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Q: Can you explain more about how the "indications" you mention in the MentalVideo Technique work?

A: Here is an example that Jose Silva gave us, about a very important event in his life. This took place in 1949, when he got frustrated with his study of psychology and decided to end his research.

"Freud, Adler, Jung - these intelligent, educated men - they cannot even agree with each other," he said. "How could I, a simple, uneducated man, ever hope to understand? If these big wigs don't get agree with each other, who am I to straighten them out? I am just an amateur!"

At this time, Silva was working at very busy schedule. He would close the radio shop at 9 p.m., go home to have dinner with his family

It was late at night. Paula and the children had been asleep for three hours, while he sat in the living room, reading a psychology book. But he'd had enough.

"I've learned enough to help my family," he thought. "My church thinks I'm wrong to delve into these areas. People in the town, all religious people, are beginning to shun me. I'm taking time and money that I could use for my family and spending it on this research. Why should I continue?"

He hurled the book across the room. It slid under the sofa and banged against the wall. And Silva went to bed.

His strangest dream

About two hours later, he began to dream. It was the strangest dream of his life: A bright light, with two sets of numbers hanging in space.

"When I opened my eyes, it was dark," he said. "But when I closed them, there was this bright light inside of my head, and the numbers: 3-4-3 and 3-7-3. And on the side was the One Solitary Life." By this time, Silva had read about parapsychology and telepathy, and he thought that someone was trying to send him a message in this manner.

He was up the rest of the night, studying the phone book looking for an address or a phone number that contained those numbers. No luck.

As daylight dawned, he got in his car and drove around town looking for a car with those numbers on the license plate. "I was going to signal the driver to stop and ask if he had a message for me," Silva explained.

Silva couldn't tell his wife about the dream for fear she'd think that he had started to go crazy. People used to tell Jose that people said that anyone who read a lot would go crazy! She believed what the church said, and wished he would stop his foolishness. So he kept it to himself all day long.

Finally, late in the day, when he had still not figured out what the dream meant, a whole series of coincidences took place that convinced him more than ever that divine guidance was at work.

"If any one of these things had not taken place," he said, "I would still be wondering what the dream meant. This, I believe, is how higher intelligence communicates with human beings."

Guided through coincidence

Other than the dream, it was a pretty routine day for Silva. Business was normal in his radio and television repair shop in Laredo, but business across the border in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, was a little slow. He used to go across to Nuevo Laredo and take care of service calls there after he closed his Laredo shop at 9 p.m.

But on this particular day, there were no calls from Nuevo Laredo. Silva stuck around and didn't close the shop until a few minutes before 9 p.m. just in case any calls came in.

As he was closing up, Silva's wife Paula came over to the shop, which was next door to their home. Thinking that Jose would be going across the border, she asked him to bring back a bottle of alcohol. They used it as rubbing alcohol.

Jose told Paula that he did not have any calls, but that he would go and get her the alcohol anyway.

About that time, a friend of Silva's named Duarte came by to see him. Duarte had studied psychology with Silva, so Silva finally had someone he could talk to about the dream. He invited Duarte to ride across the border with him and have a cup of coffee.

On the way, Jose told him about the dream and the numbers and how he had tried all day to figure out what they meant.

Duarte asked, "Have you tried the Mexican lottery?"

Silva had not even thought about the lottery. "But now that we are going to Nuevo Laredo," he said, "let us go to the lottery agency and find out."

The lottery agency was just one and a half blocks down the street from the liquor store where they were going to buy the alcohol, so they headed straight for it.

But the lottery agency closed at 9 p.m., and they just missed it. "I guess that wasn't it after all," Silva said, still frustrated at his inability to figure out what the numbers meant and what message they might have held for him.

So they drove back to the liquor store and went in. The procedure was that the clerk would open the bottle and add camphor in it. This made it undrinkable, so no tax would have to be paid when they brought it into Texas. The customs officer would simply smell the alcohol, and when he smelled the camphor, he would let is pass.

It takes a few minutes to put the camphor into the bottle. While Silva waited, Duarte wandered into the next room. He was still interested in finding some lottery tickets to see if he could find the numbers Jose had dreamed about.

Suddenly he saw some lottery tickets hanging on a string.

To his surprise, when he looked closer, he saw the numbers 343.

