The Power of Your Supermind: A Book Review

Vernon Howard authored an amazing number of books, booklets and other writings, all in that area of spirituality that goes by so many names, among them metaphysics, "the perennial philosophy," new thought and cosmic consciousness, just to name a few.

One of his best books is The Power of Your Supermind. It is second perhaps only to The Mystic Path to Cosmic Power as his clearest, most compelling work. In some ways, though, it outshines Cosmic Power, for example, in the wealth of practical exercises and suggestions it provides for getting in touch with (in Howard's words) "that ... remarkable part of you ... that is above and beyond conditioned human thought."

Howard has a special knack for stating timeless truths in fresh ways that hit the reader with sometimes startling newness. Often they are simply those things we knew all along -- or had encountered before in the pages of the world's great wisdom literature -- but that he is able to show to us in a new light.

I've always appreciated the insight from Lao-tse the Taoist that rules of morality arose from the loss of people's naturalness in the world, and are not really helpful at establishing goodness. Vernon Howard puts it this way: "Unawakened people are victims of their public virtues. I don't know anything more painful than trying to be 'good' people; they are so bad. ... But the self-unified man ... is good simply because it cannot occur to him to be anything else. Only an awakened man is truly moral."

Howard sums up the entire book nicely in the concluding chapter, "How to Have Everything Right through the Supermind." A person in a hurry could go directly to this chapter, make a committed effort to put into practice its suggestions, and find themselves achieving amazing progress on the spiritual/self-improvement path.

The Power of Your Supermind is published by Prentice Hall of Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey; ISBN # 0-13-686718-9.