The Sant Mat Background and a Contested Account

Repeating a sacred sound in order to attune to an inner current is not original to Eckankar. It is the central practice of surat shabd yoga, taught in the Radhasoami and wider Sant Mat traditions of northern India, in which the practitioner attends to an inner sound understood as the audible form of the divine. Paul Twitchell, who founded Eckankar in 1965, had studied in that milieu before doing so.

How much Eckankar owes to it is disputed. David Lane's study of Twitchell and the movement's formation argues that the debt is very large and that aspects of the founding account do not survive comparison with the earlier material. Eckankar's own position is that HU and its teaching are distinctively its own and that the succession it claims is genuine. The atlas records both positions and adjudicates neither, because the question turns on textual comparisons that a reader can follow in the published literature.

What is not in dispute is that a practice of this general shape existed before 1965 and that Eckankar's version has its own history since. Nothing in this entry is a judgement about anyone's sincerity or about the movement's standing, and the atlas describes the practice as its practitioners describe it while recording that scholarship has raised questions about its origins.