On Intuition, Bending Reality and the strange legacy of Jose Silva: Vishen at the Ideas Festival

A single speech cannot change your life, but a good speech can give you a direction and give you insights on where to take your life. And that's all I'm hoping to do right now. I'm going to talk about an idea that's very dear to my heart and something that I am obsessed with. And I hope I can make it entertaining, inspiration and transformative for you as well. So. So, firstly, for those of you who don't know me, I am the founder of mindvalley. It's the world's biggest personal growth platform. I also write books in my free time. My last book is called the Buddha and the Badass or El Buddha e El Shingon. And my books are the intersection of spirituality and work, because that is who I am. I'm an electrical engineer and a computer scientist who also happens to have quit Silicon Valley to become a meditation instructor. At one point, I decided to combine both, and that is really what I do in life. We are at the Ideas Festival, and the question I want to ask you today is where do ideas come from? When you are building a business, when you are trying to make an important decision in your life, what sparks the right idea? So I want to share some interesting ideas, ideas with you that may help give an answer. Do you recognize that lazy man in the picture? Anyone know who he is? That is Thomas Edison. Not so lazy, right? Over a thousand patents. Now, there was an interesting story about Edison. People believe that Edison, when he took his famous afternoon naps, he held a metal ball in his hand, and as he dozed off to sleep, his hand would drop, the metal ball would fall down, hit a plate, creating a loud sound that would jolt him up. He was dipping into sleep, waking up and plucking out new ideas. Recently, scientists decided to test this and they found that if they gave volunteers a really complex mathematical problem to solve, and then one group of volunteers just had to solve it on their own, and the other group had to go into a nap, get woken up. The difference was vast. The people who were napped and then woken up were solving it at 80% rates, while the other group around 35%. So that's pretty interesting, right? What is going on when we dip into sleep and get woken up? Do you recognize this man? This is Nikola Tesla. In every movie about Nikola Tesla, there are incredible scenes where he talks about how he could see his inventions in his mind. Often it would start with a bright light, much like that light, and then fully formed insights would come to him. Nikola Tesla said, instinct is something that transcends knowledge. We have undoubtedly certain finer fibers that enable us to perceive truths when logical deduction or without willful effort of the brain is futile. But Tesla did not just see ideas in his mind. There was a moment when Tesla was 14 years old and he almost killed himself. You see, he wanted to play a prank on some other 14 year olds, so he dived under this floating bridge. The idea was he was going to come out on the other side and boo, scare his friends. Unfortunately, he miscalculated and he found himself trapped under the bridge. He couldn't come out. In his biography, he said at first he thought he was going to die. And then once again that white light came and he saw with his eyes closed the exact gaps in the bridge where he could stick his head. He wrote this in his biography. You don't have to read the full text. But he was able to come up for air and he lived. Then, of course, there is this modern magician, Steve Jobs, in the biography of Jobs by Walter Isaacson. Isaacson said throughout his life he would seek to follow basic precepts of Eastern religion, such as emphasis on prana wisdom or cognitive understanding that is intuitively experienced through concentration of the mind. Jobs himself said this. When he goes into these creative states, your mind slows down and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before. It's a discipline. You have to practice it. In his famous commencement address, he went on to say, listen to your heart and intuition. They somehow already know who you are to become. What was Tesla and Edison and Jobs speaking of? I believe what they were talking about is what we commonly call intuition. Where do ideas come from? I believe intuition is that source. It is the seed of every idea. The question is, why do we doubt it? Why do we not talk about it more? I remember sitting in a bus once six years ago with Ricardo Salinas. And Ricardo was talking about changing education in Mexico. And I asked Ricardo if he knew about this man, Jose Silva. You see, I learned about intuition from a Mexican American researcher by the name of Jose Silva. If you've heard of this man's name, raise your hand. Not many people, right? Which is why it's important we talk about his work. He died over 22 years ago, but Jose Silva wrote some amazing books on the power of the mind. El Metodo Silva, the Control Mental the Silva Mind Control Method. He lived in Laredo and Nuevo Laredo, the two border towns between Mexico and the United States. And when Jose was a young man, he had 10 kids. And he wanted to get his kids to improve their work at school. So he decided to dabble with changing their brains. You see, he was a radio repairman, and he knew that if you take a wire and you reduce the resistance in the wire, more electricity flows through. So he said, well, how