the tall one, the broad one and the siamese cat

Falling on your head is never a good idea. Unless you’re sure it will result in a best selling book or three

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“In the U.S., a sign painter named Allen Noonan fell off a ladder, banged his head and found he had awakened strange psychic abilities in himself. He was soon communicating with space people and undergoing all kinds of strange experiences.

In Holland, a man named Peter Hurkos also fell on his skull and the accident turned him into a world famous psychic who has spent his life helping police solve crimes.

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In 1947, in England, a struggling British writer named Cyril Hoskin told his astonished wife that he had decided to change his name. A few months later, Cyril Hoskin became Carl Kuon Suo by court order.  He abandoned his home and moved to a distant district where he was troubled by hallucinations and developed a kind of split personality, the Englishman being slowly replaced by an Oriental entity while his appalled wife watched. Then, on June 13, 1949, while climbing a ladder in his garden, Carl Kuon Suo fell and cracked his head, suffering a mild concussion. When he recovered, the Englishman was gone and had been replaced by a Tibetan with full memories of growing up in Tibet!

Deportation of Tibetan prisoners found here

Carl changed his name again to Tuesday Lobsang Rampa and began publishing books about his various experiences.

Despite having been originally rejected as a hoax and receiving horrendous reviews, The Third Eye became a massive international best-seller. Lobsang Rampa’s publishers admitted that they, too, had had doubts about its authenticity, but thought it would make a good read anyway. They prefaced it with a statement saying that many of the author’s stories were “inevitably hard to corroborate”. On one occasion, to test the author’s veracity, Lobsang Rampa’s editor at Secker & Warburg read out some phonetic Tibetan to him to which he didn’t react. When he was told that he had just failed to understand a single word of his “own language”, Lobsang Rampa threw himself onto the floor, writhing in agony. He explained that he had been horrifically tortured by the Japanese in the war and had blocked out all knowledge of Tibetan by self-hypnotism.

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Lobsang Rampa produced another 18 books, becoming the 20th century’s best-known exponent of Tibetan Buddhism. In Doctor from Lhasa, he tells how he learnt to fly a plane, was captured by the Japanese during the Second World War, spent time in concentration camps as the official medical officer, and was one of very few people to survive the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Nor did he restrict himself to mere terrestrial travel, recounting a visit to Venus aboard a space ship and meeting two aliens helpfully named “the Tall One” and “the Broad One”. He admitted that his fifth book, Living With the Lama, was not by “Lobsang Rampa” at all. It had all been dictated to him by Mrs Fifi Greywhiskers, his Siamese cat.

all these siamese cats with their famous owners found here