Alien Abduction Of T. Lobsang Rampa

Brought to you by The Church Of Mabus where the paranormal meets heavy metal

With Tim R. Swartz and Timothy Green Beckley

QUESTION: What background can you give us on Lobsang Rampa and his life?

SWARTZ: In 1956, British publisher Secker & Warburgan released a book called “The Third Eye,” an alleged autobiography about the life of a Tibetan Lama and the secrets of Eastern spiritual knowledge. At that time, little was known about the Tibetan way of Lamasery life, and the subsequent Chinese invasion of Tibet effectively shut off what little information had been available up until that time.

The Third Eye quickly became a best-seller, though nothing was known about the actual identity of the author. In 1958, a private investigator discovered T. Lobsang Rampa was a man from Plympton in Devon named Cyril Henry Hoskin. Hoskin told the press that he was the author and the Third Eye was true and not a hoax. In 1960, Hoskin revealed in his book “The Rampa Story” that the spirit of Rampa took over the body of Hoskin after he had fallen from an apple tree in 1948.

Despite the controversy, the public could not get enough of T. Lobsang Rampa, and in total he published 20 books before his death in 1981.

BECKLEY: To a large degree, Rampa is responsible for starting an entirely new trend in the UFO field, mainly among the contactee element of flying saucerology. He is generally acknowledged as being the first Walk-In a term that relates to those Ultra-Terrestrials and supposed Extraterrestrials who have actually gained control or taken possession of an ordinary human body and soul. Usually, this is done with the permission of the natural owner of the body, generally so that a spiritual message can be spread throughout the land by a spirit or entity from another dimension, planet or realm. In other words, the aliens or masters, or spirits don’t have to arrive in silvery space ships. Instead, they can just jump into or walk into a human being and go about their mission. Other Walk-ins that have gotten some degree of notoriety over the years have been ViVenus and Omnec Onec both of whom claim they are evolved spirit beings originating from the planet Venus. . . on a different vibrational plane of course, since life as we know it seems to be impossible there. This phenomenon was first popularized by the Washington D.C. gossip columnist Ruth Montgomery who wrote a now out of print best seller titled Strangers Among Us.

QUESTION: What made him become a hermit exactly?

SWARTZ: Rampa was not a hermit, this comes from his 1971 book “The Hermit.” In this book, Rampa meets a blind hermit who teaches him about the ancient space travelers who first colonized planet Earth.

BECKLEY: In a sense I do think this book sort of brings out his inner feelings that he is a loner. Some of the dialogue takes place in a vast cavern world. Rampa wrote about the inner earth quite a bit. He helped popularized the subject. He thought UFOs had bases there. Although outwardly he gave the impression that his background was of a healer and psychic adapt living in the higher regions of Tibet, in reality he wrote about what people were most interested in. Indeed, he did bring out the inner secrets when people started searching for the truth about these vastly unknown subjects. He did spend a lot of time in seclusion so I think the title “The Hermit” did represent what he was personally going through.

QUESTION: What do we know of his actual alien contactee experiences?

SWARTZ; In several of his books, Rampa refers to “The Gardeners of the Earth,” an advanced race from another galaxy, who colonized Earth billions of years ago. In “The Hermit,” Rampa wrote that the Gardeners “…travel in universes putting people and animals on many different worlds. Earthlings have legends about about the Gardeners, referring to them as ‘gods of the sky.’”

BECKLEY: I don’t believe most people realize this today because so many years have passed, but Rampa’s first article was printed in the very prestigious Flying Saucer Review when Brinsley Le Poer Trench – later to become the 7th Earl of Clancarty — was the editor. It was an article, a very fanciful one in which he told about meeting the Space Brothers. And he made no bones about it. To his way of thinking these were the Masters who were coming down from other planets to deliver a message of peace and love.

SWARTZ: Yes, Tim is right! In his controversial book, “My Visit to Venus,” Rampa writes of his experience meeting Venusians and being taken aboard a flying saucer and flown to the planet Venus. Rampa is told that many planets in our solar system are inhabited, some live in the hollow interior of a planet, others live in a different dimensional realm.

QUESTION: What were his thoughts on his alien experiences did it lean more towards a positive divine experience or negative?

SWARTZ: For Rampa, his alien experiences were neither positive or negative, such terms are meaningless in Buddhism, they just are. However, in “The Hermit,” Rampa writes that the Gardeners felt that “Earth people had become a very evil race who threatened to destroy not only themselves but other intelligent life on nearby worlds.” However, the Gardeners had not given up on Earth, they said that there was still hope for the inhabitants of Earth, but they had to give up their warlike ways and embrace love and forgiveness.