could I reduce the resistance in my children's brain? I guess back in the 1940s, it was perfectly okay to experiment on your kids. So he started experimenting with what he called biofeedback, relaxation, hypnotherapy. And sure enough, he found that his children, their performance in school was getting better and better and better. And then something weird happened. He was sitting with his daughter Isabel. Okay, now, guys, I want you to have an open mind regarding what I'm about to say next. Jose was sitting with his daughter Isabel. He would guide her into a relaxed state of mind, what today we call meditation. But back then, they called it biofeedback or restful states. Before he could ask the question, Isabel would answer. So he was terrified. He was a Christian man. He was, what is going on? Is my daughter guessing the question? So he wrote to the famous researcher at Duke University, J.B. rhine. Maybe you've heard of J.B. rhine. He did research in human intuition, and he found that certain people could guess beyond the odds of probability. Now, JV Ryan wrote back to Silva and said, absolute nonsense. Intuition is rare. Only a few people have it. You are not training your daughter to be intuitive. Jose said, no, no, no, no, no. I know what I'm doing. So he went on and he started training all the children he could find in Laredo, Texas. And all of these kids started seeing their grades go up. And then the adults came to him. And before you knew it, he had started the Silver Method, which became one of the biggest personal growth movements in America. Now, today, my company has the rights to the Silver Method. And we see so many stories come in from executives, from CEOs, hundreds upon hundreds of stories of people going into these relaxed, altered states and getting incredible ideas. But the craziest story is this. The curious case of Richard Bachelor. Richard Back was a writer who wrote a book called Jonathan Livingston Seagull. That book became so popular, it made the COVID of Time magazine. But what people don't know is that as he was writing the book for five years, he couldn't figure out how to complete it. And it stayed in his basement. The unpublished manuscript. One day, he took a silver class. And in the class, as he was learning to relax his mind and go into altered states, the Ending of the book came. Richard back wrote about this, that book and that ending came from somewhere. But it was so powerful, it put him on the COVID of Time magazine. These ideas fascinated me. What was going on with these people who were studying this approach to go into these restful states and seemingly pluck ideas, inventions, creativity from air. So I decided to track down people who had worked closely with Jose Silva. Jose died in 1999. I missed him. I never met him. But in 2009 I tracked on Bert Goldman, who was his number one instructor. Bert back then was around 83 years old. He was retired. But Bert showed me what he was doing with his mind and he told me a fascinating story. Bert had just become a photographer. At 83, he had become a photographer and his works were now being featured in museums and galleries. And I asked him, how did you pick up photography at 83? He says, well, one day I was walking in San Diego. I came down to this, like this beach and there were lots of rocks going down into the sea. And as I was going and climbing down the rocks, I wanted to take a photo of the sea. I heard a voice say, plant yourself. So I looked around. There was no one around me who said that voice, but I decided to listen. So I planted myself. I then heard a voice say, take lots of photos. So with my foot planted, I held up my camera, I took lots of photos. And then I went back that day. I developed the film and I scattered all the photos on the bed and I noticed something curious about them. They formed an interesting perspective. Bert then showed me this. I filmed this on my iPhone in his house. This was what he created. This is the first one. And this was when those words plant yourself and take lots of photos came to you. That's it. That quantum plant yourself. This is where I planted myself. This is San Diego, beautiful, cool. And you can see what that evolved into when you look at these pictures. This is that style of photography that you developed where you take multiple pictures and you put them together. Wow. It's got this really cool 3D effect to it. That was the result of an 84 year old man listening to a voice in his head. Maybe we all should be listening to the voices in our head now. Bert didn't stop there. I then asked him, so what else are you doing? He had just taught himself to play the piano at 83. Great. So we've seen, we've seen your painting. Give me four numbers from 1 to 7, 6, 4, 3, 1. When the dog sings along. He started to show off this was a man in his 80s. He had started painting, he started photography. He'd started building his own app in his 80s. When we say that, most people are useless. But it didn't stop there, guys. It got weirder. I then went to track down a very mysterious, legendary woman called Helen Hedzel, living in a farm somewhere in Texas. She was Jose Silva's PR director years ago. But something curious about Helen. She was known as the contest queen because every competition she takes part in, she would win. She won millions of dollars. She won home, she won seven trips to Paris. It was all over the news in Texas. People couldn't understand who was