The Anti-Philosopher

Spiritual seeker Vernon Howard embraced life without labels

Vernon Howard in 1965 (Regents of the University of California)

One of the most distinctive and skilled spiritual voices of the late-twentieth century began his career in the mold of the success gospel and positive-mind metaphysics. His legacy seemed headed in the direction of secondary inspirational sage.

But he eventually—and decisively—distanced himself from modern iterations of motivational and inspirational thought. Leaving behind his old life, and with it the ethical and material dilemmas of spirituality-for-sale, he defined a new sounding of mind-power metaphysics.

His name was Vernon Howard (1918–1992). While this mystical thinker lacked fame, following, or renown, he possessed an extraordinary, and probably singular, gift for distilling complexities of world religion and ethical philosophy into aphoristic and ardently workable principles.

Indeed, Howard, a California transplant born in Haverhill, Massachusetts, became perhaps the most remarkable and independent figure to emerge from America’s culture of practical spirituality.

As Howard’s outlook matured, it grew impossible to pin any label on the truths he uttered—and abided—about pursuing a life of true value.

What Is Success?

In the first leg of Howard’s writing career, from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, he produced books that could have come from the conventional New Thought catalogue. They bore such titles as Success Through the Magic of Personal Power; Time Power for Personal Success; Your Magic Power to Persuade and Command People; and Word Power: Talk Your Way to Life Leadership.

Howard’s folksy oeuvre extended to works of popular reference, trivia, and children’s nonfiction, such as Lively Bible Quizzes and 101 Funny Things to Make and Do. To the outside observer, the Los Angeles-based author was just one more scribe-for-hire, of the type found in any large city.

In the mid-1960s, however, Howard’s outlook underwent remarkable transformation. His personal genesis began with a wish to escape the cycles of euphoria and depression that characterize the life of any ambitious author. He told the Los Angeles Times in 1978:

I started realizing the uselessness of the extraneous. People could tell me I was a good writer and I realized all it did was make me hungry for more applause. And when that didn’t come, I’d get hurt. I decided I had to find something without applause so I could live independently, without the approval of other people.

Howard found his own solution to this predicament. He left his career as a commissioned writer of success literature (as well as his marriage) and resettled in the relative boondocks of Boulder City, Nevada. “Not exactly a community noted for breeding literary mystics,” observed the Las Vegas Review-Journal in a 1979 profile.

Journalists sometimes lampooned Howard’s newfound hermitage. The Review-Journal headline announced, “Not all mystical sages are big stars.” Human Behavior magazine that year ran a piece, “Searching for the mystic path with Boulder City’s cosmic master.”

But from his desert idyl, in the late 1960s until his death in 1992, Howard developed into a wholly distinct spiritual thinker. He produced a remarkable range of pamphlets, articles, books, and lectures in which he expounded with total clarity and directness on the need to abandon fleeting rewards of outer life in exchange for authentic and self-directed inner existence.

Real Value

In a sense, Howard’s teachings reduce to the parable of Jacob and Esau. Esau sells out his birthright for a bowl of pottage—not realizing that he has sacrificed his life for a fleeting reward, which quickly gives way to pain and resentment.

Howard urged readers to see how we do this at every instant of life. He encouraged listeners to exchange the baubles of worldly achievement—and the depression or anxiety that summarily follows—for rewards of real truth: a contented, flowing inner state—a feeling of natural rightness, innate to all people once obfuscations are removed.

Howard’s psychology centered on two key ideas, which ran throughout his work. They can be summarized this way:

1. Humanity lives from a false nature. What we call personal will is no more than a fearful, self-promoting, false “I.” This counterfeit-self pursues worldly approval and security, reacting with aggression one moment and servility the next. The false “I” craves self-importance and status, which, in turn, bind the individual to pursuing money, career, and peer accolades. To be truly happy, this false self must be shaken off, like a hypnotic spell. In its place, the individual discovers his or her True Nature, which emanates from a Higher Will, or what is sometimes called God.

2. Human behavior is characterized by hostility, corruption, and weakness. Friends, neighbors, lovers, coworkers, and family members often manipulate or exploit us, wreaking agony in our lives. “It’s not negative to see how negative people really are,” Howard wrote. “It is a high form of intelligent self-protection to see thru the human masquerade.” On this, he was uncompromising. When someone makes a habit of diminishing you, Howard taught, you must resolve inwardly—and, as soon as you’re physically able, outwardly—to remove yourself from that person, without constraint by convention, apologetics, or hesitation. Once we see through human destructiveness, we attract relationships of a higher nature.

Howard later in life.

Howard’s insight could reach the psyche like a refreshing drink of water does the lips. His style is typified in an undated interview with one-time student and writer Guy Findley:

GF: What is real power?