BECKLEY: I might differ with my associate Tim Swartz on this aspect of Rampa’s writings. A lot of his books were about healing, about cosmic consciousness. About the soul. About our journey from this life to the next. He was said to have incredible powers to read minds and to see the human aura. He even penned a manuscript called “Living With The Lama,” which was sort of written in partnership with his favorite cat via telepathy. It’s one of his most far fetched works – am I really saying that? – but cat lovers just adore it. But likewise, as Swartz reasons Rampa didn’t leave out the darkside altogether. A lot of his thinking about the inner earth and its inhabitants ran parallel to the thoughts of Richard S. Shaver in that he believed in the existence of the Dero, a race of mentally deranged creatures who abduct and torture humans after bringing them down to the bowels of the earth. The Dero may be, both Shaver and Rampa claimed, abducting more humans that the Ultra-Terrestrials. You can read about Rampa’s sentiments on the inner earth in “Journey to Agharta..” Agharta being the capitol of the inner earth., a place like Shangri La that is part of the Buddhist faith. It is ruled Rampa and other say by the King of the World.

QUESTION: Though Beckley touches on the subject previously, can you expand on the Walk-In phenomenon and why Rampa is generally is considered to be the first acknowledged Walk In?

SWARTZ: A walk-in refers to the idea that a spirit can temporarily, or permanently, takes control of a human body, and replace the original soul. This is also known as “transmigration.” For example, a spirit medium uses their paranormal ability to allow discarnate spirits to temporarily take over their body to pass messages along to the living.

In “The Rampa Story,” Rampa writes that he had been a long time in preparing to bring some of the wisdom, known by the few initiated in Tibet, to the Western world. It had been arranged by the high Lamas that a man in England, who wanted to get out of a difficult life, would allow his spirit to enter the Astral world, and make possible the spirit of Rampa to take over his body.

More-than-likely, Rampa was not the first person to claim to be a walk-in. However, due to the popularity of his books, his story may have been the first to capture the public’s attention concerning the reality of transmigration.

BECKLEY: In actually that is correct. I have traveled to Greece and written on how the Gods – perhaps ancient Ultra-Terrestrials from other realms and planets — communicated with the Oracle of Delphi who many rulers and conquers came to for advice. She was actually sit upon a stool and these other intelligence would take command and deliver utterance to those high up in command. In our time I think of the book a “Dweller on Two Planets” that drew actress Shirley McLain into the metaphysical realms. This book came through a young boy of 18 or 19 who while out riding would be taken over by an entity calling himself Phylos from the “lost” continent of Atlantis. Though a bit stilted language wise for today’s readers, it is an occult classic and is yet another case of a Walk-In having a message to relay through an earthbound soul.

QUESTION: What were the embodiment of his spiritual teachings if they could be summed up?

SWARTZ: Since the original release of Rampa’s first book, “The Third Eye,” he has been attacked by skeptics who say that Rampa’s Buddhist teachings are nothing like true Tibetan Buddhism. Yet, a large number of readers felt Rampa’s books contained important spiritual teachings and started them on a path to learn more about Buddhism. In fact, the late Gray Barker once received a letter from a man who once wrote a review of the “Third Eye” for the North Indian Buddhist Quarterly. After the review was published, the reviewer received a number of letters from Tibetan phoongi who complained that Rampa had “…divulged secret knowledge, which was the property of the arcane schools of their country, and which a closed brother, in physical form, or etheric, did poorly to publish in the far lands to the West, where it lay open to the gaze of the Uninitiate.”

It is difficult, however, to summarize Rampa’s spiritual teachings as is reflected in his 20 books. One thing that Rampa wanted people to know is that our bodies, our physical reality, is an illusion. We have become so wrapped up in the material world that we have forgotten our true selves, our true, spiritual, reality. “We are creatures of the Spirit,” he said, “we are like electric charges endowed with intelligence. This world, this life, is Hell, it is the testing place wherein our Spirit is purified by the suffering of learning to control our gross flesh body.”

Rampa also desired to teach people how to see the human aura. He wrote that he had a special task because during his life in Tibet he had been to the Chang Tang Highlands where he had seen a device which enables people to see the human aura. “I am aware that if doctors and surgeons could see the human aura then they could determine the illness afflicting a human body before it was at all serious. The aura is merely a corona discharge of the body, of the life force which can be seen by almost anyone under the right conditions. If money would be spent on research, medical science would have one of the most potent tools for the cure of disease.”

QUESTION: Could you share with us some more information that you find interesting about Rampa?

