T. Lobsang Rampa
New Age
Trailblazer
Part 2 of
2
Extracted from Nexus Magazine
Volume 13, Number 3 (April - May
2006)
A
self-declared transmigrated high lama, T. Lobsang Rampa
inspired readers and angered critics with his stories
about old and new Tibet, ancient rituals, reincarnation,
benevolent ETs and inner-world dwellers. |
RECENT
DISCOVERIES
Needless to say, T. Lobsang Rampa’s assertions are just as
unpopular today with academia as they were in the 1950s.
Surprisingly, however, new discoveries continue to bring into
question the accepted chronology of human civilization. The myth of
Atlantis is just as enduring in the
third millennium as it was in Plato’s day, but today there is solid
evidence that civilisations flourished upon the now inundated
continental shelves of Asia and Central America.
Graham Hancock’s seminal book
Underworld demonstrated conclusively that the flooded coastlines
contain ruins from cultures older than the Sumerian.
Hancock and his wife Saantha Faiia, both seasoned divers,
have explored ruins that were discovered in 2001 in the Gulf of
Cambay on the west and off Mahabalipuram on the east of the Indian
sub-continent.
The South China Sea around Okinawa and
Yonaguni is peppered with
megalithic-type ruins which were only discovered in the mid-1980s
and 1990s. While these ruins are truly impressive, they pale in
comparison with the deep-water ruins photographed by a Russian
research vessel off the coast of Cuba in 2001.
These ruins lie over two kilometers deep
at the bottom of the Caribbean. As revealed by sonograph,
they show grid-patterned streets and geometrical structures. Only
tectonic forces, rather than coastal flooding, could have plunged a
city to the bottom of the sea! In November 2004, it was reported
that ruins beneath the Mediterranean Sea have been discovered off
the coast of Cyprus, towards Turkey. There are also rumors of
underwater ruins near
Bimini, Malta and Britain.
When Rampa published his first two books in the 1950s, few
people believed that sudden and cataclysmic forces had shaped the
Earth’s past.
Immanuel Velikovsky, a
scientist who tried to prove that major upheavals have occurred
regularly throughout the Earth’s history, was vilified by the
establishment, which tried to ban his books Worlds in Collision
and Earth in Upheaval.
He was also one of the first scientists
to warn us of dangers from comets and asteroids, for they had struck
our planet in the past. Velikovsky was the first scientist to
hypothesize that Venus would be boiling hot and that
Jupiter would possess a huge magnetic field. Both he and Rampa
believed that the Earth had once been impacted by another planet
which had emptied its petroleum oceans into our planet’s crust.
Archaeological evidence for ancient civilizations in Tibet is
scant because Western archaeologists have never been allowed to
excavate, and the current Chinese occupiers are far more interested
in exploiting Tibet’s resources. In Seven Years in Tibet,
Heinrich Harrer recounted how his friend Peter Aufschnaiter
indulged in some amateur archaeology in Lhasa and discovered
evidence of burial practices indicative of an earlier culture.
Harrer as well as Russian explorer Nicholas Roerich
acknowledged the rumor that huge subterranean caverns exist
beneath the Potala Palace.
In 2002, a report about anomalous artifacts in the Qinghai
Tibetan area was posted on the Internet. Li Heng of
People’s Daily Online (25 June) wrote:
"The widespread news of mysterious
iron pipes at the foot of Mt Baigong, located in the
depths of the Qaidam Basin, Qinghai Province, has roused concern
from related departments. Some experts believe that these might
be relics left behind by extraterrestrial beings, for the
site, with its high altitude and thin, crisp air, has long been
held as an ideal place to practice astronomy."
He speaks of three caves, with
the middle one being the largest.
"What is astonishing is inside, for
there is a half-pipe about 40 centimeters in diameter tilting
from the top to the inner end of the cave... At the opening of
the cave there are a dozen pipes, at the diameter between 10 and
40 centimeters, that run straight into the mountain... About 80
meters away from the caves is the shimmering Toson Lake,
on whose beach many iron pipes can be found scattered on sand
and rocks… Most strange is that there are also some pipes in the
lake, some reaching above water surface and some buried below,
with similar shapes and thickness [as compared] with those on
the beach."
On 12 February 2004, Greg Taylor
of Phenomena News provided an update that the site was to be
examined by scientists.
"A sample of these scraps was
analyzed once by the local smeltery, and were found to be
composed of 30 per cent ferric oxide with a large amount of
silicon dioxide and calcium dioxide. ’The large content of
silicon dioxide and calcium oxide is a result of long
interaction between iron and sandstone, which means the pipes
must be very old,’ said Liu Shaolin, the engineer who did
the analysis."
The area is sparsely populated and has
very little industry, leading many to call the site an "ET launching
pad".
Over the past few centuries, other anomalous objects have been
discovered which put doubt on the classical theory of evolution.
These out-of-place artifacts ("ooparts") — from
million-year-old shoeprints to a bell vase blasted out of solid coal
— periodically turn up all around the world.
