Jose Silva, founder of The Silva Method and the Silva UltraMind ESP Systems

1914 Jose Silva was born in Laredo, Texas USA. His father, a conductor on the Mexican railroad, died 4 years later during the Mexican revolution when terrorists blew up his train.

1920 6-year-old Jose, now the oldest male in his family, went to work shining shoes and selling newspaper to support his family. He quickly learned that you must provide service that is beneficial to people before you are compensated.

1928 Since he went to work instead of to school, young Jose had to educate himself. While in the barber shop reading magazines, he found a correspondence course on radio repair that the barber had ordered. The barber let Jose take the course for him - for a fee - and while the barber got the diploma, Jose got an education in electronics that helped him later on to understand the workings of the complex bio-computer that we call the human brain.

1944 Now married and the father of 3 children, with a very successful radio repair business, Jose was drafted into the army during World War II. This provided him with 2 more key elements that led to his ground-breaking discoveries: The strange questions that the army psychiatrist was asking aroused his curiosity about psychology, and he supplemented his practical knowledge of electronics repair with college-level theory and mathematics.

1946 After returning home, his study of psychology introduced him to hypnosis, which helped him see first-hand the amazing ability of the human mind. When he read about a new instrument called the electroencephalograph - EEG for short - which detected brain activity in various part of the human brain, he had a way to actually look inside people's heads and correlate brain activity with the function of the mind.

1948 He was asked to set up a radio repair school at the new Laredo Junior College. Doing this, he learned how to set up lesson plans, how to teach, and how to create and use visual aids. When the Veterans Administration named his program the best in the state of Texas, this gave him confidence in his ability to convey information to others.

1950 While conducting research with his children one day, his daughter began to "guess my mind," he said. He was hypnotizing her to help her memorize poems. She began guessing which poem he wanted her to recite next. He changed the focus of his research from helping them improve their grades, and began to investigate this "guessing phenomena."

1953 He was now convinced that ESP was real, and he was one of the first people in the world to realize the tremendous practical value of it: "A person's IQ," he explained, "is determined by how many questions they can answer correctly - how many problems they can solve. The more problems they solve, the higher their IQ. It doesn't matter whether they use their own knowledge, or project their mind to detect the knowledge - and experiences - that other people have."

1953-1963 When Mr. Silva told Dr. J.B. Rhine of Duke University that he had trained his daughter to be a psychic, Dr. Rhine, the leading researcher in the field at the time, thought she was actually a natural psychic, that psychic ability couldn't be taught. During the next 10 years, Jose Silva trained 39 more people, both children and adults, and all had psychic ability. "It is a natural human ability," he told Dr. Rhine, "just like reading. We can teach people to use ESP, just like we can teach them to read." Dr. Rhine still refused to alter the opinion he had held for many years.

1965 Silva had begun training groups of people, and refining his method. He found out that everyone benefited, men and women, young and old, rich and poor. He had found a way to train people to use a very valuable ability that 90 percent of humans never use, but... what to do next? He offered all of his research to churches, to schools, and even to the United States Government, but they all turned him down. Nobody had the insight and understanding that he had.

1966 Word about his work was beginning to get out, and Dord Fitz, an art professor in Amarillo, Texas, who used to tell his students that "You cannot be a great artist without being a great clairvoyant," asked Silva to come and tell the art students about his work. They wanted to learn his Method, and that led to the first paid Silva Mind Control Method course... and Jose Silva soon had a new career.

1969 His Silva Mind Control classes became so popular - and successful - that he began training other instructors, and soon people throughout the United States - and around the world - wanted to know all about Alpha Brain Waves and ESP.

1994 At the age of 80, with the Silva Systems being taught in more than 100 countries, Mr. Silva began researching once again to find the answer to the one question that had eluded him. He explained it this way to a group of scientists in 1973:

"We are interested: Is there a higher intelligence somewhere? Of course we are. We think we are tapping into it at some level, somehow, because we ourselves cannot explain - even ourselves within the movement cannot explain the success that we have had, except through help from higher levels. And that is putting it lightly. Now our interest would be: Can we establish a better communication with higher levels of intelligence, wherever they are?"

1997 He found the answer in the MentalVideo Technique, and created a new course around it: The Silva UltraMind ESP System. He trained the first instructors to teach the new course in March 1998, and in February 1999, with his long and successful mission on planet earth completed, he passed on.

Now It is now up to us to continue the work that Jose Silva started. He felt that we all have an obligation to do what he did: To spend every second of ever day correcting problems, so that when we move on, we shall have left behind a better world for those who follow.