Learn How to Use the Alpha Level to Think, Create, Innovate and Pull Ideas Out of Thin Air!
We hope that you’ve had an amazing experience listening to The Silva Centering Exercise, where you learned to enter deep levels of relaxation and meditation.
This lesson will show you that by opening your mind to a flood of creative ideas and inspiration, you will be able to .
By simply meditating daily you gain immense life-long health benefits. This is commonly called passive meditation.
But there is another type of meditation that we teach at the Silva Seminar. We call this active meditation.
Rather than going to your alpha level and simply remaining there in a state of relaxed meditation, we teach you to use this level of mind to accomplish anything you desire.
Now the real fun begins.
You can use this level of mind to:
* gain inspirational ideas and thoughts,
* program your brain to kick bad habits,
* accelerate your natural healing process,
* develop your intuition.
You can even use this level of mind to create coincidences to move you toward your goals.
Today, we’re going to focus on teaching you how to use this level of mind to gain creative ideas or inspiration.
Perhaps you’re looking to write a term paper, create a marketing plan for you business or compose a song – you’ll learn how to tap into your inner source of creativity to guide you.
Gaining Inspiration From Within
Jose Silva used to demonstrate an experiment on creativity with kids in his hometown of Laredo, Texas. He would ask kids to think of solutions to a particular problem while they were 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 think of further solutions. The children were always able to come up with more ideas while at alpha.
Does your mind function more creatively when you’re at the alpha level of mind?
There is 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 one inventor from Maryland, the late Dr. Elmer R. Gates, used this technique to come up with over 200 patents. Gates would sit in his soundproof laboratory equipped with a pad of writing paper.
He would shut 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 write for almost three hours. When the thoughts stopped flowing and he examined his work he found that they contained a minute description 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, 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 was entering the alpha level. He would often come out of these naps with the solution to 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 Come From?
Where do creative ideas come from? The brain? The mind?
For best-selling author Richard Bach, a Silva graduate, the idea came from a bird. Bach said this in an interview quoted 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 Laredo 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” experience 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.
Then he knew how to get to that “dream-like“ level and how to invite Jonathan Livingston Seagull to this creative level to tell him the rest of the story.
Bach said in a 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 a huge hit. In fact, Jonathan Livingston Seagull and the books that Bach wrote afterwards helped to bring about a spiritual awakening on the planet, by helping people to understand and accept their own spirituality.
Intuition in the Business World
Does this concept have applications in the world of business?
Professor John Mihalasky, Professor Emeritus of Industrial Engineeringat the New Jersey Institute of Technology, seems to think so. In experiments he performed with company CEOs he observed that the CEOs who performed best in tests of intuition 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.
% Profitability Increase of the CEO’s company over the last 5 years CEO Intuition Test Score
Above Chance Chance Below Chance
Greated than 100% 81.5% 25% 27.3%
50% – 99% 18.5% 50% 18.2%
Below 50% 0% 25% 54.5%
Note that the CEOs with the greatest profitability increases (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 also has applications 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, 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 awakened in the morning, he saw 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,” Obermeyer continued.
“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.”
Here’s how you can use this technique.
The Basic Technique
Go to your alpha level using the meditation techniques you learned in part 2 of this lesson.
When you have reached your alpha level, think of the problem you wish to solve.
When you quiet your personality during meditation you open the channel for higher wisdom and guidance to come to you through your intuitive mind.
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.
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.
