Why am I here, and what am I supposed to be doing?

    A question that many people have: Why am I here, and what am I supposed to be doing? by Jose Silva

 
    Life is often hard, and presents many challenges. Yet we must persist and do what we are supposed to do.


    I've certainly had many challenges in my life:


    *My father died when I was four years old, as the result of a terrorist act during the Mexican revolution.


    *My mother remarried and moved away, while I stayed with my grandmother.

    *I never went to school, because I was working to bring in money for the family.

    *I grew up in a border town in the Southwest, where bullies like to pick on kids as small and as light as I
was.

    *I've been through economic depressions - the Great Depression that affected the entire United States, and
numerous local depressions that result from such things as bad weather, fluctuating oil prices, peso devaluations, and air base closings.

    *When I began researching ways to help my children develop more of the natural mental abilities - the research that lead to the development of the Silva Method - many of my friends shunned me and my family, they ridiculed us, and they even called the law on us.

    *My church - which is supposed to offer spiritual support during hard times - threatened to excommunicate me
for trying to help people in ways that they didn't understand.

    *When I completed my research and tried to show the world what I had done, I was rejected by scientists, by the government, and by the educational and religious establishments.

    *When I set up a business, many of the people I had taught to teach the Silva Method turned on me, took the course that I had spent 22 years and half a million dollars to develop, and began teaching it as their own.

    *When I told an author that he could write a book that included my copyrighted material and we would split the profits, he walked away and wrote his book with one of the people who had taken my material and was teaching it without my permission. His book was a big seller at the time, but now it is out of print and ours are still being sold worldwide.

    *Today, I have many loyal people who have stuck with me for two decades or more. Yet I'm still disappointed sometimes when someone I thought was loyal says that I don't know what I'm doing, and goes out to teach on his or her own.

    It doesn't make sense sometimes. All I've tried to do my entire life is to correct problems and help people, and
to earn enough money by doing so to take care of my own family, so that we don't have to depend on anyone else.

    I'm not looking for sympathy. I know that there are people who have had a more difficult life than I have.
Everyone has challenges to face.

    I was asked what gives me the courage to persist in the face of so many obstacles; how do I know I am doing the right thing; how do I know what I should be doing with my life.

PURPOSE OF LIFE

    My first purpose, when I was six years old, was to take care of myself and my family. Somebody had to earn money, and being the oldest male, I decided I should do it. This is not difficult to figure out. Even animals take care of their own families. There is really nothing special about that.

    I have never been able to understand people who don't try to take care of their own families, or divorced fathers
who fail to even support their own children. People like that are not acting like human beings; they are not even
acting in as ethical a manner as most animals.

GIVING SERVICE

    In my efforts to support myself and my family, I learned very quickly that people were not willing to give you money simply because you needed it, but would gladly pay you if you gave them something of value, something that solved a problem for them or helped them to enjoy their life more.

    I solved the problem of dirty shoes by shining their shoes. I sold them newspapers, cleaned their offices, took
them shopping, cooked in their restaurants, helped them build buildings.

    I found that I could earn even more money by helping more than one person at a time.

    For instance, when I sold household items like needles and thread door-to-door, people appreciated my service. When I recruited several more young people to help me take my merchandise door to door, I helped even more homeowners, and helped these young people earn some money for their families also. As a result, I earned much more money than before.

    The more people you help, the more valuable your services are, and the more money you make.

    Did I enjoy doing all that work?

    Not particularly.

    Was it satisfying?

    It is always satisfying to fulfill your obligation to take care of your family. And It made me feel good to know
that I was helping people.

    Some people always pick jobs that they enjoy. They seem to be compensated by the enjoyment; but if they are not correcting a lot of problems, if they are not helping a lot people, they will probably not receive a great deal of money.

    Some people choose jobs that are very satisfying, because they are help people in need. Again, they may receive the bulk of their compensation in feelings of satisfaction rather than cash.

    Different people have different needs.

    My needs were to take care of myself and my family.

    And I found that the best way to do that was to help as many people, as much as possible.

    Eventually, in the 1960s I was employing crews of workers to install television antennas so that Laredo residents could get good television reception, even from the San Antonio stations 150 miles away.

    This was hard work, but I was helping the workers that I employed, as well as helping the people who watched the television after we installed the antennas.

    Then I found something that helped a lot more people, and helped them a lot more than any television set ever
could: I began teaching people how to use more of their minds to be healthier, luckier, and more successful in
life.

HELPING MILLIONS

    The Silva Method has helped millions of people, in every way you can imagine.

    Our files hear at the office are bulging with testimonials and thank you letters from people who have overcome terminal illnesses, who have learned how to earn all the money they need to support their families, who have overcome challenges and gotten the education that they need, and so much more.

    It is interesting that during the 22 years when I was conducting my research, I always had plenty of money for my family and also enough left over to invest in research.

