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Books So Bad They're Good: Trepanned "Monks" and Multi-Named Gurus (rhinovirus rewind) [1]
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Date: 2023-01-07
As odd as Da Bubba Adi Samraj Avatar The Way of Spirituality was, he was far from unique. The 1950’s interest interest in the occult and the 1960’s counterculture led inexorably to the 1970’s New Age, which popularized and codified many of these beliefs while influencing everything from cooking to clothing to politics to religion. Although many of the promised changes never occurred, others did, sometimes in unexpected ways; the organic foods movement moved from the fringe to the mainstream at least partially thanks to New Agers looking to farm in a more environmentally responsible way, while alternative healing methods based on herbs, a healthy diet, and “body work” (everything from chiropractic to craniosacral massage to reiki) owes its current popularity to books and techniques developed or adapted by New Age practitioners. Perhaps most important, New Age interest in non-Western spiritual traditions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Tao, and neo-paganism has had a profound impact on religious thought and practice, particularly among women; non-Western religions never forgot about the Divine Feminine, and it’s no wonder that women raised in a male-dominated Judeo-Christian society would be drawn to traditions that didn’t automatically scorn their gender as unclean, stupid, and weak.
Although some of the books that came out of the New Age, such as Diet for a Small Planet or Dreaming the Dark, were of genuine value, all too many others were badly written, pretentious, and unsupported by the slightest scrap of research into whatever they claimed to be about. Da Increasingly Silly Names at least had studied Hinduism and lived briefly on an ashram before striking out on his own; many New Age gurus and “experts” didn’t even have that much support for their theories.
Tonight I bring two prime examples of New Age Wisdom So Bad It’s Good. One was written about ten years before the New Age per se took off, but continues to sell today. The second had a brief vogue before fading into well deserved obscurity, but its influence on popular culture goes well beyond its shelf life:
The Third Eye, by T. Lobsang Rampa (aka Carl Kuon Suo, born Cyril H. Hoskins) – Back in 1956 a book purporting to be the autobiography of a Tibetan lama was published. It was crammed with colorful, hitherto unknown details of life in the mysterious Himalayan theocracy, from how the monks lived and trained newcomers to the author viewing a mummified body of one of his earlier incarnations to a thrilling encounter with a yeti, the mysterious creature better known as “the Abominable Snowman.” Best of all, the author, one Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, scion of a wealthy aristocratic family, describes how one day his intellect and spiritual prowess led to him being chosen to receive “the Third Eye,” a type of enlightenment that required him to have a small hole drilled in his forehead so he would henceforth “see people as they are and not as they pretend to be.”
It was just like a thriller about the Mysterious East, only with Buddhist monks and trepanation, and it’s little wonder that The Third Eye quickly shot up the bestseller lists. Tibet was hot news thanks to Chinese aggression toward the beleaguered mountain kingdom, and The Third Eye seemed to offer a first-hand account of what was at risk if the Chinese succeeded in suppressing Tibetan culture, plus spiritual wisdom unknown to the benighted West.
Alas, all was not sunshine and roses. Although the book was published as a true story, the few scholars who’d actually studied Tibetan Buddhism had their doubts. The emphasis on psychic phenomena and the Third Eye operation didn’t square with eyewitness accounts or Tibetan writings, and since when did Tibetans name their children “Tuesday,” anyway? Finally Heinrich Harrer, an explorer who had actually visited Tibet and studied its religion and culture, decided that he’d had enough, and hired a private detective to learn what he could about Tuesday Lobsang Rampa.
The results of that investigation appeared in the Daily Mail in February of 1958, almost two years after The Third Eye was published. Harrer’s detective had learned many interesting facts about the alleged lama, none of which appeared in his “autobiography”:
His birth name was Cyril Henry Hoskin, not Tuesday Lobsang Rampa.
He was the son of a plumber from Plympton, Devon.
He spoke no Tibetan and had never been to Tibet.
He had no scar on his forehead from the trepanation.
He had legally changed his name to “Carl Kuon Suo” in 1948 and claimed to be a doctor when first approaching publishers with the manuscript of The Third Eye.
The British press, always eager for a scandal, immediately set out in search of Hoskin/Suo/Rampa, who was neither in Devon nor Tibet. They found him living quietly in Howth, Ireland, and confronted him with the fruits of Harrer’s investigation.
Much to their surprise, Hoskin/Suo/Rampa admitted that everything Harrer alleged was true – and so was everything in The Third Eye. He claimed that one day many years earlier he had fallen out of a tree while attempting to photograph an owl, and upon regaining consciousness had been contacted by the spirit of the real Tuesday Lobsang Rampa. Rampa’s physical body was seemingly too weak to continue, and since Hoskin was suffering from a spiritual malaise, Rampa asked if Hoskin would agree to host Rampa’s soul in a sort of transmigration. Hoskin agreed, and thereafter was actually Rampa, not Hoskin, even though he continued to look and act and talk just like a plumber’s boy from Devon.
