| Scientology Rare Book Library | Dr. Christopher Evans - Cults of Unreason |
GURDJIEFF'S MIDDLE EASTERN associations, and his doubtful wanderings in Tibet and other mystic parts of the world, place him as an emissary of the Orient without much doubt. Furthermore, it is clear that the band of followers who helped sponsor his strange establishment at Fontainebleau, and those who continue to pay him tribute today, a quarter of a century after his death, see him as having offered some important slice of the Wisdom of the East to Western man. He was not the first of his kind, of course, but he was certainly one of the more successful. In the latter part of the nineteenth century two remarkable women, Mrs Annie Besant and the American, Madame Helena Blavatsky, decided that the continent of India would see the rebirth of religion as a dominant force in the life of Man, and set up the headquarters of their new movement, the Theosophical Society, in Madras. Madame Blavatsky, the queerest of the two on the whole, claimed that she had been inspired by Hidden Masters and Secret Brothers, etc., in the Himalayas and bolstered her claims with impressive demonstrations of psychic phenomena which included clairvoyant messages and the ringing of astral bells.
Theosophy - it literally means knowledge of God - was created by Westerners, largely for Westerners, but drew most strongly from the Vedic, Buddhist and Brahmanist literature. Although its founders made every effort to grant it Eastern authenticity - for example by living in India and siting its headquarters there - it has never been looked upon with much enthusiasm by genuine Orientals. It preaches a doctrine not significantly at odds with most other `osophies' and `ologies' of times both ancient and modern - that Man is capable of intuitive insight into the nature of God. The road to achieving this knowledge, incidentally, is through the theory
The Mystic East (or Thereabouts) and practice of yoga. Its aims were threefold: (1) to form a Universal Brotherhood of man with no racial barriers; (2) to further the study of comparative religion; and (3) to investigate the supposedly paranormal faculties of man such as telepathy and clairvoyance, which were believed in with great intensity in the nineteenth century.
In its early days, thanks partly to the magnetic and well-publicized figure of Madame Blavatsky, it attracted a good deal of attention from the intellectual middle and upper classes and drew into its ranks, if only briefly, a number of individuals of real creative ability such as the scientist and philosopher, Rudolf Steiner. The trouble with the Theosophical Society was that it was run by two very self-willed women and it nearly foundered in its early years in legal actions and wrangles over its leadership. These became particularly acute on the death of Madame Blavatsky in 1891, though Mrs Besant finally emerged triumphant. Just a year after she had been elected president she launched the Society on an unexpected course which caused a gigantic rift in the movement, from which it has never really recovered. This was the strange episode concerning the elevation of a young Brahmin child, Jiddu Krishnamurti, into the role of a new Messiah - a dramatic gesture which implied that Christ had returned to earth, but clothed in the body of an Indian child.
So enraged were Society members that Mrs Besant had dared to discover Christ's successor without their permission, that the movement broke apart. Amongst the most notable defectors was the interesting figure of Rudolf Steiner who departed for Europe and in 1912 set up his own occult movement, Anthroposophy. Steiner, who was enormously influenced by the writings of Goethe, caused a vast building of bizarre but powerful architectural merit, the Goethanum, to be erected in Switzerland and this is still the headquarters of his movement's activities. Anthroposophy has gradually emerged as the more significant philosophy of the two, and has attracted to its embraces a number of artists and poets of magnitude, including the stylish modern painter, Kandinsky. Though operating on vague and scatty ideas about the healing qualities of coloured rays of light, followers of Steiner have had notable successes in schools devoted to the care of backward or handicapped children. How much of this success is due to the `colour therapy' and how much to the care and devotion with which the children are taught is a matter for argument, but it is enough to say that the results are beneficial and that is that.
But to return to the Theosophical Society, or the rump of it. Here the pathetic drama of Krishnamurti was acted out with great seriousness. Despite the protestations of the boy's father, who considered the deification of his son to be literally sacrilegious, and the mutterings of the press and orthodox religious bodies, Mrs Besant paraded the bewildered boy around the world, proclaiming him as the long-awaited second Messiah. What Krishnamurti thought of all this is really beyond speculation. It is doubtful if he believed in his supposedly divine origins for a moment, and where it was necessary for him to act as if he did, he probably played along to avoid hurting the feelings of Mrs Besant whom he recognized to be a kindly soul beneath her eccentric exterior. After twenty-nine years of growing frustration and embarrassment, however, Krishnamurti could take no more and in 1929, before a large audience in the USA, rocked the remnant of the Theosophical movement by renouncing his heavenly crown and declaring himself to be nothing more than a plain mortal. Annie Besant took the news badly, but soldiered on for a bit, dying in 1933 at the age of ninety-five, serene in the certainty of her own reincarnation. As for Krishnamurti, he was soon to find out that being a retired God is not the happiest, nor the most lucrative of existences, and in recent years he has roamed the world extensively, lecturing on mystical and occult topics.
