PNTV - The Power of Your Supermind by Vernon Howard
17 Dec 2025 · 11 min
Brian Johnson summarizes Vernon Howard's The Power of Your Supermind in a short Philosopher's Notes TV episode. The host walks through a sequence of practical ideas for awakening higher consciousness and improving daily life—examples include "switching on the light" (immediate transformation when you decide to change), avoiding replaying negative mental movies, celebrating detection of negative habits, reframing suffering as corrective ("psychic spankings"), aligning with what is to remove pain gaps, and committing to a highest goal of waking up. The episode closes with promotional material for Brian Johnson's newsletter and membership.
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You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian.
Welcome to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got the Power of youf Supermind by Vernon Howard. The Power of youf Supermind by Vernon Howard. This guy's awesome. He's apparently sold millions of copies. Over 8 million grateful readers. Now, I don't know who they are because I've never met anyone who knows Vernon Howard. It must have been past generation or something, but this guy's awesome. I was turned on to his work by a guy named Tom Russell who runs a website called superwisdom.com so check that out. Good stuff. Vernon Howard, he's got all kinds of big ideas. His books are literally one big idea after another. So I'm going to go ahead and jump straight in. I'm going to go quickly as I tend to do, but I'm going to go from idea to idea to idea because he's got so many good ones in here, obviously. Check out the note. All 100, all that good stuff. First big idea is switching on the light. He says, don't be stressed out. If you have been kind of in a funk for a long time, you've just not been the person you wanted to be for a long time. Do not get stressed out. It doesn't matter how dark a room is and how long it's been dark. The moment you turn on the light, there's light in the room now. Now you might need to do a little clean up, but there's light in the room. There's a huge transformation the moment you switch on the light. Really cool idea. So don't worry about how long the room has been dark. Focus on turning on the light. Really cool. Next big idea is mental movies. He says something that's brilliant that Tony Robbins says as well. He says, look, it doesn't make any sense for you to have a negative experience. Something happened that you just weren't that fond of, just was unpleasant, right? It makes no sense to play that mental movie again and again and again. Tony Robbins says, if you went to a movie that you absolutely hated, just hated, would you go back and watch that movie again for 10 times or 100 times or a thousand times or 10,000 times? Of course not yet. Why do we do that to ourselves? We have a negative experience and we replay it again and again and again and again in our minds. Not a good idea. Quit going and watching that terrible movie. Once was enough. Let it go. Move on to the future. Imagine what you want to see come to fruition in your life, focus on that. Let that be the repetitive movie as you take the steps toward that vision of your ideal really cool idea. Next big idea is don't be impatient, he says. As long as you're studying and reflecting and trying to, you're making progress. You may not notice it. You may not feel that much different. The results in your life may not look that extraordinary. But as long as you're studying, reflecting and trying, you're making progress. He says, someone walking forward in the middle of the night, they may not be able to see how far they've gone, but they're still making progress. They're still moving forward. You're going to find that as you continue to do the work, you. You're going to reach a point where things are going to open up. Wayne Dyer used this one story that he goes through an invisible gate. It made me think of a scale. Let's just say you have kind of grains on a scale, and you might have it heavier on the negative, on the less productive things. But as we study and reflect and try, we add a grain of sand. A grain of sand, a grain of sand, and the scale tips. And there's a moment that comes where we didn't really feel. We didn't really notice that it was shifting. But then all of a sudden, the weight is here, and there's a momentum in the positive end as we take more and more constructive action consistently. So don't be impatient. Just show up, do your work, do your workout, do your meditation. Catch yourself a little more quickly as you start to do the habitually negative things and celebrate those things, which leads us to the next big idea. He says. Detecting negativity as positive. I talk about this fairly often. Beckwith, Reverend Michael Beckwith, who wrote Spiritual Liberation, which we cover. Awesome book, full of big ideas. He says detecting yourself when you're off seeing negative stuff is a positive event. Both of them say the same thing. Beckwith calls it positive negativity. I love that phrase, positive negativity. When you see yourself, you observe yourself