Michael Cremo and Richard
Thompson documented thousands of anomalous archaeological finds
in their huge book, Forbidden Archeology.
On 30 April 2002, the Russian newspaper Pravda announced the
extraordinary discovery of a stone slab
covered with a relief map of the Ural region.
"The question is about a great plate
found in 1999, with a relief map of the region done
according to an unknown technology... The map contains civil
engineering work: a system of channels with a length of about
12,000 km, weirs and powerful dams. Not far from the channels,
diamond-shaped grounds are shown... The map also contains some
inscriptions…done in a hieroglyphic-syllabic language of unknown
origin. The scientists never managed to read it…"
Professor Alexandr Chuvyrov, the
team leader, claimed that shells embedded in the surface indicated
that the map was about 120 million years old, when the south
magnetic pole was situated in Franz Joseph Land. It was also
part of a much larger map, possibly of the whole Earth and measuring
340 square meters. Could this map have been created by those ETs
whom Rampa called "the Gardeners of the Earth", who
caused such devastation with their warfare?
There are many documented discoveries of
gigantic human remains, mostly discovered and then "lost"
by museums over the past century. In Lost Cities of North and
Central America, David Hatcher Childress reprinted many
newspaper reports and even scientific studies of gigantic human
bones from the Americas.
Peter Kolosimo in Timeless
Earth wrote:
"A human skeleton 17 feet tall has
been found in Gargayan, in The Philippines, and bones of other
human creatures over 10 feet tall have been found in
southeastern China. According to paleontologist Pei Wen-chung,
these are at least 300,000 years old… Stone implements of giant
size have been found in Moravia and Syria, where the bones of
their users have been found nearby. In Ceylon, explorers have
found the remains of creatures which must have been about 13
feet tall, and in Tura Assam…a human skeleton measuring 11 feet
has come to light." (p. 31)
Kolosimo also documented the many
legends of giants which can be found around the world from
Australia to China, from Europe to the Middle
East.
Cone-headed skulls, such as those belonging to the mummies Rampa
saw beneath the Potala, have also come to light in Peru,
Malta and Syria. The museum of Paracas in Peru
contains many skeletons from that arid area, including
cone-headed skulls with a cranial
capacity of between 2200 and 2500 cc, greatly exceeding our brain
capacity of 1450 cc. The Paracas skulls seem to represent
another human species—not people like the Amerindians and Egyptians
who bound their heads.
It is surprising to discover that
Rampa used the term "chariots of the gods" over a decade
before Erich von Däniken wrote his book of the same name. The
so-called chariots of the gods, or
Vimanas, were first described by Desmond Leslie
as co-author with George Adamski of the famous 1953 book
Flying Saucers Have Landed. These Vimanas are described
in great detail in ancient Indian literature, leading alternative
historians like Hatcher Childress to believe they belonged to
the technologically advanced Rishi civilization of about
12,000 years ago.
Ancient Indian texts such as the
Mahabharata also speak of
weapons of mass destruction, including a bomb
with a brightness exceeding 10,000 suns which caused the
skin to fall off its hapless victims. Even the most skeptical
historian would find it hard to dismiss the similarity between these
weapons and modern thermonuclear bombs.
There are also examples of inexplicable radioactivity in some
ancient cities of the Indus civilization on the Indian subcontinent.
The very ancient city of
Mohenjo-daro, with its modern
grid-like layout, was found to have extremely radioactive skeletons
lying in its streets. Lumps of glass, originally clay pots that had
melted under extreme heat, have been found. Modern historians do not
have an adequate explanation for the downfall of the Indus
civilization and the radioactive anomalies discovered there. In
other places such as the Middle East and Scotland, an inexplicable
heat source vitrified forts and melted sand into glass in antiquity.
Rampa declared in The Cave of the Ancients that the
sphinx had been a universal symbol of antediluvial civilizations.
Although conventional historians date it at about 3000 BCE,
alternative historians such as Graham Hancock and Robert
Bauval speculate that the Giza Sphinx could date to 10,500
BCE, connecting it with the constellation of Leo which was in
ascendancy at that time, while John Anthony West puts it in
the post-glacial period at between 5000 to 10,000 BCE. Geologist
Robert Schoch thinks the Sphinx was created around 5000 BCE, or 7000
BCE at the earliest.
The Sphinx was recently discovered
to have chambers beneath it, and limited excavations have
revealed a burial chamber called "the
tomb of Osiris". However, many alternative archaeologists
believe there is a buried city beneath the Giza plateau, a belief
influenced by such mystics as Edgar Cayce and Lobsang
Rampa.
In these days of infrared satellite photography, it is almost
impossible to believe that an ancient city could exist in the
mountains without being detected. Amazingly, in 1998 a group of
American mountaineers discovered a verdant valley perched high in an
inaccessible gorge of the Himalayas. Totally unknown to
Europeans, this valley with its semi-tropical vegetation had
remained hidden from satellites for decades. In 2003, a huge,
hidden glacier was discovered in the Himalayas, unknown to
Chinese and Western cartographers. Who, then, can safely say that
other great discoveries do not lie hidden in a glacier or a cave in
the world’s highest mountain range?