this woman who kept winning lotteries, lottos, sweepstakes, draws. I could barely believe it myself. But this woman seem to defy probability. Now, how do we explain this? So last night I happened to have drinks with Neil Degrasse Tyson. I'm such a big fan of Neil. So I asked Neil about intuition because to me, I'm an engineer. Science is so important. I'm not suggesting there's something mystical here, but I wanted to get Neil's perspective. Now, Neil said, look, there is evidence that when we go into certain states of being, our brains operate at a heightened functionality. There is not enough evidence, he says, that we can somehow share information with other minds. Okay, now that's debatable. There is some studies from the University of Edinburgh, from Duke University, that some of this is possible, but we still have to replicate those over and over again. Now, about Helen. Neil said, it could be something like this. If you take 1,000 people and you ask them to flip a coin, heads or tails, and everyone who has tails has to leave the room. After one flip, you have 500. After the second flip, you have 250, then 125, then roughly 62, then roughly 32, then 16, then 8, then 4, then 2, then 1, that one person has flipped the coin heads 10 times. Now, the press goes to that person and says, how did you do it? And the person goes, well, you know, I was using my mind and things like that. So that could be happening too, as well, right? We must look at both sides. But still, it's pretty curious that Jose Silva's PR manager keeps winning contest after contest after contest after contest after contest. So what could be going on here? Now, this is what we do know. There is much in science that we do not know. The physicist Nassim Haramin said, spirituality is nothing more than science. We have yet to find an equation for. So let's park that aside let's talk about what we do know. And what we do know is brain waves matter. Jose Silva was a big researcher in brainwaves. And one of the early things, even about 100 years ago, we knew, was that we operate primarily at a beta waking brainwave frequency. When we meditate, it goes down to alpha relaxation. Alpha is associated with meditation, with healing. But if you get even more relaxed, we go into a state called theta. Theta is associated with intuition and creativity. When we're asleep, we're at delta. Now the thing is you can train people to get into these alpha and theta states, these restful, dreamy states, while staying awake. This is essentially what happens when you're meditating. Now, if you could hear your brainwave if you were at beta, it's a really loud noise. When you slow down to alpha, this is what it sounds like. This is the alpha frequency. Seven to 14 cycles per second. When you go slower, when you really relax and you get to theta, it sounds like this. Now what you're hearing are actual audio Silva used. He would play it in the background of his seminars to guide people into that alpha and theta state. Essentially what he was doing is he was inducing what we call an altered state of consciousness. Now this is really cool. Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheel wrote a book called Stealing Fire a few years back. And they said that altered states of consciousness today is a trillion dollar economy. CEOs, the US military, companies are all using altered states to create accelerated and magnified human performance. Kotler says we live in a monophasic society. In our society, we are told there is one way of being awake. But if you look at ancient cultures, they were polyphasic. The Toltecs, the tribes of the Amazon, the people in India, the people who, the kung fu masters of China, they did not live in one state of mind. They were polyphasic. For example, I spent time with the Achuar tribe in the Ecuadorian rainforest. These are a dream culture. In other words, the Achuar communicate to each other. They believe through their dreams. They wake up at 5am they gather around to drink tea, and then they talk about their dreams. They interpret messages from other tribes across the Amazon through their dreams. To them, they the dream world is as real as the waking world. I grew up in a Hindu family. In Hindu culture, we also practice multiple modalities to tap into altered states. The kung fu masters of China used altered states in their martial arts performance. But today we stop, we criticize it, we say, oh, that's not scientific. In 1973, an anthropologist called Erica Bourguignon did a study and found that 90% of cultures have an altered state ritual. But in the Western world, it's dying out. And she said this is a loss of perceptual diversity. She said, we are trained to believe that only what we see with our eyes is real. But perceptual diversity means seeing with a much wider lens. It's the feel, it's to see. It creates a better way of relating with each other and the world. We are greatly losing that and we need to bring that back. Now, this is my story. I moved to San Francisco in the middle of the dot com bubble exploding. I ended up losing everything. The money that I was saving my company. And in desperation, the only job I could get as a 26 year old engineer was a job where I had to pick up the phone and call back. Then we used the Yellow Pages. Call lawyers in San Antonio, Texas from A to Z in the yellow Pages and sell them on buying law firm management software. Now, if you are a Malaysian kid with a name like