PNTV - The Silva Mind Control Method of Mental Dynamics by Burt Goldman and Jose Silva

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time.

Hey, this is Brian. Welcome to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we're doing a great book. I do not have it here, but imagine that I was holding it and it is a tongue twister. The Silva Mind Control Method of Mental Dynamics. It's an awesome book and it's by Bert Goldman and Jose Silva. I found this book randomly when I was staying at a friend's house in Bali when I was on sabbatical. And it's one of the most densely packed with wisdom books out there. Totally dig it, highly recommend it. And we'll have fun today taking a look at a few of my favorite big ideas from it. And check out the note. This is one of my favorite notes as well. So first we have the Silva Mind Control Method of Mental Dynamics, but the Silva Mind Control Method. The basic idea here is what Jose Silva and others have discovered is that we have brainwave patterns, right? In different states of consciousness, our brain does different things. And you can measure it on what's called an eeg, an electroencephalogram, right? We can plug up all those electrode things to our brains and see what's happening when we do different things. So, for example, when we're sleeping, our brain is moving very slowly and has really high ups and really low downs, high amplitude and slow frequency, right? That's in the deep dreamless state known as delta. And then there's a state above that which is theta, which is just a little bit faster and a little bit less deep, but still really slow and mellow. That's REM sleep. Then you go up from there into alpha, which again is just a little bit faster, a little bit shallower. That is kind of meditative states, right? Deep relaxation, restoration, et cetera. And then we get into beta, right? And beta starts moving faster. It's a conscious state. Right now we're both in beta. As I create this and as you listen to it now, there's different levels in Beta, though, at the highest threshold of ultimate stress. And chaos in the mind is like a seizure where your brain is literally going like that. And then you can bring it down into more manageable. You're not having a seizure, but you kind of are internally where your brain is just like this. It's when we're really agitated and we can't get our brain to slow down. We literally. Our waves are going like that. And he says that creative genius is essentially the ability to bring your brain states out of that into a lower More relaxed beta, which we're in right now, I would imagine, and into Alpha, where we can imagine our ideal future and then fulfill it in a more moderately beautifully harmonic brain state of kind of an awesome, plugged in genius level beta, where it's mellow versus this kind of thing. So again, we talk about this a lot in terms of having minds that are out of control. That's when our brains are like this. Well, we can't do anything of any creative merit when our brains are like that. So we want to be able to bring ourselves down into Alpha theta Delta. It's one of the primary reasons for meditation. And as we do that, we really connect to the one deepest inspiration, which is why we go into. One of the reasons why we go into deep sleep is to restore. So to be able to do that consciously bring ourselves into Alpha is awesome. I talk about how to do that in the note. The quickest way to do it and the quickest way to describe how to do it is simply imagine sitting on a chair, straight up, or however you do it comfortably, and take a couple breaths in and out. Close your eyes, find some stillness and find a nice couple deep breaths and then breathe in, thinking to yourself, three. And on the exhale gently say to yourself, maybe imagine a 3 and go 3, 3, 3. So inhale and then exhale, 3, 3, 3. To yourself, nice and mellow. Do that. 2, 2, 2. Do that. 1, 1, 1. Inhale, exhale. And if you can't do that, it's because you're really, really stressed out. If you can do that, go to five and count down, go to 10 and count down. And you can do some cool creative stuff while you're in. That will bring you into alpha state. The moment you can do that in a relaxed manner, you're in alpha state, which is a very, very good place to be. We're going to talk about that more for it in future episodes. For now, let's quick look at brainwaves. Beta alpha theta delta. We want to hang out in Alpha more often. That's one way to do it. Really cool idea on fear versus excitement. They say that fear, all fear is, is a negative expectation. So let's imagine that we have a line, right? And on it we've got expectation, we've got a negative expectation over here and we've got a positive expectation over here. Now let's just say I'm recording this note or I'm writing the note or whatever, and I think that it's going to totally suck, right? Or my business I'm going to start is going to totally suck, or the relationship and the date just isn't going to go well. My expectation is negative. If I have a negative expectation, I'm going to have fear. It's really that simple. And the way to go from fear to excitement is to change our expectation. So if I have fear, a negative expectation about this episode, or the business or the relationship, I need to slow down and see what expectation am I giving it. Anytime you have fear, check in and write down, what am I expecting to happen. I guarantee you, if you're fearful, you will have a negative expectation. What's really cool is you can see, well, what's a possible positive expectation. So I can think, oh, I'm going to stumble and stammer and say something stupid in this episode. Or I can say, God, I hope I inspire at least one person. I go from fear to excitement. It's a totally different energy that we can show up with in life. And that's one of the coolest ways I've ever heard. To go from fear to excitement is to check in on what our expectations are and then to choose a more positive one. Simply by doing that, we're going to change our energy level around it. Try it out. It's huge. In the note, I've got a few different ideas here, but just check in with yourself and see when you feel excited, when you're excited, you have a positive expectation. When you're afraid, you have a negative expectation. I talk about in the note the seven hermetic laws. Pretty cool. Pretty fun stuff. We're not going to get into all of them, but I'll mention briefly one of the laws, the law of rhythms. Seven laws, right? Like cause and effect, rhythms, gender, all these different ideas. But the law of Rhythms is really cool. It's this idea that everything goes in cycles. There's a Circadian rhythm of 24 hours. There are monthly rhythms. There are annual, season and seasonal rhythms. All these different rhythms. Well, in our lives, we're going to have rhythms of happiness and sadness. We're never going to get to a state where we're completely happy. That's insane. And that's completely violating nature's law of rhythm. There's always going to be daylight and then nighttime, sun and moon. It's just how it works, right? Day and night, same with our emotions. We're going to have more positive times and less positive times. As we embrace that law, we quit suffering as much on the downturn. And what we'll find is we still have Highs and lows. But as they say, our highs are higher and our lows are higher. And pretty soon our lows, right, can actually be our level of happiness. A depression for us can be for a lot of people kind of their higher levels of happiness. It's kind of an interesting thing to think about. So as we move, embrace the fact we're still going to have highs and lows, but realize we can create higher highs and higher lows. Really cool ideas. The other idea I want to cover is five rules of happiness. They have an awesome idea here, five rules to happiness. Very quickly. Number one rule of happiness. If you like something, enjoy it. If you like doing something, enjoy it. Too often people like something, but they don't even let themselves dig it. If you don't like doing something, rule number two, don't do it. If you have to do it, try to change it a little bit. Try to modify it so it's a little more enjoyable, right? And then if you can't or you choose not to, don't, not to stop doing it or to change how you do it, then accept it. If you can't, if you have to do it, it makes no sense not to accept it. And the way you accept it is you change your perception of it and you can turn even the worst thing into something positive. It's a really cool idea. We talk about in here this idea that someone at his seminar went to the parking lot, their car had been hit.

Right?

Now they realized they couldn't change that. That already happened. They didn't enjoy it, but they couldn't change it. So they accepted it. Then they changed their perception of it. They made it positive. They figured it'd cost $200 or $500 to get it fixed. So they were going to make create value in the world. So they made $1,000 or whatever the numbers were. If we get unemployed, we can look at it and say, well, I can't change that now, but I can see the best possible thing on this and I can find a way to, to find the best in it and oh my gosh, enjoy it. There's always that possibility. We always have that choice. If you can't change it, accept it and change your perception of it. That's a really, really quick look at this awesome book. Hope you dug it. Brain Waves, Fear to Excitement, Rhythms and the five laws of Happiness. Talk to you soon.

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