THE
EXTRATERRESTRIAL CONNECTION
"Flying saucers? Of course there are
flying saucers! I have seen many, both in the sky and on the
ground, and I have even been for a trip in one. Tibet is the
most convenient country of all for flying saucers. It is remote
from the bustle of the everyday world, and is peopled by those
who place religion and scientific concepts before material gain.
Throughout the centuries, the people of Tibet have known the
truth about flying saucers, what they are, why they are, how
they work, and the purpose behind it all. We know of the flying
saucer people as the gods in the sky in their fiery chariots."
("Home
of the Gods" in My Visit to Venus)
Like many writers of the 1950s, such as
George Adamski and George Hunt Williamson, Rampa
described benevolent extraterrestrials who had come to warn
humanity about the follies of nuclear power. During the following
decades, his discussions on extraterrestrials became more
sophisticated and on the cutting edge of UFO research, particularly
with The Hermit (1971) which introduced the ideas of human
abduction and experimentation for genetic engineering
purposes.
Clearly, Rampa’s revelations
of extraterrestrial genetic engineering pre-dated
Zecharia Sitchin’s
Earth Chronicles series, and yet
his influence in this genre is unrecognised.
• My Visit to Venus
My Visit to Venus, an
anthology of Rampa chapters which had been rejected from
earlier books, was published without authorization in late 1958
or early 1959 by Gray Barker, an American who ran
Saucerian Bulletin. Prior to Barker’s book, it had been
published in various magazines such as Flying Saucer Review.
Rampa did not want it published, fearing it would be
dismissed as science fiction.
The opening chapter, "Home of the Gods", continues on
from Doctor from Lhasa’s description of a visit to the
Chang Tang Highlands, where the lamas discovered a huge, ancient
city. Half frozen in a glacier, this city had once accommodated
a race of giants.
"Nearby in a spacious courtyard,
there was an immense metal structure which reminded me of
two of our temple dishes clamped together and was clearly a
vehicle of some sort."
The monks cautiously approached the
vehicle, which was about 50 to 60 feet (15.24 to 18.29 meters)
across, and ascended a ladder leading inside. Once inside,
Rampa’s Guide touched something which caused the ship to hum and
emit a bluish light.
To their surprise, they were approached by large humans who
communicated telepathically:
"Be not afraid, for we were
aware of your coming for the past hundred years. We made
provisions so that those who were intrepid enough to enter
this vessel should know the past."
The humanoids showed them
pictures from the past civilization: huge buildings which sat by
the sea with disc- like vehicles soaring above. They witnessed
an enormous explosion which toppled the buildings and caused a
tsunami to rise above the ruins.
The humanoids told them of a "White
Brotherhood", composed of incarnate and discarnate entities,
which safeguarded all life.
The chapter continued with the seven lamas being taken up into
space from where they could see Tibet. The vehicle left the
atmosphere, with no increase in gravity or sensation of speed,
and soared into space. The monks were taken on a tour of the
spaceship. Its propulsion system utilized a form of magnetism
which repelled the Earth’s magnetism. The repelling force could
be adjusted to allow the vessel to hover, rise or sink.
The ship was also capable of
collecting "space electricity"—a form of magnetism based
upon cosmic energy.
The Venusian hosts took the lamas in a strange vehicle to
the Hall of Knowledge, where they observed the Earth’s
creation along with the mighty civilizations of
Lemuria,
Atlantis and Poseidonia.
The Broad One warned:
"We guard the Earth, for, if
man’s folly is allowed to go unchecked, terrible things will
happen to the race of man. There are powers upon the Earth,
human powers who oppose all thoughts of our ships, who say
there is nothing greater than the human upon Earth, so there
cannot be ships from other worlds."
Eventually, after many days, the
Tibetans were returned to Earth "which now seemed a tawdry
place" and "paled into significance against the glory of
Venus". The story ended with this:
"Never again, I thought, shall I
see such wonderful things. How mistaken I was, for that was
but the first of many trips."
• Beyond the Tenth
During the 1960s the
subject of ufology became established, and Rampa
in his books Chapters of Life and Beyond the Tenth
expanded the theme of aliens as the guardians and
indeed creators of the Earth. He described UFOs as
being of four distinct types:
1. Extraterrestrials.
These Gardeners of the Earth, an extremely advanced
race from another galaxy, colonized our planet billions of
years ago. Every now and then they come back to check on the
progress of the human race.
2. Inner Earth inhabitants. In the Venus
anthology, they are described as advanced humanoids who
live in the Earth’s interior and sometimes use their
vehicles to explore the Earth’s surface. This theme was
later expanded in Twilight.
3. Antimatter vehicles. These explode when
they come into contact with the Earth’s atmosphere.
4.
