The Truth About Eckankar 3rd Edition

THE TRUTH ABOUT
ECKANKAR
JOE SYKES
Freedom from Cult Abuse Inc.

THE TRUTH ABOUT ECKANKAR
The Truth about Eckankar
3rd edition, enlarged and updated
© 2019 by Freedom from Cult Abuse Inc. and Joe Sykes
Joe Sykes has asserted his right under the Copyright Designs and Patents
Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this book.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including
photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by
law.
Typeset in Georgia
Independently published in Kindle, e-book and paperback.
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THE TRUTH ABOUT

ECKANKAR
New enlarged
third edition
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Introduction
The Truth about Eckankar, now in its third edition, is
published to help the general public and former ‘initiates’
understand more deeply the truth about the Eckankar
organisation, a group claiming to be a religion and registered
as a non-profit corporation in California and Minnesota.
New material in this 3rd edition includes analysis of the

psychological and psychic ‘locks’ used to control initiates, the
destructive agreement made between leader Klemp and each
member, the terrors of founder Paul Twitchell, and the
psychic dangers threatened by the dying, increasingly
leaderless cult.
The Minnesota Court of Appeal describes the Eckankar group

as ‘a cult-like religion’. The Truth about Eckankar examines
the gap between the cult’s outrageous and deceptive claims
about its role and purpose in the world, and the shockingly
different reality. Further, the book explores the deep harms
Eckankar has inflicted on members and leavers.
The Truth about Eckankar is a long overdue probe into the

real character of its theology and practices, as opposed to the
modern marketing machine it uses to obscure them.
The author cuts through the layers of deceptive claim behind

which the true core of the cult hides, and probes the truth
about its origins, its three leaders since 1965, its essentially
commercial project, and the psychological and psychic
damage it has caused its membership.
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The information, opinions and insights in this book are based

on the author’s long experience of the cult, including 14 years’
membership (1980 – 1993), and contact with ex-members
since then, viewed with the objectivity gained from being
outside the cult for 25 years, and learning from the
experience and opinions of other leavers.
Eckankar is a New Age group founded in Las Vegas in 1965. It

mixed the Hindu guru systems of Sant Mat and Radha Soami
Satsang Beas with the structural hierarchism of Freemasonry
in the Scottish Rite and Scientology, and the marketing
techniques of Scientology.
The cult has had a short history marked by conflict. The

founder, Paul Twitchell, who followed both Sant Mat and
Scientology, claimed to be appointed as the highest world
spiritual leader by ‘the Sugmad’, a god residing on the 14th
Plane of Existence.
Mr Twitchell was poisoned by a seminar attendee in early

1971. He did not fully recover and died in Cincinnati that
September. His widow chose his replacement, Darwin Gross,
who she married.
Mr Gross similarly claimed to be chosen by ‘the Sugmad’.

However, in 1981 Mr Gross was abruptly deposed by the
Board of Trustees. It is unclear if the Board consulted ‘the
Sugmad’ in making that decision. It later emerged they acted
on evidence Gross had misrouted funds from the cult’s bank
account. The Board replaced Gross with Harold Klemp, a
hitherto minor and unknown member.
Mr Klemp, once appointed, similarly claimed to be chosen by

‘the Sugmad’.
In 1983 Mr Gross’s lifetime honorary position was terminated

amid allegations of theft of $2.5m of corporate funds. He fled
home to Portland, Oregon, where he split the membership in
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half by starting his own group Atom. Mr Gross claimed to be

the true Master of Eckankar, while Mr Klemp was merely a
Board appointee.
Litigation over the missing money continued until 1987. A

series of revelations emerged about Mr Gross’ multiple
adulterous relationships with the wives of senior cult
members including Bernadine Burlin.
By the very late 1980s, Eckankar was split into two groups by
the furore around Gross’ deposal and the financial and sexual
scandals. One group backed Gross. Another followed the
Board.
Klemp was liked by no-one. His efforts to impress the

leadership and membership cut little ice. Instead of
expounding borrowed religious theory as Twitchell had, or
projecting a strong emotional appeal like Gross, Klemp was a
slight, unimpressive escapee from the family farm in
Wisconsin, who had held down a number of low-paying jobs,
and whose lecture style was that of a Sunday School teacher
reluctantly assigned to a group of 8 year olds. His messages
had the profundity of the slips of paper inside fortune
cookies.
Eckankar was being torn apart. Its Californian office was rife
with contention. Klemp’s own home was split, with his first
wife Marjorie a Gross supporter.
The Board decided to escape. It abandoned its San Francisco

office and decamped to Minneapolis. The radically different
weather proved an unpleasant, visceral shock to most of the
transferees, used to the temperate northern California sun.
Through the 1990s, however, the battle between the rival

leaderships of Darwin Gross, based in Portland Oregon, and
of the Board and Klemp, based in Minneapolis, continued.
Allegations flew between the two camps. Klemp and Gross
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both accused the other of practising ‘the dark arts’,

