A Chant Meant to Open Inner Perception

This entry records that Eckankar, a new religious movement founded by Paul Twitchell in the United States in 1965 describing itself as the Path of Total Awareness, centers spiritual practice on Soul Travel, a claimed experience of the soul journeying beyond the physical body, cultivated substantially through repeated chanting of the word HU, described within Eckankar teaching as a name for God transcending any particular religious tradition, without reproducing the specific instructional or ritual content Eckankar publishes for guiding this practice here.

Eckankar draws eclectically on concepts from various Eastern religious traditions, including ideas resembling elements of Sikh, Hindu and Sant Mat spiritual teaching, combined with material Twitchell and his successors as spiritual leader, called the Living Eck Master, presented as new and direct revelation rather than as a restatement of any single prior tradition. Eckankar members refer to their local and regional gatherings as satsang classes, a term borrowed directly from South Asian spiritual tradition, and the organization maintains a network of these study groups internationally alongside its central publishing and administrative operations.