Interdimensional vehicles
containing aliens from other realms. Usually we
are unable to perceive these aliens, as they vibrate at a
different frequency to human beings. We can only perceive
their vehicles as gyrating lights in the sky, a third-
dimensional shadow of fourth-dimensional vehicles.
Beyond the Tenth was
published in 1969, the same year that Erich von Däniken’s
Chariots of the Gods? was published in English. While the
Swiss author built his case upon incongruous ancient anomalies,
Rampa stated unequivocally that...
"Earth is like a colony; Earth
is a testing ground, a seeding place where different types
are put together so that the Gardeners of Space can
see how they get on together" (p. 77).
He claimed that even though the
Gardeners were friendly and concerned with our welfare, they
sometimes abducted and experimented upon humans in an effort to
improve our species.
Rampa was also aware of
censorship surrounding the reporting of UFOs in the West.
"The pilots who fly the
[aircraft], whether in a commercial capacity or in
connection with the armed forces, have seen and will
continue to see UFOs but, until the moronic governments of
the world change their attitudes, not much will be heard of
those sightings. The Argentinean government is surely one of
the most enlightened in that they officially recognize the
existence of UFOs." (p. 86)
The military clique cannot
acknowledge UFOs because it would compromise security and
reveal their vulnerability. He noted that any reference that
astronauts make to UFOs while they’re in space is deleted
and their photos destroyed. While this may have sounded like
unfounded paranoia in the 1960s, many people today believe there
has been a monstrous government conspiracy of silence lasting
over 50 years—a belief fuelled by such TV shows as The X-Files,
Dark Skies, The Smoking Gun and Roswell.
Rampa also claimed that religious leaders would
not acknowledge UFOs because it would shake their
paradigm that man is made in the image of God, if an
advanced alien appeared to be non-human.
Further, he noted:
"If the UFO people had wanted to
take over the Earth, they could have done it centuries ago.
The point is, they are afraid that they will have to take
over the Earth (and they do not want to) if the Earth goes
on releasing too much hard atomic radiation. These spacemen
are the Gardeners of the Earth. They are trying to save the
Earth from the Earth people—and what a time they are
having!" (p. 89)
• The Hermit
Five years before Sitchin wrote his cult classic
The Twelfth Planet, expounding
the belief that extraterrestrials had seeded and genetically
engineered the human race, Rampa explained the whole
process in The Hermit. The story began with a blind old
Tibetan hermit imparting his knowledge to "the chosen one".
In his youth he had been abducted by an advanced race who
revealed themselves as "the Gardeners of the Earth".
They took him to another galaxy and
performed medical experiments upon his unwilling body, including
brain surgery to increase his intelligence. Bluntly they
informed him that the Earthlings were a very evil race who
threatened to destroy not only themselves but other intelligent
life on nearby worlds.
The Gardeners informed him:
"We travel in universes putting
people and animals on many different worlds. You Earthlings
have your legends about us; you refer to us as gods
of the sky. Now we are to give you information as to the
origin of life on Earth… for it is time that people knew the
truth of their gods before we initiate the second
phase." (p. 14)
They transported the blind monk to
another galaxy and implanted artificial sight so that he could
witness the wonders of their civilization. He was taken to the
centre of the empire, where...
"the colours were all wrong. The
grass was red and the rocks were yellow. The sky was of a
greenish cast and there were two suns." (p. 104)
The empire was vast and incorporated
many different planets and star systems which co-existed in
harmony. The inhabitants were humanoids with varied
characteristics and features. There were vast cities of towering
spires traversed by flying vehicles of all descriptions. This
world was the headquarters of the vast empire, where every
planet was self-governing but owed allegiance to the Master
of the World.
The Gardeners took the monk to an orbiting observatory
where nine wise men were in charge of observing the Akashic
records of Earth and other worlds. They showed him the
history of the world, beginning with a huge comet colliding with
a dead world at the centre of the galaxy, sending out gobbets of
incandescent gas which eventually became the planets. Two
expeditions explored the new worlds while a third dropped
biological specimens onto the land and into the seas. Millennia
later, a fourth expedition delivered huge dinosaurs to planet
Earth. However, after many years the Earth was wobbling on its
axis, so a vessel was dispatched to break up the super-continent
with a laser beam.
Another expedition brought purple humanoids to the Earth which
had eight breasts and long, ape-like arms. They lived in caves
and could not use fire, so the Gardeners were forced to
exterminate them to make room for more advanced humans. After
thousands of years and climate change, these humans developed a
mighty civilization. But the Gardeners fraternized too
freely with the Earthlings, especially the women. A group stole
their technology, attacked them and let off a nuclear device
which wreaked havoc upon the Earth, sinking whole cities and
continents beneath the oceans.
For centuries the Gardeners stayed away from the
irradiated planet but eventually returned with more human and
animal specimens, distributing them on different continents.
Mankind eventually evolved and built towns and cities, while the
supervising Gardeners were worshipped as gods by the
Earth inhabitants.