Vishen Lakhiani and you're disturbing Texas lawyers in the middle of their workday to pitch them software, you will hear more people tell you to F off than you ever imagine. So one day, after 13 lawyers, I counted 13 lawyers told me to F off on the same day. And because they are lawyers, they're very creative about how they say it, involving brooms and chairs and other torture instruments. I fell into a depression. So I decided to take a silver class. In that silver class, I learned about meditation and intuition. And I changed my approach. I no longer called every lawyer A to Z. I would run my fingers down the Yellow pages, go into a relaxed state of mind, the alpha, the theta level. And I would check my instinct. Should I call this person yes or no? And I would only call if my instinct said yes. In one week, I doubled my sales. The next week I used more techniques from Silva. I doubled my sales again. Four months later, I'd been promoted three times. And me, who was a losing salesman, became the vice president of sales in the company. I went on to stay with that company for 18 months. And I quit. And I started my company, Mindvalley, which today is the biggest platform for human transformation. But what's interesting about mindvalley is that we invented new ways of transforming individuals. If you go to our website, there are 16,000 case studies of results. And one of the first things I did was I got the rights to Jose Silva's work and we put it on our platform because this work is so dear to me. As I was building up mindvalley, I was at a big competitive disadvantage. I was not in America. I was in a developing country, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. A country which was suffering from high brain drain. And I was trying to build an American company, an American dot com. No investor gave me money. I got turned down. With no bank loans, with no investments. I took the company to $100 million in revenue. Our office went from that to an office that Made Inc. Magazine Top 10 Most Beautiful Workspaces in the world. All because I trusted my intuition. That intuition to me was more important than tens of millions of dollars in VC money which I was never able to get. I went on then to write a book called the Code of the Extraordinary Mind. The first chapter I wrote for that book took me nine months because I second guessed myself. I didn't trust myself. But the day before the book was due, I looked at chapter nine, the final chapter, and I felt that it was absolute rubbish. I felt that intuition. I decided to sit down, go into a relaxed state and the entire chapter nine came to me. And eight hours later I completed that chapter. That chapter which came from intuition, went on to inspire a documentary film which won a Daytime Emmy award. It became the best chapter in the book and the book itself became the number one book in the world at one point on Amazon, making me accidentally the number two author in the world. Following your intuition pays. I went on to start and start teaching meditation. R and B stars like Miguel spoke about in Billboard magazine how they would do these meditations to put themselves in the right state before going on show. One of my students whom I taught the Silver Method to, she used Jose Silva's techniques not just for intuition, but to visualize herself winning the US Open. She started at 16 years old. At 19, Bianca Andreescu beat Serena Williams and became the US Open winner. How do we get there? How do we get to this level where our mind, our spirit, the energy that flows within us is helping us in life? Would you guys like to know? So let me give you a simple framework. But the first thing you have to understand is we must respect the traditions of our ancestors. They knew something that we are forgetting and it has to do with tapping into altered states. The man there is one of the most successful entrepreneurs I know in America. Seven companies, including starting America's biggest art licensing company. One day when I asked him how he did it, he said, I use plant medicine. Any CEO who is not using altered states is at a competitive disadvantage. They will not survive in Silicon Valley. He said, now there's research on this. Professor John Mihalasky of the Newark College of Engineering did a study on CEOs and intuition, and he found that CEOs who score high on intuitive tests actually create more profitable companies. Maybe this is why I was lucky at what I did. And CEOs who do not score high on intuitive tests actually create bad luck for themselves. Daniel Goleman, in his book, gives another really interesting way of looking at this. He talks about altered states, and he says there are four ways to get to altered states. So these are the four ways that you can explore neurotraining, breathwork, pharmacology, meditation. Let's look at all four. Okay. Neurotraining. Crazy expensive. This is me in the world's number one neurotraining facility. That's literally what it looks like. It costs $15,000 for five days. It's worthwhile if you're rich. But in there, in these labs, what they do is they map onto your brain the ideal brainwave states of Zen monks. Now next is breathwork. Breathwork is much easier, and breathwork is really growing in popularity right now. Maybe you've heard of Wim Hof. This man, Wim Hof, who's I'm proud to say, is a friend of mine, has multiple Guinness records. He teaches breath for superhuman performance. He holds