One of the most recent invaders of the West to attract the public eye, and perhaps in world terms the most famous yet, is, of course, the Maharishi Yogi. This holy chap, who has shown himself to be amazingly at ease in the world of jumbo jets, television cameras and spun protein steaks, is considered to be of little consequence amongst connoisseurs of the occult, being largely a creation of those immensely potent figures, the Beatles. His fleeting rise to prominence, however, is a good indicator of the high esteem in which all yogis and Eastern Masters are held at this time. A more weighty and lasting incursion is that of the cult known as Subud, which we shall look at in rather more detail.
The man principally responsible for the introduction of Subud to England and America was the mathematician and author, J. G. Bennett, whom we have met already in his role as one of Gurdjieff's disciples. Bennett, whose life story is a tapestry of adventure, scientific discovery, philosophical speculation and a relentless search for spiritual enlightenment, makes no bones about his admiration for the complicated Russian, and since the latter's death had anxiously sought a worthy successor. In his various travels round the world he found himself continually bumping up against rumours that a major spiritual figure, of oriental origin, would shortly arise and make a stunning impact on the religious life of both East and West. Gurdjieff himself, when near the end of his life, had solemnly declared to Bennett, `After I go another will come. You will not be left alone.' Bennett, who took the cheerfully open-minded view that one should never turn an interesting prophecy down flat, stored the information in his mind. A year later he heard for the first time of the Indonesia monk known as Pak Subuh, who was rumoured to be heading a big religious upsurge in the Far East and reputed to be exercising miraculous powers.
His first feelings, he recalls, were only of vague interest, suspecting that the new movement, Subud, was but another tiny diversionary scene in the world's immense religious cavalcade. Soon however he found himself being pressed by friends and acquaintances to look into it further. He also heard of the so-called latihan, a unique mystical experience, which was supposed to overtake followers of Subuh and adherents to his way of life. After conversations with friends who had undergone the latihan and been considerably impressed with the apparent change in their lives and personalities which had taken place, Bennett decided to investigate it for himself.
The idea of the latihan is similar in principle to many other forms of spiritual or psychic conversion in as much as it relies on the individual making himself receptive to the metaphysical or divine forces of the Universe. Public conversions and testimonies of the kind popular with the fundamental sects are prosaic examples of this, while the phrase most commonly and aptly employed to sum the experience up is probably `seeing the light'. The latihan, which must be undergone in the presence of and under the supervision of an adept (personally trained by Pak Subuh himself), begins prosaically enough with a period of silent meditation. In due course - minutes, hours or even days and weeks may elapse - the individual becomes conscious of a significant change in his personality which may involve an overwhelming feeling of calm and a great sense of insight or `knowingness' as such things are frequently termed in the occult world. As with parallel occurrences in other areas of mysticism, the rosy glow of the happening (or `opening' as it is referred to within Subud) lingers only briefly, and needs to be reinforced at intervals by other latihans. On occasions, as with a bad LSD trip, the individual may find the psychic blast of the latihan simply unmanageable, and adherents of Subud have a rich fund of stories of the screams and howls of the spiritually switched on. Bennett himself had a rib cracked by one energetic character who rampaged around the Subud headquarters like King Kong, smashing down doors and needing several men to cool him down. Fortunately such displays were the exception rather than the rule, and Bennett's own first latihan was a relatively gentlemanly occurrence merely providing him with a period of `almost unbroken consciousness, free from all mental activity and yet intensely alive and blissful'.
It was largely on the basis of this experience, and reports of the impact that Pak Subuh was making in the Far East, that the mathematician made a momentous decision. This was to put aside the writing of his four-volume epic of cosmology, The Dramatic Universe (a work so abstruse and obscure that a reviewer of Volume I in the scientific journal, Nature, dubbed it as a horrible warning to scientists to keep away from fantastic speculations) and concentrate on studying and promoting the new religion. Bearing in mind the veiled references to a great successor that Gurdjieff had been making throughout his life, Bennett was convinced that Pak Subuh was the new Messiah. In March 1957, by his personal invitation, the Indonesian monk arrived in England and set up court at Coombe Springs, Bennett's big house near Kingston, Surrey. It was the first step in a sequence of events culminating in a gale of drama and sensation which were to flash Subud and its followers into the world's newspaper headlines.
The new Messiah, when he turned up, looked like a perfectly ordinary Indonesian monk, slight, bespectacled and gently-spoken. The evident contrast with Gurdjieff's dominant physical presence and personality nevertheless impressed Bennett. The monk's biographical details had the traditional vagueness of most Messiahs: born a sickly child in 1901 his name was changed on the advice of a passing beggar (such are the ways of the mysterious East) to Mohammed Subuh, whereupon his health miraculously improved.
So important and significant a figure amongst the numerous inquirers and devotees of the borderlands of science and religion was J. G. Bennett that the news of Pak Subuh's arrival spread rapidly across the world. Although he did everything to avoid the evolution of the kind of wild rumours which characteristically accompany major occult figures wherever they go, the psychic tom-toms were soon beating out a message of miracle cures and spiritual revelations taking place at the Kingston mansion. All might have been well had the rumours been confined to the rather private world of psychic enthusiasts, but Fleet Street quickly began to prick up its sensitive ears. The climax began when the beautiful actress Eva Bartok, whose tempestuous movie career had been spiked with scandal and personal tragedy, moved in on the Subud menage.
