—I guess they don’t call them directors any more—but he had quite a large territory with Silva Mind Control. I was speaking with him this morning, and he said,…

Ankerberg: What state?

Hunt: In Pennsylvania. He said some years ago when they first began to doing this, when these “counselors” came out of the elevator, they were demonic, very often, and they didn’t have control over this. And they had to then begin to tell everybody, “Well, you must expect only human forms and so forth.” Now, if you don’t get the counselor you thought, it seems to me you are not in control. I was just reading in his book and he’s telling of one of his graduates who got Shakespeare and Sophia Loren and they acted rather strangely. In fact, they didn’t seem to have too much interest in healing this person or diagnosing this person. They were tripping off having a little sex on the side, or that was the implication. It doesn’t sound to me like you are in very good control of this thing. You are looking to some other source and that’s what I’m concerned about. What is that source?

Ankerberg: Okay, Jose?

Silva: I would like to answer. He’s basing himself on an article that came out of New York City, New York Times. And this writer presented his script, you know, and they returned it to him. It was too much favorable to mind control. This is something like instead of paying for publicity, getting free publicity, you know. So he rearranged it and it was turned back again. So, finally, he thought up the idea of changing the counselors to Sophia Loren and, old/youth kind of thing, and they liked it. They wanted something to be kind of way-out, or something like this. He would say the right thing and they would return it. They wouldn’t take it. But when he changed to Sophia Loren and this other guy and the sex acts and whatever, they took it and they like that. See what I mean? It’s not the real thing. I don’t know who you talked to, but we can prove that very easily.

Hunt: Sounds like misrepresentation. If Silva Mind….

Silva: Well, that’s newspaper problems.

Hunt: Yes, but I don’t think you should bow to that. If you’ve got some truth to share, I don’t think you should bow to…..

Silva: Well, how can you control the newspaper what they are going to print about you?

Ankerberg: I’d like to come back to something right along this line. Let me come to you, George, on this, and that is the fact that, as a doctor yourself, what do you think about these counselors? Where do they come from?

DeSau: I think a statement Jose was making, referencing that we don’t always know our inner functioning, inner workings. I think it’s a nice representation. To me, it’s a nice representation of how you can communicate with subjective, giving it a type of reality, if you will, which allows for a translation through. Many of us, if we get a series of thoughts and we think that it’s attributed to us, we have a tendency not to give value to. And if you set up a system of “something translating through,” that seems to make sense to me.

Ankerberg: Okay.

DeSau: Can I follow through for a moment?

Ankerberg: I want to come right to you on this very thing. Jose in his book says, “Even though the student has a pretty firm idea of who he wants as counselors, they don’t get who they wish. But the counselors are very real to Mind Control graduates.” And Jose asks the question, “What are they? We are not sure.” Now, what I want to know is, if we are not sure what they are, and we don’t have control of “them” when they come to us, how do we have control, then, under SMC?

DeSau: Jose evidently wants to answer that, but I’d like to have a shot at it before he goes.

Ankerberg: Go ahead, George. Jose will get a shot at it.

DeSau: We can talk about not being sure of “demons,” we can talk about not being sure where thoughts come. My field is psychology and we still have trouble defining where thoughts come from. So the idea of “not being sure” is to me an honest statement.

Ankerberg: Okay, Jose has got his guides. When you went through the course, did you have your guides?

DeSau: Yes.

Ankerberg: Okay. Do your guides still talk to you?

DeSau: Yes, when I go to “the laboratory level,” when I decide that I want to talk to them.

Ankerberg: In the laboratory level, do they give you information that you don’t otherwise have?

DeSau: They give me information I am not cognizantly aware of at the time. The question of do, I know it or do I have it, is an open question.

Ankerberg: Well, for example, these students going back and getting these sense impressions from George Washington, obviously they don’t have that until they go back. Now, the question is, if you’ve gone back into the past or you’ve gone into the future, or done psychic healing, I would suspect everybody that’s gone through SMC has psychic abilities.

DeSau: Right. It’s part of the course.

Ankerberg: Now, the thing is, do you have that information already, or are you getting that from some other source?