VH: The absence of your false power. Now, you see when I tell you that you’re going to be puzzled by it. Get rid of your nonsensical power and then you’ll know what’s on the other side of it. But people won’t do that. They want to argue and they want to say, “Oh, I know what power is.” You don’t know what power is. What you know is weakness. Because as long as you have human power, you have weakness only.

And further:

Have you ever noticed a small child, how easily he’s distracted? He has a little toy he plays with. You put a piece of candy in front of him and he forgets the toy. You hand him something else, a little colored ball, and he sets the candy down. Human beings are like that. They start off with a purpose of some kind and then you put a little piece of candy in front of him—you put marriage in front of him, or a romance—or you put a promotion at work in front of them—Eh! “Who needs God? I got a promotion. I’m an assistant manager!” See? So the world is so filled with false delights that people would rather have in place of persisting. Now, one way to overcome that latching onto distractions is to see that every time you get that promotion down at work or every time someone compliments you, that nothing has changed.

As much as I admire Howard’s work, I must pause in considering its gestation. It is possible that the teacher discovered truth—but also truth that fit his own tempered expectations of life as an author. There is—possibly—a sour-grapes quality to Howard’s outlook, reflected, too, in some of his acolytes.

A Los Angeles radio talkshow host once told me ruefully about hosting a former child star who had since become an admirer of Howard’s. A well-meaning caller misidentified the onetime actor leading to his visible distress on air. “Hey, are you okay?” the host asked during a break. I know this pain. Whether escaping, conquering, or surpassing it is a perennial question and one not to be taken lightly.

“Don’t Come Back”

Howard eventually attracted a circle of about fifty students in the Boulder City area. “We send our message out but we have no concern for the results,” he told a reporter. “What does the size of our audience have to do with the truth?” One evening he announced to a roomful of listeners: “We’re here every Thursday night. If you don’t like what you hear, don’t come back.” Anyone disgusted with hard pitches or cult-like seductions had found the antidote.

Howard only occasionally ventured from his Southern Nevada town to deliver talks in Los Angeles. He did, however, reach a larger audience through videotaped lectures, which students broadcast through the early medium of public-access cable television, along with a prodigious output of books and tapes. “He says he lives comfortably just on royalties,” the Los Angeles Times reported in 1988.

Many of Howard’s video presentations are today preserved online. You can begin them, as with his books, from any point. In a mark of Howard’s virtuosity, the entirety of his message appears in all of its parts. He spoke extemporaneously, without notes, rarely betraying a hesitation, stumble, or missed beat.

In his talks, Howard appeared exactly as he did in daily life: casually dressed in a polo shirt or short-sleeved button-down, physically robust though slightly paunchy. Seated at a spare table, he looked like any ordinary, late-middle-aged man—not quite professorial (his edges were too rough) but more like an avuncular gym teacher. In recent years, I have noticed similarities in personality between Howard and Senator Bernie Sanders. But Howard’s voice and gaze were those of a distinctly poised and purposeful individual: a simple man with a profound message—namely, that inner freedom awaits you the moment you turn to it, provided you learn to mistrust the vaunted goodies of outer life and those who proffer them.

“50 Ways to Get Help from God”

In a carryover from his years as a success writer, Howard gave his books sensationalistic even lurid titles, such as The Mystic Path to Cosmic Power (his most popular and, some say, best book); Esoteric Mind Power; Secrets for Higher Success; and The Power of Your Supermind. His utilitarian pamphlets—with titles like Your Power to Say No and 50 Ways to Escape Cruel People—were advertised in popular psychology magazines and grocery tabloid the Weekly World News.

A 1981 pamphlet.

A typical ad for one of his pamphlets read: “Worried? 50 WAYS TO GET HELP FROM GOD.” The ads were in no way cynical. Tucked amid competing advertisements for weight-loss programs and wrinkle creams, Howard’s ads reflected the dictum to go out to the highways and hedges and bring them in. The former success writer knew how to reach people in need.

I have, from time to time, wondered if his overwrought titles restricted versus amplified his appeal. In some ways, Howard seemed to use this approach not to broaden but restrict his readership, deliberately rejecting approbation from lettered culture. Nothing does more to dilute the search than ersatz seriousness. Howard would have none of it. He seemed to invite the kind of wrinkle-nosed reaction I sometimes receive when exploring his work, e.g.:

Instead of appeasing pedants, Howard facilitated entry. His writing could be picked up nearly at random—any chapter, any page, any pamphlet or book—and the reader could fully enter his outlook. There existed no prerequisites, no partially thought-through ideas. Howard’s gift was to fully and continually illustrate and restate core truths in fresh ways, a talent evinced by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), Neville Goddard (1905–1972), and few other modern voices.

Although Howard eluded category, his psychological insights meshed with the work of spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) and, at times, the critically important twentieth-century spiritual philosopher G. I. Gurdjieff (1866–1949). Confluence with classical Buddhism and early Christianity also appeared.