For some time Miss Bartok, who was pregnant and psychologically distressed, had been seeking fodder for a spiritually bankrupt life in Gurdjieff's teachings. Her sudden departure from a film set in Hollywood to Coombe Springs caused a flutter in the press. On arrival she `recognized' the mansion as a building she had seen once in a vision, and Pak Subuh himself made an immediate impression on her. Her sensational cure following the latihan, and the subsequent delivery of a normal healthy child despite her doctors' gloomy predictions, really blew the cork out of the bottle. Reporters descended upon the house in droves, interviewing all and sundry, and providing that aura of indecision and flap which is the hallmark of the living presence of the press. The newspaper publicity in turn bumped up the numbers of those interested in, or merely curious about, Subud and in one month in 1957 nearly five hundred newcomers were `opened' by the latihan, many of whom behaved in a bizarre and unpredictable fashion as a consequence. One man was so overcome by it all that he lay down and died shortly afterwards, an event which Subuh himself correctly described as a warning. Curiously the man's post-mortem showed no obvious visible cause of death, with heart, lungs, brain, etc., quite sound. It was all very mysterious, and those involved can be forgiven for responding emotionally. In that heady summer it must have seemed to the followers of Subuh that world attention was focused on the Surrey mansion, in whose grounds a nine-sided building was being erected - its central axis pointing to Fontainebleau where Gurdjieff was buried. Bennett's book, Witness, includes a photograph of the great American architect Frank Lloyd Wright gazing quizzically at the structure which was known as the Djamichunatra - the peculiar name being taken from Chapter 46 of Gurdjieff's All and Everything.
Subuh himself seems to have been agreeable at first to wearing Gurdjieff's mantle, and on the ninth anniversary of the latter's death a great crowd gathered to hear some of his weird music played by a full orchestra to scoring and orchestration specially created by the talented conductor Basil Cameron. Bennett and his colleagues were by now absolutely convinced that Subud was set fair to conquer the spiritual world, and as if to ram the message home a new comet - the Arland-Rouland - obligingly made its appearance in the sky. What else could this signal mean but `The coming of Subud in the West?' A lengthy world tour drawing frenzied press attention in New York, Honolulu, Sydney, Mexico and other major cities followed, culminating in a giant International Congress at Coombe Springs in 1959 with four hundred delegates attending from forty countries, testifying to the meteoric rise to prominence of the movement.
It was in fact the high water point of Subud and its modest and rather self-effacing leader or prophet. The monk, who had spent so much of his time denying that he was a Messiah began to show far less enthusiasm for his supporters than many of them would have liked, and the ill-knit organization soon began to suffer from internal bickerings and personality problems. Before 1960 was out, the press had lost interest (no bad thing no doubt), the camp-followers began to depart from Coombe Springs, and Pak Subuh left England for sunnier climes. At the present time Subud has settled down to being a minor splinter of the occult fringe, an Eastern-style religion with some support in the West, but only a pale glimmer of its former blazing noon. Links with the remnants of the Gurdjieffians (themselves a disconcertingly inharmonious group) are now almost non-existent. A few years ago there was a brief flap when a teacher sacked from the Architectural Association claimed that the organization was being run by Subud followers. The Association's principal at the time, John Lloyd, while admitting that he was himself a Subud fan, denied that the AA was at all influenced by his private beliefs and, quite justly, asked what all the fuss was about anyhow. This incident apart, Subud seems no longer to be news and a recent count of its world-wide support has come up with a figure of some 15,000 souls who have at one time or another been opened by the latihan. In world terms this is not a large figure, and serves to remind one that for a cult to be successful, headlines alone are not enough. As for Mr Bennett, whose roving mind and extraordinary personal zeal seems to have been largely responsible for launching the Indonesian mystic amongst us, he is now journeying down a more firmly-trodden path. In 1968 he came a convert to the Roman Catholic church.
Like so many of the intellectually-orientated cults of today, Subud appealed almost entirely to the spiritually disenchanted and well-educated middle class. A less intellectually demanding cult is that of Hare Krishna, whose more ardent followers promenade in picturesque fashion in London's West End. In part popularized again by two of the Beatles, George Harrison and Paul McCartney (two young men who wielded immense social power in their day), the movement was actually founded twenty-five years ago by the Calcutta mystic, Swami Prabhupad, and introduced to the West in 1965. Its basic theme is that the teachings of the great Krishna, who was responsible for bringing the Bhagavad-Gita to mankind, have become corrupted and ignored to the general detriment of human affairs. The first and most essential step in the revival of the world's fortunes is the restoration of an awareness of Krishna and his teachings - which are indeed admirable as they demand an end to all wars, a spread of universal love and ample food and drink for all. Those inspired by these goals make it their business to draw Krishna's name to the attention of the world by chanting `Hare Krishna...Hare Krishna' over and over again in public places. Hence the interesting processions of saffron-robed youths and girls, the men with shaven heads, the women with beauty spots on their foreheads, marching up and down Oxford Street and Portobello road ringing bells and chanting the magic words.