From another galaxy, a warlike race with horny growths on
their forehead attacked the empire and laid waste to our
solar system. Cataclysmic battles took place in the heavens:
atmospheres were blasted away and worlds destroyed. A planet,
dislodged from its orbit, struck the Earth, causing a
catastrophic loss of life. Only a few humans and animals, aided
by the Gardeners, were conveyed to safety in a great ark.
On the Earth, a great ice age developed. The Gardeners
now decided to live apart from humans and dwell on mountains.
Some inexperienced Gardeners, the "gods of Olympus",
engaged in licentious behavior and were transferred to
other worlds. So the Gardeners then decided to communicate only
through suitably chosen natives such as Moses, Buddha
and Jesus, who were instructed to institute new
religions. But always the priests perverted the true
teachings for their own power and gain.
The hermit was returned to a comfortable cave in Tibet
where he was told a "chosen one" would come many years later to
hear his wisdom. The Gardeners decided that even though
the auras of the human race were faulty, mankind would be given
another chance. However, if humans did not heed such warnings
and stop polluting their planet with radioactivity, the
Gardeners would be forced to intervene at any time in the
future.
• Tibetan Sage
In Tibetan Sage, Rampa provided more information
about these Gardeners, although he repeated many themes
from earlier books. With his Guide, he visited an artificial
cave which...
"...used to be the headquarters
of a special race who could do space travel and just about
everything else. Through millions of years, it still works;
everything is intact." (p. 19)
This cave was part of a network
created millions of years ago when Tibet was a low-lying
land. It contained a space vehicle "about four or five men tall
and looked something like two dishes, one on top of the other"
(p. 23).
The similarity of this description
with the one given in "Home of the Gods" in My Visit
to Venus is obvious. These extraterrestrials had the
technology to melt solid rock and heal traumatic wounds with a
special bath. They were able to suspend life so that people
could exist for millions of years, "receiving adequate
nourishment to keep the body functioning on a minute scale" (TS,
p. 28). These suspended bodies were being kept alive in tubs in
order to provide bodies for aliens to transmigrate into at a
future date.
The Lama Mingyar Dondup could read their inscriptions and
learned that the suspended aliens were actually evil
Gardeners who had raped human women and performed genetic
experiments. They were a renegade faction who had waged many
wars against the other Gardeners—wars that Rampa
observed on one of their devices which contained the Akashic
records. (This is the fourth time Rampa
claimed to have viewed the Akashic records; he had
described them in the Venusian ship, the Cave of the
Ancients and the orbiting observatory.) As Rampa and
his Guide departed from the caves, the whole complex was
destroyed by booby traps.
Even if Rampa’s stories are dismissed as science fiction, there
is merit in some of his original themes. His warnings from the
extraterrestrials to stop our nuclear folly were
not original, as other contactees in the 1950s—particularly
Daniel Fry and Richard Miller—had said the same.
Venusians were very popular with contactees in the 1950s
before space probes revealed Venus to be an inhospitable planet.
Frank Stranges said he had been in contact with Val
Thor, and George Adamski claimed to have flown to
Venus with friendly aliens years before Rampa’s jaunt to our
closest neighbor.
Nor was Rampa the first to
speak of levitators and telepathic communication
with aliens, as George Van Tassel and George
King had made earlier claims. Furthermore, in 1953 in
Flying Saucers Have Landed, Desmond Leslie first
popularized the notion that the ancient Indian scriptures
contained many references to the vehicles of the
extraterrestrial gods.
However, some of Rampa’s ideas were original and may have
influenced later writers. His descriptions of Earth from space
and warp travel with anti-magnetic propulsion were quite novel
for the pre-space-flight era. The Hermit described alien
abduction, experimentation and genetic engineering at least a
decade before Whitley Strieber wrote his influential
Communion. Recently the idea that extraterrestrials were
responsible for the evolution of humans and other animals has
been incorporated into a new theory called "interventionism"
by
Lloyd Pye, who challenges
Darwinism and creationism.
Zecharia Sitchin, one of
the proponents of this theory, claimed that the Mesopotamian
gods,
the Anunnaki, were
extraterrestrials from the 12th planet,
Nibiru, who genetically
engineered the terrestrial hominids to produce a new species,
Homo sapiens, about 200,000 years ago. Sitchin’s
influence in alternative history is undeniable, as terms like
Anunnaki and Nibiru have passed into the New Age
lexicon. However, Lobsang Rampa, whose book The Hermit
tells us who the aliens are, where they are from and why
they are visiting and abducting humans, is virtually unknown.
SUBTERRANEAN WORLDS
"There are passages which reach to
the ends of the Earth. The Earth has a spine just as we have,
but the spine of the Earth is made of rock… This tunnel was
man-made in the days of Atlantis when they knew how to
make rock flow like water without generating heat. I have
travelled extensively and I know that this rocky spine extends
from the North Pole to the South Pole."