starting to lose your temper, right? Or yell at someone or eat a food that you just know you don't want to be eating very much. And you see it happening, even if you're a bite in or you're a harsh word into the event. That's a very positive event. Don't get mad at yourself for doing it again. Celebrate the fact that you just caught it, because the awareness of that act is an extraordinarily positive event. That's the first step in making change, is seeing the change that needs to be made. So celebrate that deep breath halfway through. Next idea, psychic spankings. He says suffering is nothing other than a psychic spanking. If you had a child, he says, who crosses the street in a very dangerous area, you may choose to spank that child. I'm not a parent yet. I haven't studied all the parenting literature to know the pros and cons of that. But for the story, metaphorically, imagine that. That would be a useful way to let the child know that's not what you want to do. A masculine, compassionate act. He says, God is kind of doing that for us when we suffer. It's a little psychic spanking saying, you're not on right now. You're not living the truth that you know you could be living. And this suffering is just giving us an opportunity to see what we still have to work on. It's an incredibly powerful, positive thing from that vantage point. Which leads us to another big idea he has. He says, look, if your highest goal is to wake up, if that's your highest goal, to wake up and to live from the power of the supermind, which is really your true self, it's that place from a higher level of consciousness that is never in fear or doubt or worry, it's your true self. It's independent of that.
Right?
He says, if your goal is to consistently live from that which is my personal highest goal, then anything that happens to you can be a good thing. If it helps you get closer to waking up, if your greatest tragedy, your greatest suffering, helps you study this stuff more, become a true, passionate philosopher and someone committed to awakening and living your most extraordinarily awesome life, then that negative event is a very good thing. Can you see that? Really cool way to look at it. He says, you got to have your grand purpose, make it clear. I call it your highest goal, and that's clear. And anything and everything can be a positive event. Really cool idea. Next big idea is vanishing pain gaps. He says pain exists when you think something should be happening and something is actually happening, then you have this idea that something else should be happening. There's a gap right there. Now, if you can make what's actually happening what you want to be happening, the pain gap vanishes. There's no room for pain. There's no room for suffering. Byron, Katie says this in Loving what Is. Eckhart Tolle says it in the Power of Now. We talk about it all the time. We need to be in alignment with what is. The healthy individual has what's happening as what they want to be happening, even if they didn't think they wanted it and they wouldn't have ideally seen it happen. Once it's happened, embrace it. Act as if you wanted it to happen. Your pain gaps will vanish. He's got a great idea here too. He says, we've got all kinds of quotes in here. This dude is remarkably quotable, super inspiring, very lucid and compact in his delivery. The quote he has here is, accept nothing as true that is not your truth. Accept nothing as true that is not your truth. So none of the stuff that I say that anyone says that you may say to yourself from someone else, don't accept it unless it's your truth, unless it's something that deeply resonates with what you believe, and focus on those things that you know that you just absolutely know to be the truth. Live those and let those evolve and become organic. But live those truths and don't accept anything as truth unless it's your truth. Huge idea. He talks about the importance of that and just embracing our own authentic self and our happiness is going to be determined. He says, quote, how true are you to yourself? That is the degree of your contentment. How true you are to yourself is the degree of your contentment. If you're not true to yourself, you're not going to be happy. Final big idea. I know I'm going quickly is getting out of messes. He says, people ask me, how do I get out of this mess? And he says, you'd never be in that mess in the first place if you had a higher level of consciousness. We talk about this in T Harv Eker's Secrets of a Millionaire. Mind you versus the size of your problems. If you're a size 2 problem and you have a size 3, size 2 person, size 3 problem, you're stressed. If you're a size 10 person, you don't even notice the size 3 problem. Point being, come to the power of your supermind, expand your consciousness and all the problems you have in your life right now, or a lot of them wouldn't even be problems. Big idea. We're going to talk about that a lot more in the future. That's the power of your supermind. Hope you dug it and look forward to sharing more with you soon. As always, have an awesome day. See you.
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