    I was actually earning more money than other people in similar businesses, even though they were helping as many people with their business as I was with mine.

    Why was this?

    I attribute it to the fact that I was committed to helping people with research.

    I don't mean involved; I mean committed. Do you know the difference?

    The difference in being involved and being committed is like ham and eggs. The chicken was involved; the pig was committed.

    I was doing much more than helping my own children.

    *When other parents saw that my children had started getting better grades, they asked me to help their
children. I did so. 

    *When people learned that I could help them with holistic faith healing techniques, they came to me looking
for help. I attempted to help all who came. In fact, my brother Juan and I used to go out looking for people to
help.

    *When other adults in Laredo saw what the children could do, they asked me to teach them my techniques also.

    *Eventually I was teaching my method to groups of people. I did not do it for money, but to help them.
Eventually I began to accept a small amount from those who came to the meetings to help pay the cost of the room and refreshments.

HELP FROM HIGHER INTELLIGENCE

    I believe that Higher Intelligence, on the "other side" as we like to say, guided me in the correct direction
because I demonstrated my commitment to use what I learned to help people, and to use it to correct problems.

    Many people get involved and promise a lot of things. I was committed, and I was producing. From the very
beginning, I shared everything I was learning with anyone who wanted to know.

    How did I know that I was doing the correct thing?

    I didn't always know.

    Did I ever have doubts?

    You bet I did.

CALLING IT QUITS

    One time I got so discouraged while reading psychology books late one night, after everyone else had gone to bed, that I threw the book across the room and it slid under the sofa. That was it, I had found the help I needed for my children, I was frustrated and ready to quit.

    Why should I continue to take the abuse and criticism from people in the community?

    Why should I, who had learned to read and write with the help of my sister and brother because I never attended school, try to understand books that college students found difficult?

    Why should I continue to put my money into something for other people's benefit?

    That's how I felt.

    So what caused me to change my mind, to realize that part of my purpose in life was to continue my study and research?

    A dream.

    I had a very strange dream that same night, a dream that contained numbers, and I spent all of the next day trying to figure out what the dream and the numbers meant.

    That evening, somebody suggested we look for a lottery ticket with those numbers. In Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, we found the ticket, and it won me $10,000.

    Well, I found out what the numbers meant, but what did the dream itself signify?

    I sat down by myself and thought about everything that had happened, both before and after the dream.

    The one thing that stood out, that was different from my normal routine, was by little violent episode when I threw the psychology book across the room and vowed to end my research.

    Could there be a connection? Could it be that that book slamming into the wall woke up somebody else besides by wife? Could it have gotten the attention of somebody on the other side, who realized that they needed to send me an sign to let me know I should keep going?

    Was that there way of compensating me for the work I was doing?

    That was the conclusion that I drew from the episode.

    So I went back to work, studying, testing, trying out many different things to see what would work.

    A few years later I got discouraged again.

    That was when Christ - the symbol of my religion - came to me.

    It was actually a picture of Christ that my son Ricardo put into my lap one morning shortly after I had
packed all of my books away in the attic. At least this time I wasn't throwing them around.

    Ricardo came running in from the rain and tossed the rolled up papers to me.

    When I picked them up, they were dry. How could that be?
    When I unrolled them, the life-sized face of Christ was looking me straight in the eye.

    It hit me as hard as any fist has ever hit me. I felt as if he was asking me, "Didn't I tell you to continue your
research? Why are you not obeying me?"

    I went into the bathroom and locked the door. I didn't want my family to see me cry.
KNOWING WHAT'S RIGHT

    Here are some of the conclusions that I draw from my life experiences:

    *We have been sent here to help correct problems, in order to make this world a better place to live.
    
    *Correcting problems means that we should be doing constructive and creative things. We should not destroy or do anything to make life more difficult for anyone, but should make life better whenever we can.

    *The more problems we correct, and the more people we help, the more compensation we will receive.

    *Our helpers on the "other side," the helpers that I refer to as Higher Intelligence, offer us guidance. It is up to us to listen and to heed the guidance.

    *When you are centered, when you function at the alpha level, you will receive the guidance from the other side. It is not just ideas that count - they might be coming from your own imagination. Notice what happens in the physical world. When things are going well, you are on the right track. If you have too many problems in your life, you may be going in the wrong direction.

    I believe that I was one of the fortunate ten percent of humanity that naturally functions at the 10 cycles alpha brain wave frequency. I was centered. I used those levels naturally, without even realizing it. I was at the correct level, and had the correct attitude - helping people - so I got the messages.

    Now you can do the same. Enter level with the 3 to 1 method that you learned in the Silva Method. Ask for guidance. If you are sincere, and if you are demonstrating your sincerity by taking action - if you show that you are really committed - then you will be guided to know what is right.

    And when that happens, it is easy to press on, to persist, to have faith, to trust, and to do what you know in your heart is right to do.

    As it says in the Bible, "If God is with you, then who can be against you."

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