(As it Was, p. 75)
Lobsang Rampa wrote extensively
of inhabited, underground caverns, tunnels and cities in Twilight,
As it Was and "The Subsurface World" chapter of My
Visit to Venus. In Twilight, he introduced the topic of
the subterranean realm of Agharta (or Agharti) with
its capital city
Shamballah (or Shambhala) and
omnipotent ruler, "the King of the world".
Rampa strongly hinted that the
mysterious (unidentified) island Ultima Thule and the loss of
the US nuclear submarines Thresher and Scorpion were
somehow connected with this underground civilization and its
denizens.
Tunnels to
Shamballah and Agharta
In occult and Buddhist lore, the realms of Shamballah and
Agharta are usually situated underground in the Himalayas or
Central Asian deserts. In the earlier decades of the 20th
century, Russian explorers Ferdinand Ossendowski and
Nicholas Roerich traveled throughout Central Asia seeking the
fabled land and city. Ossendowski first mentioned Agharta in his
1922 book Beasts, Men and Gods. Tibetan lamas had told him
that the thousands of people living underground in Agharta
were ruled by "the King of the world".
The inhabitants of Agharta are
believed to possess advanced powers capable of destroying whole
areas of the planet, although they choose to live in peace.
Roerich, a respected traveler, mystic and Theosophist, also
believed in these subterranean lands but was unable to provide any
scientific evidence of their existence. In his 1929 book Heart of
Asia, his main interest centered on the spiritual dynamics of
Shamballah and its importance as a symbol in the coming "New Age" of
enlightenment and peace.
In a booklet titled Agharta (1951), American Buddhist Robert
Dickhoff wrote:
"Agharta began some 60,000 years ago
when a tribe led by a holy man disappeared underground. The
inhabitants were said to number many millions and had a science
superior to any found on the surface of the Earth… The few
remaining tunnels open to the surface world are in Tibet,
Siberia, Africa, South and North America and on remote islands
which were once the mountain peaks of Atlantis."
In 1960, Dr Raymond Bernard
commented in his book The Subterranean World:
"Belief in the existence of a
subterranean world, which was given the name of Agharti, is
universal and an integral part of the Buddhist faith. Another
sacred word amongst Buddhists is Shamballah, the name of the
subterranean world capital."
(Alec Maclellan, The Lost
World of Agharthi)
Nicholas Roerich had heard from
learned lamas of underground passages and a lake beneath the
Potala:
"If you have seen this underground
lake, you must have been either a very great lama or a torch
bearer."
Harrer recounted this story in
his book Seven Years in Tibet (p. 185).
In The Third Eye, Rampa described his visit to the
tunnels of the Potala. According to his Guide, a group of
monks had once tried to explore this mysterious lake but some had
drowned. The survivors managed to exit the cave and found themselves
in a swamp about 40 miles from the Potala.
Later Rampa was able to study the
passages himself, climbing ever downwards through secret doors until
he reached a lake which was the remnant of an ancient sea. Years
later, he returned to the caverns to undergo the "Ceremony of the
Little Death" amongst the mummified bodies of gigantic
extraterrestrials who had once walked the Earth as gods.
In Twilight, Rampa introduced Rigden Jyepo, the
King of the world who dwells in Shamballah.
"In Tibetan lore there is much
mention of Shamballah where the King of all the world lives, the
King who is hidden from millions on the surface of the world.
Tibetans firmly believe in the King of the world living inside
the world, not as some sort of demon but as an extremely good
king, a good spiritual ruler who is alive in two planes at once,
the physical, where he lives for ever and ever, and the astral
plane, where similarly he lives for ever and ever… Tibetans
believe that the King of the world gave his first instructions
to the first Dalai Lama... who is the outer
representative of the inner-world king." (p. 20)
The current Dalai Lama has often
been asked about Agharta and Shamballah in Tibetan
mythology. In a non-committal way, he gave this enigmatic response:
"Shamballah exists, yes, but not in any conventional sense."
(Hicks and Chogyam, Great Ocean, p. 92)
In 2003, Inner Light published My Visit to Agharta,
which was purportedly retrieved from the estate papers of a New York
bookseller, Jim Rigberg. The publisher claims that Lobsang
Rampa often sent Rigberg his rejected writings, which were
incorporated into the 2003 edition. In this story, Rampa and
his Guide journeyed through caverns to the inner kingdom of
Agharta, encountering both malevolent and benevolent races
along the way.
Eventually they reached a vortex which
transported them, and millions of other enlightened souls, to the
sacred land of Agharta in
the centre of the
Earth. In Agharta, "the Creator" appeared as a luminous
sphere, addressing each pilgrim separately with a message of love
and hope.
While this story has a feelgood "New Age" appeal, it does not
sound like a Rampa creation. More suspiciously, Rampa’s
secretary Sheelagh Rouse has no recollection of ever
typing it or anything of that genre.
Tunnels to
Ultima Thule
Rampa originally discussed the inner world and its
inhabitants in "The Subsurface World" chapter of the My
Visit to Venus anthology.