In fact psychologists know that when a word or brief phrase is repeated over and over again, it begins to change its characteristics in a peculiar way. This is not merely a matter of tongue-twisting (Hare Krishna soon becomes pretty muddled on repetition) for a word played repeatedly on a tape recorder will soon distort perceptually in the most strange way. The word kettle, for example, will soon be heard as petal, castle, rattle, etc. This phenomenon, which is an exceedingly striking one and which anyone can demonstrate to himself with a tape recorder and an endless loop of tape, has been the subject of much serious psychological experimentation and it is believed to say something about the nature of the auditory recognition process. It is very likely that this odd effect is behind the evolution of the mantra, a phrase or prayer which, repeated over and over again, is supposed to acquire a special kind of spiritual significance. The mantra of course was around long before experimental psychologists, but it is interesting that at the end of the Beatles' LP Sergeant Pepper, as the stylus cycles and recycles in the final grooves, a single phrase - `Fug you fugging superman' - can be heard over and over again. Thus was the mantra incorporated in the pop culture of the late sixties.
The Hare Krishna groups, many of whom are emigre Americans appalled at their country's war in Vietnam, caused a minor sensation on their first appearance in London streets in 1968 and 1969 and attracted a fairly considerable following. A `Temple' appeared in a rambling Victorian house in Bury Place with lectures and chanting taking place on Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings and, as a special treat, a Love Feast every Sunday. At one stage the movement appeared to be getting so successful that the length of the lines of chanters in Oxford Street and elsewhere began to constitute a traffic hazard. Also the noise of the mantra chanted by so many enthusiastic voices drew complaints from the public, and at this point the Metropolitan Police began to take an interest. Whether due to this attention or not, from that point on the numbers of robed and shaven-headed figures on the march began to decline. Actually, the most probable explanation is not police persecution, but that the movement suffers from a basic lack of stuffing and an insufficiently dynamic leader - the Swami Prabhupad is a benign and self-effacing septuagenarian. Despite its claim to thirty-five temples in various parts of the world, and its touchingly acceptable overall policies, the 1970s are not likely to see the movement sweep the world as its followers hope and believe, and it seems likely to drift into a gentle and generally unnoticed eclipse. Perhaps its converts, after their first flush of enthusiasm, become gradually aware that though the world does undoubtedly need changing, the endless repetition of `Hare Krishna' is never really going to do much to set this change in motion.
Western interest in oriental religions, from the sublime to the ridiculous, is probably motivated by the hope that somewhere hidden amongst the mantras and the prayer wheels, lies a great truth which is missing in orthodox European religions. This is strikingly attested by the ease with which almost any tale of wonder, no matter how tall and fantastic, is eagerly accepted by the populace at large - in particular when it has an Eastern setting. The most illuminating example of this is the story of that holy guru, Mr T. (for Tuesday) Lobsang Rampa, clairvoyant pilot, doctor and lama from Tibet, who is also known to certain people as Mr Cyril Hoskins, formerly of `Rose Croft', Thames Ditton, Surrey. What possible link, you may well ask, could there be between a Tibetan lama and a Mr Hoskins from homely Thames Ditton? To get the amazing answer to this question it is necessary to unfold the story of the psychic doctor from Lhasa and how he came upon us.
The saga commenced in 1955 when a simply dressed individual presented himself with part of a manuscript at the offices of the highly respected publishers Messrs Secker & Warburg in 99 Great Russell Street, London W.1. Mr Frederick Warburg recalled the occasion very well, later describing his visitor as `short, slim, dark hair cut into a tonsure, penetrating eyes, aquiline nose...a most unusual figure'. The individual's dramatically fluctuating physical appearance must have been at least one of his unusual features, for in contrast to Warburg's description, a BBC producer, Mr John Irwin, who invited the mystery man to tea at about that time, remembers him as a portly figure, `over six feet tall, bald and clean shaven'. To confound matters even further, a contemporary photograph of the man, who had introduced himself as Dr T. Lobsang Rampa, reveals him to be heavily bearded. At this late stage, alas, we shall probably never know exactly how Rampa looked in those days. Suffice to say that this tall, short, portly, slim, bald, dark-haired and clean-shaven chap with a beard stated that he was a Tibetan lama, medically qualified and now residing in England. The manuscript he was offering was his autobiography, an account of his amazing life and upbringing in the land on the `Roof of the World'. To back up his claims to being a doctor of medicine, Rampa flourished a gaudy document allegedly issued by the University of Chungking. At the time the publisher thought it a bit strange that the document was written in English rather than Chinese, but managed to push such thoughts aside. When Rampa then seized Mr Warburg's hand and, inspecting the lines on it, correctly told him his age and also that he had recently been engaged in a big criminal case (again correct), all doubts were apparently dispelled and the publisher agreed to read the manuscript. With this the author, who indicated that he was also known as Dr Kuon, departed, evidently satisfied.