‘necromancy’ and ‘black magic’.
In 2008, Mr Gross died, and his Atom group closed, leaving

Mr Klemp alone on the field. From this point, with greatly
reduced numbers, the cult started to die. Klemp never built
loyalty, except with a few Californians he knew in the 1970s.
One might think a sensation-packed chronology of this type

surprising for a group based on Hindu religious theory. This
isk perhaps, because the Hinduism – Scientology mix is an
outer shell.
The real Eckankar is an obsessive personality cult based

around its leader, Harold John Klemp. It demands absolute
obedience to Mr Klemp. It deploys violent thought control
techniques to terrify and punish the non-compliant.
This book is timely as the present era is one in which old

beliefs, organisations and practices are being re-examined
and in many cases rejected on grounds of falsity or
irrelevance to current needs.
In the case of Eckankar, re-examination and rejection are

merited. The Truth about Eckankar is designed to facilitate
that process.
Christmas 2019
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Contents
1 The true history of Eckankar
2 Claims vs. Reality
3 Copyright theft
4 Terrors of the Eckankar Masters
5 Psychic locks
6 Destructive practices
7 Destruction of relationships
8 Abuse of initiates
9 Statements by leavers
10 Attacks on Christians
11 Is Eckankar legal?
12 Escaping the dying cult
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
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The true history of

Eckankar
The Eckankar organisation is variously described as a religion
or cult in books and online sites listing and giving brief
chronological accounts of religions, cults and New Age
groups. None of these descriptions probe the real character
of the organisation. This short account is a first attempt to do
so.
Origins of Eckankar
The Eckankar group was founded in 1965 in Las Vegas,

Nevada, by Paul Twitchell. Mr Twitchell was an unemployed
man in his mid-40s. He had been born in Paducah, Kentucky
in or about 1908.
Twitchell’s career to date consisted of employment as a gym

instructor and as a printing office assistant. He found work
in a press office of the Armed Forces in Washington DC
during World War II, having avoided military service. He
was then about 35 years old.
Postwar, Twitchell attempted a journalistic career in

Washington DC. He failed to be retained by a newspaper. He
tried writing books. He did not find a publisher.
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Twitchell drifted during the period 1950 - 1963 with wealthy

Hindu guru groups and Scientology. In that period Hindu
gurus and alternative religions and cults were fashionable.
From or about 1950 - 1955 Twitchell lived with his first wife
Camille Ballowe (or Barlow) in Swami Premananda’s
compound or ‘ashram’ in Washington DC. This was located
at 4748 Western Ave NW, Washington, DC 20016. It was
called the ‘chapel’ until, in 1952, the Golden Lotus Temple of
Self-Realization opened on the site.
Twitchell was staff writer on the ashram newsletter, the

Mystic Cross. He was also involved in a number of physical
fights with residents in the compound. A quarrelsome and
thin-skinned individual, and by this time prone to paranoia,
Twitchell was the cause of the fights.
He later told an Eckankar Youth Conference in 1971 that the

problem with the residents of an ashram is that they are often
at each other’s throats. Unspun, Twitchell was seeking to
disguise his own role in causing conflict and hatred around
him. The main reason he survived at all was that the Swami
was often elsewhere, and there was no-one in practice to
control Twitchell.
Finally, in 1954 - 1955, one particularly brutal fight led to

Twitchell’s arrest at the compound. Twitchell was taken to
jail, and thence to the criminal court, where he was convicted
and remanded for sentencing.
Following receipt a psychiatric report on his state of mind the

court sentenced Twitchell to hospitalisation in a mental
health facility. This was the notorious St Elizabeth
psychiatric hospital in east Washington.
Twitchell typically put out a false version, claiming he was

beaten by the ashram cook, and left to stay with friends for
six weeks while he recovered.
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St Elizabeths Psychiatric Hospital

Washington DC
In reality, his stay in St Elizabeths is understood to have been

significantly longer, at about or over a year. Brief allusions to
that period of hospitalisation appear in Twitchell’s later
novels.
During his period of hospitalisation, Camille separated from