"Jose! Jose! Come here quick!" he shouted. "Look: There are your numbers."

"I thought he was kidding me," Silva said. But then he went into the room and saw the ticket for himself.

"What are you going to do now?" Duarte asked. Silva had never bought a lottery ticket before, and wasn't even familiar with what they looked like.

They studied the tickets. Each lottery ticket was divided into 20 segments, so that people with very little money could buy just one segment if they wanted to. Fifteen of the 20 segments had already been sold for 15 pesos each. That was less than $2 in U.S. currency.

Silva bought the remaining five segments for less than $10. Then he waited eagerly for the next two days, when they would draw the winning numbers, to see if he won anything.

On the day of the drawing, he drove across the Rio Grande to the Mexican lottery office in Nuevo Laredo to find out what had happened.

The ticket with the numbers 373 would have won Silva approximately $1,000, after taxes to the Mexican government. But that ticket was sold in Mexico City.

The ticket that Silva bought -- the five segments that he obtained -- paid even better. After taxes and after exchanging the pesos into U.S. dollars, Silva wound up with $10,000, quite a tidy sum in 1949.

Analyzing the experience

After it was all over with, and Silva was $10,000 richer, he sat down to figure out what it all meant. How did it all come about?

It all began, Silva reasoned, when he threw down the book and decided to stop studying psychology.

Two hours later came the strange experience of the bright light inside his head. Who put the numbers in his head? And why didn't he understand what they meant?

While analyzing it, he recalled the "One Solitary Life" poem, which appeared alongside the numbers. This reminded him of Jesus, and of his decision to begin the study of psychology.

But what about all of those strange coincidences that led him to the winning lottery ticket? What did all of that mean?

He began to realize that after he had spent the whole day trying without success to figure out the mystery, he needed some help.

"How does higher intelligence help us?" he asks. "Sometimes, they give us visions," he said. "But sometimes, what we think are visions are really only our own fantasies. And sometimes, we don't understand the visions when they do come. That's what happened to me: I didn't know what to do with the information that came in the night.

"So then, higher intelligence has to arrange things so that we do what we are supposed to do," he continued. "We call these spontaneous happenings 'coincidences,' but they are really divine messages from higher intelligence."

So he traced every step of that experience to see if it really did indicate divine intervention through a chain of coincidences:

"Number One," he says, "I had no reason to go to Nuevo Laredo.

"Number Two, if Duarte had not come at the right time and suggested the lottery, I would not have thought of it.

"Number Three, had the lottery agency been open, we would not have found the ticket there and might have given up on it.

"Number Four, the time it took to put the camphor into the bottle of alcohol provided enough time for Duarte to browse around and locate the ticket in the next room of the store. If we had not requested camphor in the alcohol, the bottle would have been in a bag and out the store before Duarte had a chance to see the ticket.

"Number Five, and the most important one, is the coincidence involving my wife Paula. Since I did not have any service calls in Nuevo Laredo, I could have told her that I would pick up the alcohol the next time I went across. But instead, I told her that I would go across anyway.

"That started the chain of coincidences that led us to the only place in all of Mexico where the 343 ticket could be purchased. It was in the store where we always bought alcohol, but I never would have wandered into the next room and seen the ticket. It was Duarte who did that. And he might not have seen the ticket if we had been able to look for tickets at the lottery agency.

"This chain of coincidences, not just one coincidence but five coincidences on the same subject, is what I consider divine intervention. Scientists always look for verification. Having alla of those coincidences happen the way they did provided me wiht the verification that it was divine guidance.

"Many people in Laredo would have thought about the lottery immediately, just as Duarte did. If I had thought about it, I would have checked the lottery agency immediately, which means that I wouldn't have found the ticket. Higher intelligence guided me, through the series of coincidences, to the right place, so that I would find the lottery ticket, and would understand that it was not just luck or coincidence, but divine guidance.

"What did I get from all of this? What was the bottom line? It goes right back to the beginning, when I threw the book across the room and it slid under the couch, and I vowed not to study any more psychology.

"The One Solitary Life that appeared with the numbers got me to believe it was Jesus who was telling me to continue to study, and gave me an incentive to do so.

"So I got down on the floor and retrieved the book from under the sofa and continued reading where I had left off."

Without those "indications" from higher intelligence, we would not have the UltraMind ESP System today.