Why I Started This Site.
You might be wondering why I started a personal growth site when bookshelves all over are groaning under the weight of Self Help books; not to mention the bandwidth relegated to self improvement sites on the internet. To answer that, I’d like to tell you a little bit about myself…stay with me, I promise not to bore the crap out of you.
I’m not sure when I first got hooked on self help books, but I think it was in 8th grade when the world was taking way too long to realize my awesomeness. It was around then that my older brother brought home a book written by T. Lobsang Rampa.
Rampa, a self-proclaimed Tibetan monk claimed that while photographing a bird, he fell out of a tree and knocked himself out. While unconscious, he saw a Tibetan lama (the religious kind, not the hairy kind) who asked permission to possess him. Apparently, the lama was severely injured. In China, he had served as a pilot, survived a Japanese concentration camp, and escaped the Hiroshima blast in a boat. He was then captured and tortured by the Soviets.
The lama’s soul searched for a body to occupy and came across this unconscious, unassuming Brit. Rampa gave further details, alterations, and additions to the origin story in many of the books he penned on the mysticism of Tibetan Buddhism. He claimed to have undergone a rather violent procedure to open his “third eye.” In Buddhist philosophy, the third eye is the eye of consciousness and enlightenment. It is also considered an access point to preternatural abilities like clairvoyance, astral projection, and the ability to see auras. You can see how clairvoyance, astral projection and the ability to see auras would be very attractive to a high-schooler trying to impress Keith Partridge’s doppelganger in third period.
Rampa’s books made me feel as if I had tapped into some ancient secret powers. Powers that promised to make me feel more like Marcia Brady and less like Dick and Jane’s dog Spot.
For me, Rampa’s book “The Third Eye” was a gateway to harder spirituality. It didn’t take long before I found myself hooked on a steady stream of chakra cleansing and tofu. I voraciously consumed self-help books for many, many, years; each promising it’s own version of freedom from that undercurrent of dis-ease that never seemed to go away, no matter how many books I read.
It was later discovered by Scotland Yard that not only was Lobsang Rampa not a lama, he had never even been to Tibet. Put that in your tsampa bowl and smoke it. The life of Lobsang Rampa may have been the creative imaginings of Cyril Henry Hoskin, a plumber’s son from the suburb of Plympton in Devon, England. I was gutted.
It took many years before I could be grateful to Cyril Hoskins, or Lobsang Rampa or whatever spiritual-sounding name he chose to go by. Not only did I learn that every spiritual teacher/guru will eventually let you down, but that truth can only be revealed in the moment of direct experience. It can never be taught as a concept. In other words, “The finger pointing to the moon, is not the moon.” The truth is alive. It has to experienced, fresh in every moment.
I started this site as an effort to clear the cloud of incense smoke and cut through the woo-woo of new age speak; to share the useful practices buried under piles of dogma do-do; to forget the finger, and the moon, and instead invite your to shift your awareness from your head to the body where the intensity of being present reverberates through your whole being until you have the direct experience of not being separate from the finger, or the moon.