A reading of the manuscript, which arrived in a series of chunks via the literary agency, A. M. Heath & Co., convinced Secker & Warburg that they were on to something pretty interesting. The story was a fascinating one, written with a distinct literary style, and full of fascinating, not to say fabulous material. It reads like a cross between James Hilton's archetypal novel Lost Horizon and Alexandra David-Neel's travelogue With Mystics and Magicians in Tibet. Similarities to the style of the latter, incidentally, are occasionally remarkable.
According to the narrative, the young Rampa, born of wealthy Tibetan parents in Lhasa, was singled out by astrologers at the age of seven for incarceration in a lamasery, there to be trained as a priest-surgeon. A vivid account is given of the hardships of his long apprenticeship within the monastery, during which time the ability to survive extreme physical hardship and develop latent psychic powers was taught. The whole is richly backed by colourful details of the weird Tibetan terrain and the strange social life within the monastery itself. Much is written of the human personalities involved, ranging from Rampa's personal tutor and guide, the Lama Mingyar Dondrup, to the Dalai Lama himself, with whom Rampa became on better than nodding acquaintanceship. The atmosphere is packed with tiny, and superficially convincing, items of local detail - the dung fires sending blue smoke into the mountain air, the wooden bowls of tsampa (a kind of barley porridge which was the monks' staple diet), bumpy rides on yaks across bleak mountain tops, bowls of steaming buttered tea, etc., etc. There are also more fantastic episodes, such as terrifying rides in man-carrying kites (`he lost his hold and went tumbling end over end down the rocks five thousand feet below, his robe whipping and fluttering like a blood-red cloud'), the development of various supernormal powers (`levitation can be accomplished and sometimes is, solely for the technical exercise involved. It is a clumsy method of moving around...the real adept uses astral travelling'), spine-tingling encounters with the Abominable Snowman (`It was pointing a hand at me, and uttering a curious mewing noise like a kitten. The head seemed to have no frontal lobes, but sloped back almost directly from the very heavy brows...'), and so on.
By far the most sensational section, however, was the chapter which gave the book its name. When only eight years old, the apprentice lama states that he was submitted to a drastic brain operation to open the inner `third eye' - seat of all psychic powers and the organ mediating clairvoyance and telepathy. The operation, which was conducted without anaesthesia, was performed by medically trained monks and it makes quite harrowing reading. An instrument made of shining steel with a rotating, sharply toothed end was pressed up against his forehead and slowly drilled in. A clean sliver of wood `treated by fire and herbs' and very sharp, was then poked gently into the hole made by the drill and pressed slowly but firmly into the brain. `Suddenly I felt a stinging, ticklish sensation apparently in the bridge of my nose', writes Rampa. `It subsided, and I became aware of subtle scents that I could not identify.' This was followed by a blinding flash and a moment of searing pain. `You are now one of us, Lobsang,' the Lama Mingyar Dondrup told him. `For the rest of your life you will see people as they are and not as they pretend to be'. Gazing round Rampa was amazed to see that all the men present were surrounded by a luminous golden flame - the aura. The opening of the third eye had been effected.
Whether it was the opening of the third eye, the bit about astral travelling or the meeting with the Abominable Snowman (a particularly popular newspaper character in the 1950s) that made the publisher's breath catch is not known, but Warburg himself admits to being fascinated if very dubious. The details seemed authentic, but never having been to Tibet it was hard to say. For all anyone in the publishing office knew, there might be no such a meal as tsampa, buttered tea might have made the average monk gag, and in Tibet dung fires might have been thought positively improper. The only thing to do seemed to be to call in some experts.
The response from these gentlemen was curiously uncertain. Some damned it more or less out of hand, others thought it had the stamp of authenticity. Warburg sent for Rampa/Kuon and confronted him with the criticisms. Come clean, he told the enigmatic author, admit the book is fiction and we'll still publish it - as fiction rather than fact. The other stood fast, stoutly insisting that his story was one hundred per cent true. Warburg then submitted him to a simple test in basic Tibetan which Rampa failed miserably. When taxed with this lack of comprehension of his native tongue, he produced an ingenious and undoubtedly irrefutable explanation. When a prisoner of war with the Japanese (a new development) he was tortured for secret information about his country. Rather than be forced into betrayal he used some of his amazing psychic powers and put a hypnotic block on his knowledge of Tibetan, which he had of course been subsequently unable to remove. At this point, Warburg recalled, a violent spasm shook the monk and he `clasped his hand to his head as if in agony' - warning, if ever one was needed, that the psychological effects of the Japanese torture had been grave indeed and that it would be unwise to question further. Now deeply suspicious he decided to reject the manuscript, but changed his mind once again on pondering the book's unquestionably fascinating material.
