Eckankar

Eckankar was founded in the United States in 1965 by Paul Twitchell, who presented it as the ancient "Religion of the Light and Sound of God" made available in a modern form. The name is glossed as ECK, understood as the Holy Spirit or the divine current of Light and Sound that sustains all worlds. Twitchell drew on his own study of Indian Sant Mat and Radhasoami teaching, Theosophy and Western esoteric currents, and scholars of new religions generally read Eckankar as a twentieth-century synthesis rather than the unbroken ancient lineage its own accounts describe.

After Twitchell's death in 1971 the leadership passed through a disputed succession to Darwin Gross and then, from 1981, to Harold Klemp, who remains the living head of the movement. Central to the religion is the office of the Mahanta, the Living ECK Master, held to be the current human embodiment of a spiritual mastership transmitted from teacher to teacher. The Master is regarded both as an outer teacher and as an inner guide encountered in dream and contemplation, and the tradition holds that at any time one such Master carries the full spiritual authority of the ECK.

The core claim of Eckankar is that the individual is Soul, an eternal, indestructible unit of awareness that is not the body and does not die, and whose purpose is to return in full consciousness to God. The signature practice is Soul Travel, described as the shifting of awareness through progressively higher planes of Light and Sound toward the divine, undertaken chiefly through inner Spiritual Exercises of ECK. The best known of these is the singing of HU, treated as an ancient name for God, chanted to attune the practitioner to the ECK current.

Dreams are taken seriously as a field of instruction, and members keep dream journals and seek guidance from the inner Master. The tradition teaches karma and reincarnation, holding that Soul passes through many lifetimes and that the relationship with the Living ECK Master can resolve karmic debt and shorten the journey. Its stance toward other religions is characteristically inclusivist: they are read as lower steps on a single ladder whose higher reaches the ECK teachings claim to open. Eckankar frames itself less as a body of doctrine to be believed than as a set of personal experiences to be had, and it emphasises direct individual verification over creed.

Eckankar is organised as a centralised religion under the Living ECK Master and a governing body, with its Temple of ECK and international headquarters at Chanhassen, Minnesota, dedicated in 1990. Members progress through a graded series of initiations, study monthly discourses, and gather in local centres for worship services, HU chants and community classes; there is no requirement to abandon a prior religion on joining. Estimates of membership are modest and imprecise, ranging from the tens of thousands into low hundreds of thousands worldwide, with communities in North America, Europe, Africa and elsewhere and a notable presence in parts of West Africa.

Scholars of religion classify Eckankar as a new religious movement, and specifically as one of the family of Western groups derived from the Indian Sant tradition of inner Light and Sound. Its history has included controversy over the originality of Twitchell's writings, some of which researchers have shown to draw closely on earlier authors, and over the contested succession of the 1970s. The movement presents itself today as a living, non-exclusive path centred on personal spiritual experience rather than on inherited membership.