Chanting HU

Among the practices of new religious movements, this one is distinguished less by what it involves than by how it is offered. Eckankar presents HU as an ancient name for God, older than language and belonging to no single tradition, and holds that anyone may sing it regardless of membership, belief or preparation. Public HU chants are advertised as open events, and the movement has run recurring worldwide gatherings on that basis.

In Eckankar's teaching the sound opens awareness to what it calls the Sound Current, an inner audible stream held to carry the presence of the Sugmad, the movement's name for the divine, and to prepare a person for Soul Travel, the movement's term for conscious movement through inner planes. Those are the movement's own categories and the atlas reports them as such.

The openness is worth recording as a fact about religious organisations rather than only about this one. Most movements with an inner teaching restrict its practices to members and stage access by initiation. Eckankar does maintain graded teachings for members, but it has made its most characteristic devotional practice its principal outreach, which is an unusual arrangement and a deliberate one.

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.