DeSau: It’s quite possible we have it. We’re really talking about subjective, internal area that has been really ill-defined. Psychologists have enough difficulty with objective levels. But what we’re capable of subjectively and what we have as subjective information is still a very wide-open field. But it still says it relates to the individual.

Ankerberg: Okay, John, a comment from you.

Weldon: For me, I would really have to question that. As I sit here listening, this sounds to me very much like spiritism. I hear the same things from mediums and spiritists who talk to their advisors or their spirit guides, or their counselors, or whatever.

Ankerberg: We’ve got to say, too, that you’re not talking off the top of your head. You have actually researched 13 of the psychics. You’ve actually gone and talked with them, so you know what you’re talking about here.

Weldon: Well, I’ve done research with an awful lot of different individuals. And, for example, the gurus, about 98% of them admit that they were in contact with some form of spirit entity and that they had been possessed. They defined it differently, as “god-possession” or possession by one of their deities or whatever, but they admitted to a state of possession and to receiving information from their spirit guides. My concern with this is that there is no reliable way for an individual who’s in contact with the spirit world to know that that spirit is really telling the truth. Biblically, God prohibits it in Deuteronomy 18. He calls it an “abomination” to contact the spirit world. [Deut. 18:9-13]

Ankerberg: Why doesn’t God want us to contact the spirit world?

Weldon: Because, I think, He knows what’s there. There is a world of spiritual evil. Spirits, demons, have designs against men. In 1982 I wrote a book on Psychic Healing and looked at psychic diagnosis, psychic healing, and psychic surgery. The lowest common denominator was really spiritism. And I was corroborated, for example, by George Meek’s book Healers and the Healing Process, a massive study over ten years; Sally Hammond’s research covering several hundred British psychic healers. The spiritistic centers are where healers usually develop from, at least in terms of psychic surgeons. Again, people claim that the power to heal was not their own, that they received it from a higher power. And typically that was spiritism.

I have to ask, who are these spirits? What are they? When you look at the philosophy, the worldview of the healers, or the messages of the spirits themselves, again, they are distinctly anti-biblical. That gives me a clue. When I look at the impact of the psychic involvement in the lives of individuals, there is a high degree of tragedy, of suicide, of mental illness, and that’s documented in the studies of Dr. Kurt Koch, a German theologian, who’s counseled about 20,000 people. I look at the damage that is done in psychic healing; I look at the source; I look at the claims of the psychics themselves, where they get it; and it all comes back to spiritism. I look at the nature of the spirits, and to me it seems like we’re dealing with a demonic phenomenon.

Ankerberg: Okay. You guys are all sitting close together so it is real hard to make statements that are tough. We’re all friends here and we can disagree on some things, okay? Give me a conclusion. If you apply all of your research to what you are hearing about Silva Mind Control, your conclusion is?

Weldon: That, potentially, when they receive their advisors, their guides, that that is an open door to spiritism, and that the nature of spiritism is ultimately demonic. That they are not “good spirits” as they claim.

Ankerberg: Okay. Jose, you have to respond to this body of literature as well as the fact of, if you don’t know the source of these spirit guides, as you admit, and the information they get is fantastic. We’re not debating the reality of it; I think the reality is clear. The question is, aren’t you in danger?

Silva: Let’s put it this way, John. I have also researched with many spirit mediums and spirit centers and spirit medium schools in Brazil and many other places. Now, how do I detect a false medium from a real true one? By the information we get. If you get all the information, so many words but mean nothing because you cannot use that information to solve anybody’s problems, or maybe create a problem because of doubts and so forth, I say this is no good. He’s false. But if you get information to solve problems, where people are suffering, and you do alleviate that suffering and you correct the problem, who cares where the information comes from? The idea is, get it anyway you can to stop a problem and forget everything else.

Ankerberg: Okay, the audience made a reaction there and I wish they wouldn’t make that reaction, but the reason I think they did make that reaction, Jose, would be the fact of, obviously, it seems to matter. And maybe, Dave, you could explain here, why, from a Christian, biblical point of view, that it does matter where you get even sometimes good information.

