History & overview · every faith gets one
Soul travel — leave the body on purpose, and come back with something.
Founded by Paul Twitchell in 1965 as the Ancient Science of Soul Travel: Soul is eternal and already exists, the ECK is an audible life current that can be heard as sound and seen as light, and a living Master — the Mahanta — teaches the way out of the body and back. Its temple stands at Chanhassen, Minnesota. Twitchell presented the teaching as an ancient lineage rediscovered; the historian David C. Lane documented from 1978 that much of its literature came from Radhasoami sources.
Why it is filed this way
Twitchell said Eckankar was an ancient teaching he had rediscovered and denied any debt to a living body. David C. Lane, writing first as an undergraduate in 1978 and later as a professor of philosophy, traced Twitchell's membership in Swami Premananda's church and in Kirpal Singh's Ruhani Satsang, and identified hundreds of passages taken from Julian Johnson's The Path of the Masters. Eckankar disputes what follows from that; the documentary record itself is not seriously contested. The line is carried as a root because Eckankar denies descent, not because the denial has been accepted.
The founding
Twitchell announced Eckankar in 1965 and named himself the 971st Living ECK Master of a line he called the Vairagi Order, running back beyond recorded history. He died in 1971. Harold Klemp has held the office since 1981.
Its founding is bound to Paul Twitchell — 1965 CE.
What it holds
Reality. Worlds stacked above the physical, each with its own sound, all of them carried by the ECK.
The divine. Eckankar names SUGMAD as the source and refuses to personalise it. The point of contact is the living Mahanta, and the practice is directed at the current rather than at a god — which is why members describe Eckankar as a path and not a worship..
Death and after. Reincarnation and karma until Soul is free, and then service as a co-worker with God.