SWARTZ: What I find interesting about Rampa is the fact that even though he was a man from the UK who apparently had never traveled to Tibet, his knowledge of the inner workings of Tibet and the Lamasery life before the Chinese invasion was uncanny. His detractors said that his knowledge of Buddhism was obviously gleaned from library books and incorrect in many places. Yet, time and again it was shown that the skeptics were wrong and Rampa was right when it came to secret esoteric knowledge only known to a select few. Another interesting thing is that Rampa was ahead of the game when it came to things such as UFOs, ancient astronauts, and the inner Earth. Referring to ancient knowledge, Rampa often wrote about these things long before they became known in popular culture.

BECKLEY: I remember reading an article — The Mystery Of The Three Eyed Lama — in the late 90s in the official Buddhist journal Tricycle. The author, a university professor, was naturally skeptical about Rampa’s background and pointed out the inconsistencies in his tales, but on the other hand had to admit that T. Lobsang probably attracted hundreds of thousand of individuals around the world to am adoration of the Buddha and to the plight of the Monks living a meditative life in Tibet under the yoke of the Chinese communist occupation. They pointed out that some of the matters Rampa took it upon himself to reveal were not culturally true.

Such as how as a youth he had a hole drilled in the middle of his forehead which enabled him to open his third eye and to perceive things clairvoyantly for the first time as well as to read the aura of an individual and determine their health flaws. The profession who authored the Tricycle article said that such claims were outlandish and were not rooted in the folk culture of Tibetan life.

QUESTION: What obstacles or persecutions did Rampa go through during his life?

SWARTZ: Right from the very beginning with the release of “The Third Eye,” Rampa was targeted by skeptics who sought to discredit him. “The Third Eye” was very successful, and more-than-likely there were people who were jealous of its success. One man, Heinrich Harrer, who was supposedly an expert on Tibet, hired a private detective to find out who Rampa really was. The detectives findings were eventually published in The Daily Mail. From that point on, Rampa was continuously under attack from the British press, despite of, or maybe because of, his books growing popularity. One critic, Agehananda Bharati, writing for the Tibet Society Bulletin, Vol. 7, 1974, called Rampa’s books, “cretinistic confabulations.” It got so bad that Rampa and his wife eventually moved from the UK to Canada and became Canadian citizens in 1973.

According to Karen Mutton in her article, “T. Lobsang Rampa, New Age Trailblazer,” Rampa over the years managed to “…antagonize feminists, teenagers, Catholics, Western doctors, communists and the Tibetan government in exile. However, his greatest venom was reserved for journalists and literary critics, whom he despised.”

BECKLEY: Of course we know this sort of persecution happens throughout the UFO field and into the paranormal. There is always some agnostic, or skeptic or die hard disbeliever lurking around the bend to put a monkey wrench into the proceedings. Not that skeptics don’t have a right to point out the flaws, but basically here we have an author who is trying to tell his life story in a series of books and it looks like everyone is trying to clamp down on what he has to say. The books speak for themselves. Rampa was a damn good writer. He still has thousands of fans around the world today. He must have had something important to say or this wouldn’t be the case. Even people who don’t necessarily believe in all of his background find his work most enlightening and easy to comprehend.

QUESTION: Is Rampa still alive and if not how did he die? And how else has his legacy inspired others?

SWARTZ: T. Lobsang Rampa, at least in this incarnation, died on January 25th 1981. For many, their first exposure to Eastern religion and philosophy came at a young age from reading Rampa’s books. Donald S. Lopez, author of the 1998 book “Prisoners of Shangri-La – Tibetan Buddhism and the West,” said that when discussing Rampa with other tibetologists and buddhologists in Europe, he found that The Third Eye was the first book many of them had read about Tibet; “For some it was a fascination with the world Rampa described that had led them to become professional scholars of Tibet.” (Wikipedia entry).

I think Rampa sums it up best when he refers to how influential his books have been, despite the ardent attacks from his critics…”In any battle between will power and imagination, imagination always wins.”

QUESTION: What are some of the books that you have available from Rampa from Conspiracy Journal?

BECKLEY: My favorites that we have published under the Inner Light/Global Communications imprint include The Hermit, Tibetan Sage, and Cave Of The Ancients. Other books that we have released in the series include Candlelight, Beyond The Tenth, Chapters of Life, Saffron Robe, My Visit To Venus, Journey To Agharta, Doctor From Lhasa, The Rampa Story. . .and of course the book that start it all – The Third Eye. Our books are printed in large format editions. The type is big and clear not like the dusty paperbacks only published in the UK and faded with age. We have given them all nice new, colorful, covers. The Rampa sage, we hope, will continue to live on!

SWARTZ: Hey, in closing, don’t forget the book Living With The Lama his blind cat supposedly wrote, “speaking” the text telepathically to Rampa. And than there is the book Pussywillow written by Rampa’s wife, again about their beloved pet. Animal lovers eat them up.

For fine publications and T. Lobsang Rampa’s books stop by Conspiracy Journal one of the best websites around for books and information on the high strange and so much!