Hunt: One of the problems that I have is I believe Jose has put up his own definition of what it means to solve a problem. He has made his own definition of what problems are, and I think it is a rather self-oriented definition, although, of course, he’s involving, and I know he’s very sincere and he wants to help the human race.

But, there could be something more important. There could be a problem more important than giving us power to heal and to give us paranormal sources of information. The Bible says that the real problem is in the human heart. Jesus Himself said that. He said, “Out of the heart there proceeds fornication, adulteries, murders,” and so forth, and “these are the things that defile a man.” [Mark 7:21-23] We created the problems in this world. We’re not going to solve these problems by looking into ourselves and gaining control over our minds. So I have a problem with his basic assumptions right to begin with.

Now, John said that the information that comes out ultimately becomes anti-biblical, and I would have to say that about Jose’s. He’s done away with the blood of Jesus Christ; he’s done away with the sacrificial death of Christ for our sins. It’s not a sin problem anymore, it’s ignorance. He says the only problem that we have is we’re functioning in the left brain instead of in the right brain. And I don’t think that from brainwaves you can get moral problems, and I don’t believe you will solve moral problems by changing your brain waves through the hemisphere.

Ankerberg: Okay, let me come back to this “brain waves” next week, okay. But I think that where we’re going that needs to be addressed, Jose and George, would be this, and that is that many times in your book you are quoting Jesus saying this, that and the other, okay? Jesus said some other things as well, that Dave said about the human heart, about sin, about a real hell. And He was the one who also cast out demons so that they were real entities to Him. We’ve got a body of literature that seems to support the fact of the reality of it, and I’m still waiting for an answer: If we don’t know where the spirit guides or the counselors that you teach students how to contact, and they give information that parallels the research as well as what the Bible is saying: Again, aren’t we still in a spot that we’re dangerous?

Silva: John, my personal concept is that we have been sent to the planet to solve problems, to convert this planet into a paradise, and we need to solve all kinds of problems, regardless of what problems they are. So, information, the real, true information, is only that information that would apply to solve problems, not create problems.

Ankerberg: George?

DeSau: Well, I’m just intrigued by the orientation that David takes in rather generalizing statements to Jose that Jose has his own definition of “problem.” I didn’t hear that from Jose. It makes it very good to generalize and make the statement. I think if we’re looking for generalizations then, since the biblical quotes are so heavy, I think we need to look at the type of arrogance that one might have to believe that the particular interpretation that one has of the Bible is the end result. We have any number of translations of the Bible, for example, and the utilization of that—your particular version—to prove a point is rather untenable.

Ankerberg: But, George, if we can show that the same way a guy reads the newspaper, he picks up the Bible and reads it the same way—that words mean something in context; and if it comes out that across Church history, the Church fathers and all of Church history are interpreting the fact of the reality of the demonic and what Jesus is saying about them and the solution to sin, etc., etc., down the line, then we don’t have to worry about interpretations. I think that’s documented.

DeSau: I think we do need to worry about interpretation, because most of the interpretation is coming through the Greek and through the Latin and through the German. If you go back to Aramaic you can get a different definition for demonic.

Ankerberg: There’s millions of people watching that program who read their Bible, and they have some idea what Jesus said. Is there any particular thing that you are saying that you disagree with?

DeSau: I think I’m disagreeing with the belief that a strictly literal interpretation, as expounded by the particular translation that one has in front of them, is the last word is the height of arrogance.

Ankerberg: Scholar, what do you say about that? John?

Weldon: I think that a good translation is accurate and it can be read literally. I think there are a lot of problems in the world, but Jesus said, “What will a man be profited if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” [Matt. 16:26] And I think that is something every individual has to deal with. What about their soul? What about their relationship to God and to Jesus Christ and the issue of sin? Are their sins forgiven?

Ankerberg: Yeah. And, you folks out there, before we leave you this week, before you throw your Bible away here, realize that in the American Standard Version and on the Revised Standard Version and the King James Version, that on the major versions you have got 25 to 50 scholars from different denominations that fight out what those words are going to say when you read it. So I don’t think you have to worry about bias coming in at that point. So don’t throw your Bible away. Hang in there and we’ll pick it up next week.

Read Part 3