Howard’s language and methods convey a hands-on urgency that perhaps no other contemporary spiritual figure demonstrates. In that vein, Howard insisted that any program of self-development had to palpably improve the ordinary hours of daily life. On this, he was unwavering.

“Leave People Alone!”

Howard was likewise resolute on the problem of commonplace cruelty—a crisis he believed most therapists and spiritual thinkers underestimate or fail to grasp. The teacher urged listeners to cut off cruel people, without qualification or concern for social approval. This gainfully impacted my life and work.

Escape from Cruel People

Cruelty, Howard taught, often takes the form of subtle putdowns, chronic provocations, or cutting asides, for which the bully always claims plausible denial. The payoff for the predator is a perverse thrill or “false feeling of life.” Hence, Howard counseled separation—not confrontation or “communication” (the midwife of self-defeat), which only grants the aggressor the friction he savors. Moreover, the predatory persona is often first and loudest to cry injustice! In a statement certain to engender pushback, Howard said: “Show me the victim and I’ll show you the bully.”

Avoid Predatory Personalities

One evening he erupted at students in Boulder City:

All I’m really trying to say is: why don’t you just LEAVE PEOPLE ALONE! They’ve got problems of their own. They don’t need your jokes or your smart remarks.

Because I used to play Howard’s lectures at home and in the car, my then-young sons chided me, “Vernon Howard is mean!”—a note one of them snuck into my journals. I explained that Vernon was simply trying to shake us awake and demonstrate options. To which I would add that his plainly worded aphorisms—he encouraged listeners to live with just one for six months—conceal unexpected lifelines. This article closes with a sampling.

Does It Work?

Howard’s approach coalesces with William James’s philosophy of pragmatism. The only meaningful measure of a private belief system, James wrote, is effect on conduct. If a thing works, it doesn’t matter what detractors say. And if it doesn’t, then the philosophy has no claim on seeking people. It may belong to the annals of thought history but not the folds of daily life.

Empiricism, in James’s view, requires measuring an idea without reference to how it compares to widely held reasoning but rather by what an individual perceives of its nature, consistency, and, above all, impact. Pragmatism means evaluating an ethical or religious idea by usefulness, especially pertaining to self.

Many philosophies avert questions of result by undermining the very concept. Howard took the opposing tack:

Will you trust a religion or philosophy that does not produce a truly poised and decent human being?

That question is, I believe, one to which every spiritual or ethical communicator must submit—as Vernon Howard readily did.

Selected Aphorisms from Vernon Howard

We attract negative people and events because we wrongly and unconsciously value them.

You’ll never be taken in by a false prophet when you are no longer a false follower.

A successful day for many people is one in which no one discovered what he is really thinking.

A chief feature of false life is that it cannot stand alone, but frantically demands allies to support its false positions.

A weak person’s duty is to try to shove his responsibilities onto you, and your duty is to refuse them.

It is unnecessary to obey any arising reaction which tells us to act against our true interest.

It is not risky at all to risk the dislike of someone in favor of being and acting what is true.

Your past can be changed in an astonishing way by seeing it with these higher truths.

We must never forget that wrongs about life and boredom always go together.

A man is punished only by the level he occupies, as when deceit deceives the deceitful.

Wherever you are, perhaps with friends or at a party, ask yourself, “Do I really want to be here?”

Never do anything that causes distress in a hostile person. By doing this you deny him his painful thrill, and since he is no longer rewarded he will leave you alone.

You can recognize only your own level.

Every one of your human relationships must be on your terms or not at all.

Fear is the product of truth refused.

If you do not use your business for ego-expansion, it will never be a problem to you.

A man’s psychic level instantly signals itself to others.

Quietly ignore a cruel man.

Notes on Sources

Vernon Howard’s statement “I started realizing the uselessness” is from “He’s on the Highway to Higher Truths” by Anne LaRiviere, January 1978, Los Angeles Times. The observation about Boulder City is from “Not All Mystical Sages Are Big Stars” by Ed Vogel, July 21, 1979, Las Vegas Review-Journal, which is also the source for Howard’s quote “we send our message out.” Howard’s statement “it’s not negative” is from his pamphlet Be Safe in a Dangerous World (New Life Foundation, 1981). Other helpful articles include “Searching for the Mystic Path with Boulder City’s Cosmic Master” by Eleanor Links Hoover, March 1979, Human Behavior magazine; “New Age Prophet Offers Mystic Road Map to Inner Bliss” by Steve Chawkins, May 5, 1988, Los Angeles Times; and “New Life Foundation Founder Howard Dies of Natural Causes” by Carri Geer, September 3, 1992, Las Vegas Review-Journal. Howard’s statement “will you trust a religion” is from 1500 Ways to Escape the Human Jungle (New Life Foundation, 1978). New Life Foundation issues Howard’s books, pamphlets, and audios.

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