Friday, December 20, 2013

The Power of the Mind

By Tereza Hubkova, M.D.

Ever since I can remember I have been intrigued by the unusual and mysterious in life. I want not only to know of the unusual but also to experience it firsthand and understand it. I would like to believe there is an explanation for everything—that life has its order, its rules, that it flows in accordance with physical laws—and thus can be studied and comprehended. Perhaps like you, I can remember listening to stories told by my parents, extended relatives, and their friends describing events that cannot be explained by our current level of understanding, nor are within current scientific paradigms.

My father once recounted a dream he had the night before my grandmother passed away. In his dream he saw her standing in a window waving goodbye to him. The next morning we got the news that my grandmother had died in her sleep. Did she want to say goodbye to my father as her soul was leaving her body? A skeptical mind could say, it was just a coincidence. But was it really? Could it have been my father’s precognition of what was about to happen? Or did my grandmother’s spirit enter my father’s dream? I have a strong feeling that whatever it was, it wasn't a coincidence.

Recent research performed by scientists like Dean Radin shows that people are in fact able to access information from the future—although usually only a few seconds ahead of our time. Could it be that occasionally we can access information from a more distant future? Is time even linear? Modern physicists are asking those same questions, triggered by observations of the minute worlds in and around us—the quantum world—as well as the incomprehensibly large reality around us called the multiverse.

For most of my life I’ve wanted to know, as so many others before me, how everything works and what life really is all about. Along that journey there were times when I felt as if I understood and could even control my reality, only to be humbled again and again by the vastness of the unknown. I had times when instead of trying to control my life, I would simply accept whatever it brought and stayed in observer mode. Are we meant to learn how to control, or are we meant to peacefully observe and accept? I have struggled with that question many times over the years and finally came to the conclusion that we can do both—each has its role. We all may have moments of understanding and moments of uncertainty. When life goes smoothly, it’s easy to believe you have it all figured out. Sometimes little mishaps or big accidents bring the awareness that has wandered off back to the moment and back into the body.

When I was twenty-two I was travelling on a bus from Spain, where I had spent six weeks on an elective surgical rotation. As this was a very long ride—I couldn't afford to fly at that time—I bought several Spanish magazines to read while on the bus. One of them, some sort of psychology magazine, featured an interesting article about José Silva. He was a man who believed that we can control much of our external life circumstances by using the full power of our minds. He started research on learning and manifesting while in a special state of mind corresponding to the alpha wave electrical activity of the brain.

The electrical activity of the human brain is measured by Electroencephalography (EEG). Fast beta waves (ranging from 12 to 30 Hz frequency) usually occur while awake and active. Alpha waves (from 8 to 12 Hz) present with waking relaxation. Slow delta waves (up to 4 Hz) are observed during sleep. And theta waves (from 4 to 7 Hz), which bridge the gap between sleep and restive wakefulness, is typically only experienced during meditative states.

José Silva had an interesting life. He never went to school, he had to support his family by selling newspapers and shining shoes, but instead taught himself how to read and write. Later he learned how to repair radios, and at age fifteen had a successful radio repair business. During World War II he joined the Signal Corps where he had the opportunity to study advanced electronics. He also became intrigued by psychology, which he studied on his own time.

Having this dual background in electronics and psychology, he started to theorize that the human brain could be more efficient in receiving and storing information when it was less busy. He began teaching his children how to get into an alpha state mind. The grades of his children during the period of this training sharply improved. Silva also noticed the development of extra-sensory perception in his daughter while in alpha state. When he would prepare to ask her a question, she would start answering before he had a chance to actually verbalize the question. Silva then trained another thirty nine children in his home town of Laredo, TX, investing over half a million dollars over twenty years into research on how to teach anyone to access their brain more efficiently.

Being a medical student at the time of my introduction to José Silva's teachings, I understood enough about the alpha, beta, theta, and delta wave brain states to know that this article was science-based and that this man, José Silva, was possibly onto something powerful.

A few weeks after returning to Prague I came across an advertisement in a local newspaper inviting people for weekend training in the Silva Method. I couldn't believe the coincidence. Had I not just read the Spanish article on the bus from Spain I probably would have missed this advertisement altogether. My interested and excitement piqued, I immediately signed up for the course.

The course was fantastic. It was far better than I had expected. Our lecturer gave us many examples, showed us data on the ongoing research in this field, and walked us through the learning process with ease. By the end of the first day of the course we learned how to set up a mental alarm clock, so we would wake up exactly at the time we wanted to awake, without using an actual alarm clock. He wanted us to try it to wake ourselves up the next day. I was a bit nervous as I paid a lot of money for this course and didn't want to oversleep. At the same time, I trusted the technique and myself and decided to give it a shot. Before going to sleep on Saturday night I visualized a beautiful huge and colorful clock with its arms and numbers made of fruit to fully engage my attention and I set it for seven o’clock the next morning. The next day, I woke up five minutes before seven. I was quite excited about this, but what I learned and achieved with this techniques over the years made this little alarm clock success look really quite insignificant.

During the following years I have used the power of positive thinking not only for myself, but also for my patients—whenever I thought they might be open to it, I would teach them the techniques. Those were the most satisfying moments of my medical practice because I was putting the power over the illness back into the hands of the patient.


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