This man changed my life forever.
- gaymen2
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
The Tibetan lama who was really a plumber from Devon
This article is more than 5 years old
A 1956 bestseller about life in a Himalayan monastery turned out to be made up by a man who’d never been there. But that didn’t stop the Dalai Lama endorsing it
The Third Eye, written in 1956 by a person who called himself Tuesday Lobsang Rampa.
This spiritual travelogue covers Rampa’s early life in Lhasa, his years in a Tibetan monastery, encounters with yetis, yogic flying and other Buddhist mysteries. The book sold half a million copies in its first two years, making Rampa something of a celebrity.
He did, however, have his detractors. Rampa’s wild claims – not to mention his West Country burr – led Tibetologist Heinrich Harrer to hire a private detective. What this gumshoe uncovered surprised even his employer. Not only had Rampa never been to Tibet, he didn’t even own a passport. He was a former plumber from Devon called Cyril Hoskin who damaged his back by falling out of a tree while owl-spotting. During convalescence he had, it seems, settled on a drastic career change.
The media was scandalised; Hoskin was unrepentant. Cheerfully admitting that he’d never been to Tibet, he now claimed that as he lay semi-conscious at the bottom of a tree that fateful afternoon, half-strangled by his binoculars, an elderly lama (monk) had floated by on the astral plane and the pair had agreed to swap bodies. (Whether, in 1950s Tibet, an elderly lama ever claimed to be a West Country plumber remains unverified.)
Rampa nevertheless garnered a global following. His 20 books range from an interstellar travel memoir entitled My Visit to Venus to Living with the Lama, transmitted to him telepathically by his cat, Mrs Fifi Greywhiskers.
History should not judge Rampa, who died in 1981, too harshly. Many leading Tibetologists admit that he set them on their paths, and the Dalai Lama has acknowledged Rampa’s role in drawing attention to the plight of his country. “The farther one travels, the less one knows,” sang George Harrison in 1968’s The Inner Light. With lockdown making travel writing almost impossible, fellow freelancers take note. A ripe imagination, decent broadband and a trickster’s cunning are perhaps all you need.
The Third Eye (Ballantine Books, £7.99)
remains the best selling book on Tibet.
EXPLANATION: by John Bellamy
At 17 years of age, living with my first lover in Guernsey and running our own hotel, we had an elderly lady friend - Elsa Cooper - who lived a 2 minute walk from us, and she heard me talking and chatting about stuff and one day handed me a book and said she thought it was a good time, the right time, for me to read ' THE THIRD EYE' by Tuesday Lobsang Rampa.
It changed my life forever.
It answered all the questions I had asked throughout my childhood, - as from very early on I experienced tons of strange things hapening to me - from the cradle - which made no sense and my Mother would tell me I was dreaming or making it up - and for most of my childhood I suppose I had these experiences but put them down as just that - my imagination. Being an identical twin - my brother and I aways had that ' twin connection' but for me, it went further.
Then at 17 when I read this book, it answered all the questions - gave details to everything I had experienced and showed me that I was not making it up - it was not my imagination at all, it was some advanced psychic experiences that many - simply do not understand so claim its fake and make believe.
This book detailed a great deal that made a lot of sense to me and answered all those questions.
As for him being a plumber and having never been to Tibet ...
It is called ' A WALK IN.' - where 2 spirits decide to change places - change bodies - and while the memories are fully intact, the new memories will come forth and the new person will appear in the old body - and visa verca, and if you delve into the psychic world further, you will find 'WALK INS' are more common that reported.
I knew a women in Guernsey years ago who was shy and reserved and never spoke and stayed at the back of the room and just listened to others.
After a horrible car crash where she was dead on the operating table for some time, she recovered after a month in a coma and although was wheel chair bound, her personality was OUTRAGSOUS, loud and cheerful, laughing and telling the worst, vulgar and rude jokes that even made the local fishermen in the bar I worked at and where she would visit,- blush.
Her parents always said ' She is not the same girl we knew before the accident'- and in her death on the operating table, another spirit had come into her body and - taken over... always with permission ... and she lived a long and noisy life being the bell of the ball, the centre of attention, the fun and laughter in any crowd, and that - is a walk in.
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A truth is a truth regardless of where or whom it comes from.
PERIOD.
DO NOT get stuck in semantics. Because he was a plumber therefore he talks crap - when the fact is what these books shared was truthful information that even the Dali Lama accepted as facts, and how could a plumber have such knowledge unless - --- There was more to it that most will accept ?
I have received just the same rhetoric. 'How can you possibly know what you are talking about, you were just a hooker...' - and after I wipe the floor with them and not just put them in their place, but teach them that a hooker often has more common sense than a brain surgeon, and never - ever - attempt to put someone down just because of what they do, as all you do is make yourself look small and uneducated.
His books changed my life. I was aware I was not dreaming and to trust my feelings and ' strange occuraces' as real, and it helped me formulate a spiritual journey onwards.
I had not even thought about his books for decades until recently I saw an article on the author and never realized at the time, just how popular and famous his books had become, even all these years later.
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