This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Paul Twitchell presented Eckankar as the Ancient Science of Soul Travel, an unbroken teaching he said had passed through nine hundred and seventy Living ECK Masters before reaching him as the nine hundred and seventy first, a lineage he traced to sources far older than his own recent training. Twitchell's own writings, though, draw closely on Sant Mat and Radhasoami vocabulary and practice, the tradition he had studied firsthand through correspondence and direct contact with Kirpal Singh's Ruhani Satsang and with Swami Premananda, an American offshoot of an Indian devotional movement built around surat shabd yoga, meditation on an inner sound and light current.
Religious studies scholarship, most extensively David C. Lane's research collected in The Making of a Spiritual Movement, has documented substantial unattributed borrowing in Twitchell's published Eckankar material from Radhasoami and Ruhani Satsang authors he had studied under before breaking with that organization in the early 1960s. Passages Twitchell presented as revelations belonging to an ancient and independent tradition trace, on that scholarship, to specific recent texts he had direct access to as a student rather than to the millennia old transmission he claimed.
That gap between the ancient lineage Twitchell publicly claimed and the recent, traceable sources scholarship has since identified behind his teaching makes Eckankar's own origin story, not merely its practices, a documented case of one man's spiritual borrowing recast as independent revelation.