From a sales point of view the decision to go ahead with publication was one of the best things Secker & Warburg had ever done. The Third Eye, when it hit the bookshops in 1956, became a literary sensation. Sales were enormous and, perhaps surprisingly, reviewers were apparently able to take a charitable view of the book's bizarre story and occasional inconsistencies. The Observer, no scatter-brained Sunday rag, described it as `an extraordinary and exciting book, and a disquieting one'. The Times Literary Supplement, normally the scourge of fringe and sub-standard works, went into raptures, declaring, `...it comes near to being a work of art...even those who exclaim "magic, moonshine or worse" are likely to be moved by the nobility of the ethical system which produces such beliefs and such men as the author'. Against such praise, the occasional highly critical review, such as the icy blast delivered in the Daily Telegraph by Dr D. L. Snellgrove of the London University School of Oriental and African Studies, could of course make little headway. Within a year The Third Eye was a best seller in twelve countries, netting its author some £20,000 in royalties.
Intriguing though the tales of man-carrying kites and encounters with the yeti were, there is little doubt that the real spice in the book was the account of the physical opening of the third eye. For centuries the idea that human beings have a latent psychic centre with a physical analogue somewhere in the brain has fascinated all the fans of the occult. Some reptiles do in fact have a third eye, or the evolutionary remains of one, in the frontal region of the brain and its function seems to be to detect low energy radiation in the heat spectrum. Man himself has one apparently functionless organ, the pineal gland in a frontal/central position, which Descartes thought must be the point of interaction between soul or mind and body. This is still often believed to be the psychic centre in the folklore of modern Spiritualism. The opening of Rampa's pineal eye, and its sensational consequences as personally testified by the author, himself a medically qualified doctor, had been given the seal of approval of a world-famous publisher. This seemed to imply a victory over materialism of a totally new kind, a dramatic new weapon in the armoury of the world of the psychic and the occult. No doubt it was for this reason that The Observer considered the book to be disquieting.
For a brief moment the prosaic, materialistic view of the world flickered slightly, but it was to be a brief moment and no more. Had The Third Eye been less well written, less favourably reviewed, less popular and backed by some small crank publisher, things might have remained where they were with Rampa's story sliding gently into the mists of the psychic anecdote. But it was not to be. The book was too good, too clever to be ignored. Too good in fact to be true.
The trouble started when a vague and rather mysterious academic body, generally described in the press at the time as a `team of Tibetan scholars', decided that the time was ripe to have a closer look at the now world-famous doctor from Lhasa, and to examine his credentials rigorously, third eye and all. Their first step was to hire a Liverpool private detective, one Clifford Burgess, to trot around in his tracks, and find out what was what. When did he arrive in this country for example from the Far East? What did the Tibetan authorities - admittedly rather difficult to get hold of face to face - know of him, and of such figures as the Lama Mingyar Dondrup? And what about Rampa's war record (he had claimed he was a pilot in the Chinese air force fighting the Japanese) and of course his alleged medical qualifications?
It wasn't long before the industrious Mr Burgess began to come up with some extraordinary facts. In the first place he found that Tuesday Lobsang Rampa came not from Tibet, but from rural Plympton in Devon, where he was born in 1911 with the very un-Eastern name of Cyril Henry Hoskins. Far from studying medicine and learning to be a lama during the formative years of his life, he was assisting with his father's plumbing business. This, incidentally, was the closest he ever got to any kind of basic anatomy, and was a chore which he was glad to abandon on his father's death in 1937. In 1938, just about the time when Rampa claimed that he had been training as a fighter pilot (a vivid account - full of aeronautical howlers - of how he taught himself to fly is given in his second book, Doctor From Lhasa, Mr Hoskins was taking a correspondence course in time-and-motion study with a firm in Weybridge, later joining that same concern as a correspondence clerk. An inquisitive journalist on the invaluable Psychic News, Mr John Pitt, supplemented the apocalyptic findings of the detective Burgess by tracking down individuals who knew and clearly recalled Hoskins in those pre-war years. A Mrs Ablett, from Weybridge in Surrey, remembered him when he was taking the correspondence course, and stated that he was full of strange stories about China where he claimed he had been taken as a child. She stated that he had been very interested in occult matters, would cast horoscopes for all and sundry and was a generally good conversationalist, if a bit inclined to tell contradictory stories about his past.
In the course of browsing around Weybridge, Pitt was able to track down one or two other people who distinctly remembered Hoskins/Rampa. A Mr and Mrs Boxall, who lived on the same estate as he had, knew him well. `He told me, in 1943 or 1944, that he had been a flying instructor in the Chinese air force', Boxall told Pitt. `He said he had been badly smashed up in a plane crash when his parachute failed to open.' This no doubt accounted for Hoskins's tendency at the time to limp around on a walking stick. A rather similar picture came from a Mr Lorraine Sutton of East Molesey who met Hoskins in 1948, shortly after he had changed his name to Carl Kuon Suo. By that time the former Hoskins was describing himself as Dr Kuon and saying that he was born in Tibet - a fact which rather surprised Mr Sutton somewhat since `The Doctor' both talked and looked remarkably like an Englishman.