"There are a number of natural
orifices on the world which give access to the inner world. One
is in the Andes, another in the Gobi Desert, and another…beyond
the Shetland Islands…eternally wrapped in swirling fog is known
as Ultima Thule, the Last Island."
The British Royal Navy once visited it
to conduct a survey, but what they encountered became highly
classified.
"Very strange happenings indeed took
place, and in the secret records of the British Admiralty there
are records of truly fantastic happenings on Ultima Thule,
happenings which are so incredible that the reports have long
been suppressed and kept under close guard."
The very existence of this island is a
mystery, as the only North Sea island which nominally fits Rampa’s
description of Ultima Thule is Jan Mayen, currently ruled by Norway.
Uninhabited except for a manned weather station, it is dominated by
a huge active volcano, Beerenberg. It is a bleak island, but there
is little else to recommend it as an island of great mystery. To
make matters even more confusing, in Chapters of Life Rampa
described Ultima Thule as a gateway to another dimension.
In Germanic and Nordic mythologies, Ultima Thule is known as part of
the sunken continent of Hyperborea, but it has no place on modern
maps. Perhaps it is in the same category as Peary’s Crocker Land or
Cook’s Bradley Land which were observed in the high Arctic and then
disappeared, probably because they were mirages. Furthermore, the
mid-Atlantic Ridge is an area of intense seismic activity, as was
evidenced when the Icelandic island of Surtsey rose from the waves
in the 1960s.
In Invisible Horizons, Vincent Gaddis
wrote of literally dozens of islands which have been charted and
subsequently disappeared.
"That islands may sink below the
waves is not in any way unbelievable or even extraordinary.
Submarine archeologists have mapped dozens of them along with
many quite deeply sunken coastlines. Volcanic activity alone has
accounted for many cases of submergence that have been properly
and fully witnessed and examined." (p. 32)
Inner-world
Inhabitants
Rampa introduced the inner-world inhabitants in "The Subsurface
World" as:
"...people who dislike those humans
who dwell upon the surface of the Earth. They are not benevolent
people at all: they have instead a horror dread of those who
dwell in the sunlight. They are a small colony of people who
live inside the Earth."
Their flight capability was "a glorified
type of air vehicle not a great deal better than the puny aircraft
which we surface people possess, and these inner-worlders cannot
travel any great distance into space". An extinct volcano had
created many lava tubes through which the inner-worlders—"not unlike
humans"—sometimes visit the surface. Although they dislike the
surface dwellers, they never attack unless provoked.
"Often they take flight, and with
their abnormally high speed they can outdistance anything which
the surface people have at present."
In As it Was, the Lama Mingyar Dondup
took Lobsang to another complex of caverns near Lhasa which
contained strange artefacts and carvings. He told him of tunnels
reaching from the north to the south pole, while others, which were
sealed, reached into the Earth’s interior. Lobsang learned of a race
of people who had once entered the caverns to escape the surface
cataclysms, sealing the entrance behind them. Beneath the surface,
they developed their own sciences which were often more advanced
than those upon the surface. Dondup said:
"We of the higher lama class have
often visited this place and tried to commune with those below
by telepathy…but they want nothing to do with us…and if
necessary they will intervene." (p. 77)
Mingyar Dondup described the inner world
and its inhabitants:
"They have a sun something like we
have but theirs is much smaller and much more powerful. They
have much more than we have, but they are very much more
intelligent."
Long ago these inner-worlders discovered
the principles of flight.
"Sometimes they come out of the
Earth in special vehicles…which fly around on the outside of the
Earth to see what people are doing and to ascertain if their own
safety is jeopardized by the folly of those whom they term ’the
outsiders’." (ibid.)
In Feeding the Flame, Rampa had more to
say about inner-world dwellers.
"Yes there was an Atlantis, and
there are living remnants of Atlantis still, deep underground in
a certain part of the world, and let me make it clear that that
part of the world is not Mount Shasta; this is just an ordinary
area which has been over-publicized by people who wanted to make
not just a quick buck, but a whole sack of them." (p. 148)
The Case for a Hollow
Earth
In Twilight, Rampa devoted a whole chapter to the hollow Earth
question.
"I have believed it for years and I
have studied it thoroughly. I have read all about it [and
believe] there is another world inside this Earth of ours that
is 2.9 times the size of the Moon, and that it is populated by a
very intelligent race."
He continued:
"I have been in some of those
tunnels, and I have also been in some of those tunnels in Ultima
Thule. There are certain places in the Earth where it is
possible for the Initiate to travel down into the centre of the
Earth and meet representatives of that inner civilization…
Brazil and Tibet are two vitally important parts of the outer
world which have a special attraction for the inner people." (p.
21)
Furthermore, he claimed that the Gobi
Desert and its pyramids have a connection to the inner world.
Rampa presented his case for the hollow Earth theory with these
points:
1. Commercial
airlines do not actually fly over the poles, as the
navigational instruments would go awry.