Needless to say, the scandal only helped sales of the The Third Eye. Hoskin/Suo/Rampa wrote two sequels (Doctor from Lhasa and The Rampa Story), as well as over fifteen more books on spiritual subjects, Tibet, ancient wisdom, and life on Venus, which he claimed to have visited astrally. To be fair, My Visit to Venus was based on material that Hoskin/Suo/Rampa had not approved for publication, but its dubious history didn’t prevent it, too, from selling briskly. Other members of his family, including his wife, San Ra’ab Rampa, adopted daughter/secretary Sheelagh Rouse, and Siamese cat, Mrs. Fifi Greywhiskers, also wrote accounts of Rampa’s life and teachings, although the cat’s had to be dictated to her favorite human as she lacked opposable thumbs with which to grip a pen,
The Rampa/Hoskin/Rouse/Greywhiskers family eventually ended up in Calgary after the British press basically hounded its patriarch out of the islands as a charlatan. He went on to his next incarnation in 1981, still claiming that he was indeed Tuesday Lobsang Rampa. No comment was available from Mrs. Fifi Greywhiskers, who had gone onto her next life several years before.
The Secret Life of Plants, by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, based on the research of Cleve Backster. Cleve Backster has an unusual background for a New Age legend. Born in 1924, he began as an interrogator for the CIA, where he was introduced to a new, exciting machine that promised to reveal definitively whether a suspect was telling the truth or not.
This machine, the polygraph, measures sensitive physical reactions such as perspiration, heartbeat, and respiration in an effort to determine if an individual is giving truthful answers. Although it is commonly known as “the lie detector,” polygraph results are not admissible in court because despite its name, it is reasonably easy for a determined person to beat. It is still used by law enforcement for preliminary screening of suspects, although its results are now regarded as only one of many tools available to modern forensic science.
All that was in the future when young Backster was trained to use the polygraph. He quickly became an expert polygrapher, and founded the CIA’s polygraphy unit soon after World War II. He rose to become the chair of the Research and Instrument Committee of the Academy for Scientific Interrogation, and by the 1950s he was a legend in the law enforcement community.
Backster left the CIA in 1960 and opened a school in New York to train others in the use of the polygraph. He worked as a consultant to police departments throughout the country, and his students went on to train many of the polygraphers still working today, either in New York or his eventual home, San Diego.
If Backster had simply stuck to police work he might have joined the ranks of forensic legends like Milton Helpern, Thomas Noguchi, and Herbert MacDonnell. Alas for his reputation, in the early 1960s he began experimenting on non-humans, including vegetable matter, to see what information the polygraph could yield about the natural world. All living things have a slight electrical charge, after all, and what better device than a polygraph to measure the charge in the body electric? Researcher Jagadish Chandra Bose claimed to have discovered that playing certain kinds of music in the area where plants grew caused them to grow faster, so clearly there was something interesting going on.
And so Cleve Backster, expert interrogator and polygraph pioneer, took a few houseplants and hooked them up to his favorite machine.
The results were amazing: not only did plants register changes in electrical resistance when harmed or even threatened, they seemed to perceive human thoughts and emotions despite having no nervous systems or sensory organs that might allow them to sense changes in human sweat, expression, or speech. Backster, excited to be proven right, published his results in the International Journal of Parapsychology, where he dubbed this phenomenon “primary perception.” Botanists howled at his less than stringent research protocols, but Backster, undeterred, soon expanded his research to cover even less promising organic matter, such as bacteria, disembodied human cells, and yogurt (presumably with live cultures).
That was when two writers, Christopher Bird and Peter Tompkins, got involved. Fascinated by Backster’s work on plant sentience, they did some quick research into possible forerunners such as Goethe’s theory of plant metamorphosis, threw in a great deal of information about hot new ideas such as Kirlian photography, bioelectrics, and psychophysics, just as much about old tired ideas like dowsing, orgone energy, and the human aura (supposedly proved by Kirlian photography), and published the resulting mishmash in 1973.
The book was a sensation. The 1970s were a time of fern bars, organic farming, and plenty of houseplants, and housewives and New Agers alike seized upon the idea that their plants could and did have feelings with gusto. Cleve Backster appeared on talk shows to demonstrate his theories live and in person, and soon astronaut Edgar Mitchell, founder of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, was inviting Backster to present his work at IONS’ scholarly gatherings. There was even a documentary based on the The Secret Life of Plants in 1979, complete with a soundtrack written by none other than Stevie Wonder, then at the height of his fame.
The belief in sentient plants soon faded, although millions of people continue to talk to their hydrangeas, philodendrons, and mother-in-law’s tongues. Backster himself continued to appear on Art Bell’s Coast to Coast late night radio show until his death in 2013, still convinced that primary perception exists and is not merely a misinterpretation of results the polygraph was never designed to give. That he persisted in his research despite near-unanimous rejection by the scientific community, a thorough and very public debunking by the Discovery Channel’s “Mythbusters” program in 2008, and that certain taint of insanity attached to anyone and anything associated with Art Bell is a tribute either to Backster being an unsung genius and latter-day Galileo, or to him being too invested in his theory to admit that he might not have been as correct as he thought he was.
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Have you ever encountered the spiritual teachings of Avatar Adi Da Samraj? Talked to your plants? Named a cat “Miss Fi-Fi Greywhiskers”? Visited Tibet? Watched an episode of Twin Peaks where Agent Dale Cooper talked about Tibet and wondered what he was raving about now? It’s a mild night in Massachusetts, so come to the firepit and share….
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