When Barb Rosenthal was 13 years old, she was a promising young athlete. Her older brother was already one of the top junior ski racers in the eastern United States and Barb showed every sign that she would surpass her brother’s accomplishments. Then, tragedy struck.

In the seventh grade, I shared the same classes with Barb. I remember watching Barb break down crying in the middle of Algebra class. She started massaging her legs and complained of excruciating pain. This continued for a few days, then we didn’t see Barb for several months. When she finally returned to class, this promising young athlete’s legs were imprisoned in full-length leg casts. Instead of speeding along on skis, she now rolled along in her wheel chair. Over the next few years, Barb spent many months of time at the Boston Children’s hospital, where the best doctors of the western world puzzled over the affliction that had stricken her. They gave the disease a name and thought that they had seen it a few times before. They tried numerous treatments, but none of them could return her legs to anywhere near their former healthy condition. Barb’s legs eventually improved slightly to the point where she could walk with a cane and leg braces. Her stiff-legged walk was slow and awkward, but was a major improvement over the wheelchair.

Barb and I remained good friends throughout high school. In spite of her handicap, Barb’s demeanor was cheerful and optimistic. In the fall of 1974, I temporarily lost contact with Barb when I left my hometown to attend engineering school at MIT. During my freshman year at MIT, my older brother told me about a seminar, called Silva Mind Control. He said that the Silva Mind Control techniques had improved his concentration capabilities and his ability to accomplish his goals. Jose Silva, the founder of Silva Mind Control, developed these techniques while working with developmentally challenged children. He found that simple meditative and creative visualization techniques helped these children to learn faster and actually seemed to boost their IQ’s. While working with these children and his special techniques, Jose found some unexpected results, including increased evidence of ESP and some significant health improvements. The program sounded interesting, so my sister (also attending MIT) and I enrolled.

The very last process of the seminar was a process called “Health Readings”, which gives most people a direct personal experience of their own powers of ESP. For this process, each participant writes down the name, age, place of birth, brief physical description and rough health history of three different people they have known, who have had significant health problems during their life. You then work with a partner, who has no prior knowledge of the people on your list. Using the Silva Mind Control methods, the partner first gets his mind functioning at the alpha brain wave state. Next, a strict protocol of questioning is followed, to be certain that the partner is not “led” to answers but finds the information through their own innate powers of the mind. One of my three choices of people with significant health problems, was my friend Barb.

After your partner has entered their special state of mind, he/she is told the name, age, sex and place of birth of a person with significant health problems. He is then asked to picture this person in his mind. If he gets a clear image, he is asked to describe the physical look of the imagined body. The partner is next asked to scan the body with his mind, noting any “problem areas”. The internal organs and skeletal system are each scanned separately. “Problem areas” are focused on to see if the partner can intuitively find specific information about the problem. Since participants in this exercise often come up with correct information, which is unknown to the other person, or occasionally tap into a future event that has not yet occurred, partners are never told that they are “wrong”. Instead, they are told “Perhaps, but I do not have information on that at this time.” At the end of the exercise and prior to returning to normal waking consciousness, the participant mentally “fixes” the health problems and imagines that the unhealthy person is now whole and healthy. They then compare notes taken from their verbal answers with the information that was written down prior to the start of the exercise. Sometimes the answers are way off, but many times both the physical and health record descriptions are uncannily accurate.

When my partner was asked to picture Barb, she immediately started complaining of terrible chest pains. I was surprised by her reaction and answered, “I have no information on that at this time”. She accurately described Barb’s physical appearance, then scanned the body for other health problems. In the area of the lower back, she “saw” a hole where one of Barb’s kidneys should have been. This was 100% accurate. A few years earlier, Barb was rushed to the hospital in extreme pain. They found that one of her kidneys was destroyed by a tumor and had ceased to function, so it was surgically removed. Surprisingly, after several perfect hits, my partner failed to see anything concerning Barb’s legs. For the next few weeks, prior to returning to my hometown for Christmas vacation, I continued with daily Silva Mind Control meditations. For lack of something better to do in these active meditations, I chose to visualize my friend Barb skiing and riding her bicycle with whole, healthy legs.

When I returned to Vermont for Christmas vacation, the first thing that I did was to visit my friend Barb. Before I had a chance to tell her about the Silva Mind Control health readings, she exclaimed, “Mat, my legs have gotten so much better. I’ve been riding my bicycle and last week went skiing for the first time in six years!” I was shocked. Excitedly, I started to relate my Silva mind Control experiences. After a brief description of the procedures for the health readings, I made a motion towards my chest. Before I had a chance to describe what my partner had related about Barb’s chest pains, Barb yelled “Chest pains! How did she know I had chest pains?”

I replied, “Barb, I never knew you had chest pains”.

Barb returned, “Mat, there have been so many things wrong with me. I never told you everything. I haven’t mentioned the chest pains to anyone but my doctor and my family.” Next, I described my daily meditations in which I had visualized Barb riding a bicycle and skiing. Barb and her mom were amazed. They both concurred that they first noticed the mysterious steady improvement in the condition of Barb’s legs just a few days after I had begun daily visualizations in my meditations. It had been several years since there had been significant improvement in Barb’s condition. At the time, I was a freshman at MIT, the number one scientific institution in the world, and had a hard time integrating these experiences with my scientific belief system. Not only had I personally experienced the ability to snatch unknown information out of the ethers, but now I saw what appeared to be a physical healing by a person meditating 200 miles away from a subject who had absolutely no knowledge of the “healing work” performed on her behalf. Certainly, it was not “faith healing”, as neither Barb nor I had any faith in this process!

I had to admit to myself that there must be more to the physical body and healing than simply action-reaction, biochemistry and physics. Reluctantly, I accepted that the powers of mind and consciousness were far greater than I had previously believed. This was the first of numerous eye-opening experiences to come my way. Over the course of my lifetime, powerful spiritual experiences have caused me to transform my belief system from a traditional scientific western style “Billiard Ball Theory of the Universe” (all is action-reaction, chemistry and physics, and your life is like a candle that burns once) into a spiritual, consciousness based model where I perceive our so-called reality as a cosmic soup consisting of multiple levels of God’s creation, and our physical world is only one of them.