the record for running a marathon in the Antarctica barefoot. For running a marathon across deserts barefoot, he's able to perform superhuman feats. And there's a movie about his life coming up soon. How does he do it? Accessing altered states through breathing. This is essentially breathwork. Breath work is nice, but it's not very easy to control. When you take a breath work class, often memories that you may need to heal will come up. But it's very random, but still very, very, very powerful. The third one is pharmacology. Ayahuasca is growing in popularity. I did an ayahuasca trip with a Colombian shaman two years ago. For seven hours, something spoke to me. And in that dialogue, I saw a fully completed app. I went invested a million dollars, and that app is now being deployed. But it was amazing how screen by screen by screen, even an AI algorithm was all downloaded while I was in this state. I recently was in a brainstorm with the founder of Zumba. Maybe you guys have heard of Zumba, right? It started by a group of Colombians, and it became one of the biggest fitness revolutions in America. That's Jeffrey Perlman, one of the co founders of Zumba. He and when we were doing this creative brainstorm and Jeffrey was guiding me to think about my company, he insisted on one. We do it under the influence of San Pedro, which is a plant medicine from cactus. And he says, because it gives you a creative way of thinking and new ideas will flow to you outside your logical mind. Today when I invest in a company, I sit down with the co founder. I had to block off her face because I couldn't get her permission in time. And we DO psilocybin microdosing, 0.75 grams. Did this recently because we needed to get certain decisions about this new app to the software development firm and we couldn't solve it in a conscious state in 30 minutes under microdosing Psilocybin, the exact details we needed for the UX comes to us today. I would never invest in a company without doing a psilocybin microdose trip with the founders to really, really, really get clear on what we are building. But the most important, says Daniel Goldman, is meditation. Meditation in the book Altered Traits is listed as the number one way because it's cheap, it's effective, and it's something you can control. Now look at that chart right, you'll see that research and meditation only really started taking off in 2010 and it's now going through an exponential rise. Meditation doesn't just make you more creative. It improves your health, it improves your kindness, it improves your compassion, it improves your confidence. It is the most important drug that we can possibly get and it's free. My next book, coming out in August this year, is on meditation. It is taking my years of experience and I've designed a form of meditation for entrepreneurs. I hope you guys read it. So as we wrap up, I want you to remember, being human is messy. Being human can involve bouts of sadness, depression, not knowing where, what to do next, who we are to become. But being human is also magical. Because within all of you, there is something that we cannot explain through science, but there's something that has a seed of magic in it. Call it a seed of God or a seed of the soul or a seed of your ancestors, there's something within you. I like to call it the still inner voice. Every time you feel alone, every time you feel that you need to make a decision, but you don't know what decision to make, every time you feel that the world is beating you down, the most important thing you can do is to learn to sit still, to learn to go into a relaxed state of mind and to listen to this inner voice. We can't explain where this inner voice comes from, but we all have it. We are all made of the same stuff. Or as Neil DeGrasse Tyson says, We are all made of stardust. And there's something beautiful and mesmerizing in that idea. Do not forget this. The same abilities that the people I shared in this presentation had to create music, to create artwork, to build businesses, to go into extreme bouts of creativity is in all of you. But the modern world beats it out of us. And especially here, the people of Mexico. This has been part of your culture for generations. It is an important part of your culture. And it is a piece of human society that we need to not say was outdated or old fashioned or unscientific. Rather, it's something we need to dig up, to polish, to bring into our lives. Perceptual diversity matters. And the more we can understand this, the greater our ability to influence each other and the world. I want you to look at the person on your left. Just look at them. Look at their eyes for a moment. You don't have to have a conversation with them. Now look the other way. Look at the other person. Now I want you to just look at your hands. Observe the lines on your hands when you look at another human being. In the eyes. When you take time to just look and pay attention to the world around you, you automatically induce restful states, altered states. You automatically go back into your body and your soul. You automatically feel more connected to life. Life. And this is the bridge to intuition. I hope you remember this. And I hope, if anything, this presentation gives you new insights and ideas on what you need to explore next. To take that magic within you and use it to change the world, to build a beautiful life for yourself and to help heal the planet. Thank you, Sam.