2. No one has ever really been to the
poles, only near them.
3. There is an atomic sun in the centre of the
Earth which is responsible for the auroras.
4. The current model of geophysics
(crust/mantle/core) is not based upon any solid evidence,
merely supposition.
5. The inner Earth is about 2.9 times
bigger than the Moon. This makes it actually larger than the
land area on the outside of the Earth.
6. Inner worlders are remnants of Lemuria/Mu/Atlantis
and even older civilizations who escaped from surface
cataclysms by entering the cavern system.
7. There is a legend that the gypsies are
descendants from inner-worlders.
8. The government denies the existence of
the hollow Earth in order to avoid a panic.
9. Certain UFOs come from the inner world.
10. Photographs of the polar regions do not show
holes, only shadows and patches.
Rampa made an enigmatic comment about
the Northwest Territories of Canada, which may have been a clue for
hollow Earth seekers.
"Many areas in the Northern [sic]
Territories have not been explored. Some areas have never even
been seen by humans. How do you know what holes there are in the
Northern Territories when no one has been there? It is stupid to
say these things are impossible until you know all the facts,
until you are an expert in photography, geology." (p. 28)
He made even more mysterious allusions
in Feeding the Flame, hinting that he was censored by his publisher.
"I wish I could tell you some of the
things I absolutely, definitely know, but there are certain
things which cannot be told at present. I know the actual truth
about the submarines Thresher and Scorpion, and I know what
happened to them and why. The story, if it could be told, would
make cold chills run up and down your spine, but the time is not
yet. There are many things which could be told, but, well, these
books circulate everywhere...and there are many people who
should not be aware that certain people know what is really
going on... The mystery of the Thresher and Scorpion is a
stranger thing than you would ever believe." (p. 148)
This comment is referring to the two US
nuclear submarines which disappeared and were destroyed under
strange circumstances in the 1960s. Unfortunately Rampa never
mentioned them again, leaving us to wonder about the great mystery
as debris from the subs was allegedly discovered by the US Navy and
pictures of the imploded Thresher were featured in a National
Geographic article.
In Twilight, Rampa concluded his discussion of the hollow Earth
theory.
"I have said all I am going to say
about it. Oh yes, I know a lot more, a great deal more than I
have written, but just trot along to a really good bookstore and
buy some books on the hollow Earth." (p. 32)
References
(in alphabetical order)
• Adamski, George and Desmond
Leslie, Flying Saucers Have Landed, Werner Laurie, UK, 1953.
• Childress, David Hatcher, Lost Cities of North and Central
America, Adventures Unlimited Press, Kempton, IL, 1992.
• Cremo, Michael and Richard Thompson, Forbidden Archeology,
Govardhan Hill Publishing, 1993.
• Gaddis, Vincent, Invisible Horizons, Ace, New York, 1965.
• Hancock, Graham, Underworld, Michael Joseph/Penguin, 2002.
• Harrer, Heinrich, Seven Years in Tibet, Rupert Hart-Davis,
1953.
• Hicks, Roger and Ngakpa Chogyam, Great Ocean, Penguin, 1990.
• Kolosimo, Peter, Timeless Earth, Sphere Books, UK, 1974 ed.
• Maclellan, Alec, The Lost World of Agharti, Corgi, 1983 ed.
• Rampa, T. Lobsang, The Third Eye, Secker & Warburg, 1956.
• Rampa, T. Lobsang, Doctor from Lhasa (originally titled
Medical Lama), Souvenir Press, 1958.
• Rampa, T. Lobsang, The Rampa Story, Corgi, 1960.
• Rampa, T. Lobsang, Chapters of Life, Corgi, 1967.
• Rampa, T. Lobsang, The Cave of the Ancients, Corgi, 1963.
• Rampa, T. Lobsang, Beyond the Tenth, Corgi, 1969.
• Rampa, T. Lobsang, Feeding the Flame, Corgi, 1971.
• Rampa, T. Lobsang, The Hermit, Corgi, 1972.
• Rampa, T. Lobsang, Candlelight, Corgi, 1974.
• Rampa, T. Lobsang, Twilight, Corgi, 1975.
• Rampa, T. Lobsang, As It Was, Corgi, 1976.
• Rampa, T. Lobsang, Tibetan Sage, Corgi, 1980.
• Rampa, T. Lobsang, My Visit to Agharta (unauthorised
anthology), Inner Light, 2003.
• Rampa, T. Lobsang, My Visit to Venus (unauthorised anthology;
date unknown; no page numbering).
• Sitchin, Zechariah, The Twelfth Planet, Avon Books, 1978 (book
one of the Earth Chronicles series).
• Strieber, Whitley, Communion, Century, UK, 1987.
• von Däniken, Erich, Chariots of the Gods?, Dell Publishing,
1969.
• Velikovsky, Immanuel, Worlds in Collision, Macmillan, 1950.
• Velikovsky, Immanuel, Earth in Upheaval, Doubleday, 1955.
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