26.08.2026
File 6. Lobsang Rampa
My first contact with any of this was a book: The Third Eye, by Lobsang Rampa.
It tells his life from the time he entered a Tibetan monastery as a child. They studied extrasensory perception, and there was a ceremony to open the third eye, which is supposed to be the pineal gland, between and little above the eyebrows. Once it was opened he began to see people’s auras. A ring of energy you can’t see with the naked eye, and which animals and plants have too. When a monk got angry, he saw it red. And if some part of the body came out darkened, there was an illness there.
I read it at twelve years old and it opened my head. As it did for a lot of people: half a million copies in two years.
And it was a lie.
In 1958, Heinrich Harrer — who had actually lived in Tibet — paid a private detective to find out who this lama was. The Daily Mail published the answer: his name was Cyril Henry Hoskin, he was from Devon, the son of a plumber, and he had never set foot in Tibet. Nor had anyone operated his forehead.
His explanation was that Rampa’s soul had entered his body. He went on writing until he died, in 1981.
Here’s the part that interests me, and it isn’t the scandal. That invented book moved hundreds of thousands of people to look for something beyond what they could see. It moved me. That push was real even though the book wasn’t.
But a real push deserves real sources. And that, thinking about it, is other lesson I take at this point: what wakes you up doesn’t have to be what holds you up afterwards. You keep the shove and you change the book.
Forty-five years of checking editions, verses and letters come from there. From having started with a plumber from Devon dressed as a lama.