One can imagine the smiles which wreathed the faces of the team of Tibetan scholars when their sponsored detective work paid off so handsomely. One can also imagine the consternation within the offices of Messrs Secker & Warburg. Frederick Warburg, in a lengthy statement to the press, expressed amazement at the turn-up of events, but pointed out that they had been in two minds about publication in the first place. To cover themselves they had written a foreword to the book, pointing out that it was hard to corroborate and had been submitted to `nearly twenty readers, all persons of intelligence and experience' for assessment. Their comments had been contradictory, but that was to be expected. `Was there any expert', the publisher asked, `who had undergone the training of a Tibetan lama in its most developed forms? Was there anyone who had been brought up in a Tibetan family' and could confirm or deny the domestic details given? Apparently there was not, and Secker & Warburg decided to publish and be damned, adding that the proviso that `the Author must bear - and willingly takes - a sole responsibility for the statements made in his book'. Even when faced with the new material on Hoskins's West Country, as opposed to Himalayan, background, Warburg appeared to be still partially unconvinced. His press statement concludes:
But is the truth, the whole truth, out? How could the man alleged to be Cyril Henry Hoskins, known to me as Dr Kuon [author's note: that same tall, short, slim, portly, bald, dark-haired, clean-shaven man with a beard who entered their offices for the first time two years ago] write a book which has thrilled the world? Why did he choose this subject? How did he gain the material? From where comes his writing ability, his superb imaginative power? Did he believe his own fantasies? Was he, perhaps, the mouthpiece of a true Lama, as some have alleged? To these questions an answer must be found.
Most people would be inclined to agree with Mr Warburg that an answer to these questions was indeed required, and amongst the most enthusiastic seekers after truth were a team of newspaper reporters who soon tracked down Hoskins/Rampa to a hideaway home outside Dublin, discovering in the process the usual air of unreality and razzamatazz that reporters seem to find wherever they go. The `plumber's son who posed as a Tibetan Lama' was apparently living in `a cliff-top villa' where the door was guarded by a `pretty society woman' whom Rampa had `recruited as a disciple' and parted from her `old Etonian husband'. The woman, needless to say, `sobbed as she told her story', and the husband later `shouted to callers to go away' from his `luxury flat in Kensington'. The soi-disant lama himself was less communicative altogether, being `ill, it is said, in bed'. It was, one suspects, a diplomatic illness, for when one reporter refused to be discouraged and hung around making a nuisance of himself, he was suddenly favoured with the personal appearance of Hoskins/Rampa, bald head, robes and all, who delivered upon his visitor a blood-curdling Eastern curse. The journalist, a hard-boiled type, was not impressed at the time. He changed his mind a few weeks later when he emerged as the sole survivor of a spectacular air crash, and now considers the curse to have been a particularly valuable one.
Naturally enough the Rampa flap died slowly down with no one really much the wiser. In due course a second book, Doctor from Lhasa (published this time by Souvenir Press), appeared which totally lacked the panache of the first book, and in no way helped to clear up the mystery of the author's the origins. Then, in 1960, came a third book - The Rampa Story - in which Rampa decided to tell all, and confirm rumours that had been circulating for some time. It turned out to be a wonderful story, and a most ingenious explanation for the confusions and inconsistencies of the past.
It appears that those people who claimed to have remembered Cyril Hoskins working for a correspondence college and pottering around in the western suburbs of London, while T. Lobsang Rampa was gallantly battling it out with the Japs in the skies of China, were not suffering from serious delusions. There really was a Mr Hoskins, with occult leanings, a passion for oriental matters and gravely dissatisfied with his lot on earth. He had even experimented in astral travel, without too much success, as a means of escaping from the environs of Weybridge and his boring existence in those parts. Unknown to the lowly plumber's son (the narrative reveals) he was being watched from afar by a real adept at astral travel. This was none other than the versatile Tuesday Lob- sang Rampa, who really had been trained as a medical lama, had had his third eye opened, was a pilot in the Chinese air force, etc., etc. Rampa's interest in Hoskins was not entirely altruistic. What was really ticking around in his wily oriental mind was a staggering plan to take over the other's body - with the present occupier's permission of course. Rampa's own body, because of his general unselfishness and bravery in the war years, had got a bit battered about, and even the wonders of Tibetan super-surgery were unable to restore it to an acceptable condition. Such is the nature of psychic transplants, however - unlike the simple physical transplants of such trifles as heart, lung or kidney - that they must be performed with both donor and recipient alive and kicking. And, as we have said, there is the other matter of acquiring the donor's permission.
One night, in pursuit of his goal, Rampa made a psychic journey from Tibet to London and appeared before the astonished Hoskins who was at the time making a feeble attempt at astral travel himself. The Englishman soon cottoned on to what was happening and confided in Rampa that there was nothing he would like better than to `find release'. Since the other planned to use his body in a good cause (something to do with saving Tibet from the Communists) he could hand over at any convenient time. After some friendly chat the two individuals left the astral plane to return to their respective bodies, one in Lhasa, the other snoozing away in bed in `Rose Croft', Thames Ditton.
A month after their first meeting the amazing swop - later to be the cause of so much confusion in the world of publishing - took place. Hoskins of course only knew of the impending swop when conscious in the astral plane. His waking self remained oblivious and continued to drag his unwilling body around from employment exchange to employment exchange in the hope of finding a job commensurate with his largely unrecognized talents. He cannot therefore have been expecting anything significant when on 13th June 1949, while perched in a tree photographing an owl, a branch broke casting him to the ground head foremost. Rendered unconscious, Hoskins found himself floating above his body, though attached to it by a silver cord. The world of Thames Ditton appeared to be in suspended animation - he had time to note a horse-drawn baker's cart nearby, quite motionless, one of the horse's forelegs poised in mid air. Then, gliding across the garden in truly spiritual fashion (i.e. several inches off the ground), he saw the figure of Lobsang Rampa. After some discussion in which the astral Rampa told the astral Hoskins that as a reward for giving up his body he would have a sizable Kharmic debt eradicated, the lama severed Hoskins's astral cord and watched as the astral body of the former Devon plumber and correspondence course clerk floated off to God-knows-where. Rampa now severed his own lengthy cord (it stretched all the way back to Tibet), connected the loose end to the end poking out of the body of the recumbent Hoskins, and promptly took over. Thus were the anomalies in the Rampa/Hoskins story explained. In his new body Rampa found that he retained his own (i.e. Tibetan) memories and brain power but next to no knowledge of Hoskins's life and knowledge. It is doubtfull if he was missing much, and apart from one or two moments of embarrassment, such as when he failed to recognize his (i.e.Hoskins's) wife, he soon adjusted and before long was writing the book which was to create such a sensation.
It is clear that there are three separate and exclusive ways of approaching the Hoskins/Rampa saga:
(1) The story is true, or very nearly true, from beginning to end and the body of Hoskins is now occupied by the mind or spirit of a Tibetan lama;(2) The story is lies, or mainly lies, and Hoskins's mind still inhabits Hoskins's body, the only significant change being a marked improvement in Hoskins's bank balance;
(3) Hoskins is a deluded, or mentally disturbed individual whose fantasies about Tibet, the lamas and their great psychic powers, have now assumed the dimension of reality - perhaps precipitated by falling from the tree while photographing the owl.
It is impossible and unnecessary to give specific guidance to the reader as to which of the above hypotheses should be adopted - so much will depend on one's natural bias and tolerance of the unusual. It is fair to say, however, that most uncommitted people will consider the first of the three interpretations to be improbable in the extreme. It is also fair to say that many thousands of people the world over - probably hundreds of thousands - take the amazing story of the Tibetan lama and the surgical operation to open his clairvoyant eye as gospel. More than a decade after the rumpus it is clear that, while the expose of the book has been more or less totally forgotten, the theme and central images created in the narrative have remained vividly in people's minds.
Before closing this episode, it may be worth noting the subsequent history of Hoskins/Rampa, who has for some time resided in North America. He has been a fairly prolific writer, stretching the lama topic out pretty well on the whole, the three books we have already mentioned being followed by The Cave of the Ancients and Living With the Lama. There have also been two books with an academic rather than anecdotal flavour, You-Forever (a special course in psychic development and metaphysics) and Wisdom of the Ancients, which is `A Book of Knowledge, with special sections on breathing-exercises and diet'. There is also a lesser-known, considerably less scholarly work called simply, My Visit to Venus, in which Rampa describes the occasion when he was favoured with a trip in a flying saucer. It seems to have been a dull ride, if one may say so, as the company was limited to two partially articulate Venusians known as The Tall One and The Broad One respectively. On Venus, a multi-coloured planet with skyscraper cities constructed after the fashion of 1950s science fiction, a visit was paid to the `Hall of Knowledge' where the histories of Poseidon, Lemuria and Atlantis are thoroughly documented. The book closes with a clear warning that this was but the first of many trips, thus implying future volumes in store.
Advertisements regularly appearing in the magazine Fate give one an interesting glimpse into the lama's recent nonliterary activities. `Let Dr Rampa instruct you in the art of meditation', one reads, `gain the inestimable benefits...Peace, Tranquillity, Inner Harmony, Knowledge...that can be yours so easily'. To assist the seeker in his quest for Peace, Tranquillity, etc., one is urged to buy one or more of the following aids: long-playing record on meditation, featuring the voice of Dr Rampa himself ($4.95); meditating figure ($5.00); a meditation robe (made personally for you; indicate small, medium, large - $25.00); Rampa meditation incense, tube of assorted ($3.00); incense burner ($1.00); and Lobsang Rampa original prayers, a set of two ($1.00). Two original prayers for a dollar sounds pretty reasonable, but an even better bargain would seem to be the COMPLETE HOME MEDITATION KIT (includes all of above in handy storage and carrying case) for just $37.50, or two dollars off list price. Lest the above advertisement should give readers the impression that the saintly Dr Rampa is seeking earthly profits from his spiritual gifts, one should point out that a foreword to My Visit to Venus makes it absolutely clear that all royalties from sales are to be donated to the Save a Cat League of 245 West 25th Street, New York City.
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