Twitchell. She left their accommodation in the compound.
She sought and obtained divorce.
In the early 1960s, following his divorce from Camille in or

about 1960, Twitchell met his new wife, Gail Atkinson, a
library assistant, while researching for a book he was writing
about New Age religion. He moved in with her and married
her. She supported him on her modest income. Twitchell
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was as exploitative and as quick to take an opportunity as

ever.
When his new wife threatened divorce unless he gained an

income, Twitchell agreed but had little idea how to obtain
one. His principal interest was reading books particularly
about religion, and in trying to write them.
Gail suggested Twitchell start his own group. This was, after
all, something he knew about. Twitchell set to, and started
what became the first version of the Eckankar organisation.
An American guru cult
Twitchell created an organisation apparently designed to look

different to other groups in the then crowded New Age
marketplace. His formula was unusual. He combined the
theology and practices of Kirpal Singh’s Hindu guru tradition,
with the hierarchism of Freemasonry and Scientology. He
added the marketing skills he had observed in Scientology.
This formula was not as haphazard as it might seem. It

solved the two problems that beset religious groups:
obtaining regular income, and control of the membership.
Getting donations of a few dollars from a visitor to a Hindu

ashram was not going to be enough. Religious group
members are notoriously flaky, wandering out as well as
wandering in. If they wandered out, how would the bills get
paid?
Twitchell’s wife Gail wanted a proper income coming in. She

wanted the bills paid.
Twitchell’s solution was to adopt the methods of membership

control used in Freemasonry and Scientology. Both of those
groups enforce membership obedience firmly.
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The key was hierarchism. Conferring status on members as

they stayed longer and paid annual subscriptions caused
members to stay – and therefore to pay not only
subscriptions but to give money and to make bequests leaving
money to the group.
Initiation rituals
The secret initiation ceremonies Twitchell had seen in the

Kirpal Singh guru organisation were commercialised into
initiation meetings.
In an initiation meeting, a higher status was conferred on the

faithful Eckankar member every few years. It was a reward
for paying annual subscriptions, being compliant with
organisational demands (such as devoting previous free time
to public group meetings), and showing respect to the
leadership.
This was a nice fit with the hiearchical nature of the

educational and professional career systems then highly
developed in American society. The commercialised
Eckankar initiation system was something Americans
The centrality of the Master
Twitchell’s publications in Eckankar – books, discourses,

taped speeches – repeatedly emphasised the fixed and
absolute hierarchical structure of Eckankar.
At the top of the hierarchy was the Master, Paul Twitchell

himself. Twitchell reminded members on practically every
page of his monthly discourses that what was required of the
member was complete submission to ‘the Master’ (himself).
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The alternative to obedience, he explained, was personal

destruction. He explained this clearly enough in ‘Letters to a
Chela’ and ‘Shariyat-ki-Sugmad II.’
This was not the laissez faire approach of Hindu guru cults,
where you could more or less do what you wanted, but a
disciplinarian, harsh approach to membership.
Twitchell began by advertising monthly pamphlets by

subscription. The adverts promised information about then
fashionable topics in New Age groups, including out of body
travel, spiritual freedom, and personal realisation.
Given the high interest in Eastern religion and the occult in

the 1960s, Twitchell got responses. He retained members by
the enforcement methods set out above, with one addition.
Twitchell rewrote Kirpal Singh’s out of body travel techniques

so that instead of purportedly travelling to mystical worlds,
the members was required to look for the Master in the
mind’s eye. He refocussed the member’s experience on the
Master, on himself.
In ‘The Tiger’s Fang’ Twitchell fabricated an experience twice

in which every time he purportedly met the ‘god’ of a
different imagined world, the god looked like his Master. He
renamed his master, who had been Kirpal Singh, as ‘Sudar
Singh’, and later ‘Rebazar Tarzs.’
This was a world away from the modest role of Kirpal Singh
and similar gurus as Hindu teachers.
In this way, the group Twitchell created through a mashup of

Hindu guru systems’ theology and practice and Scientology
marketing techniques was an American guru cult.
Like the Unification Church of Reverend Moon (the

‘Moonies’) and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s organisation,
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the Eckankar organisation was a personality cult demanding

obedience to and worship of the leader.
Twitchell added a further innovation. He claimed he was not

merely a Master, an American guru, but the highest guru in
the world.
This underlined and impliedly validated his disciplinarian

focus on obedience to him as the Master. As the highest of
Masters, he emphasised in every publication that he, the
‘living eck master’, deserved total obedience.
In the world of sales and marketing, where Eckankar needed

to succeed to survive changes in new religious fashion, these
special factors were ‘USP’s.
In the result, Eckankar was created because of financial need,

and was designed to meet that need long-term by an
organisational formula that would retain members and keep
them paying in.
Eckankar was not created to provide second hand religious

education, but to ensure a continuing income stream for the
Twitchell family.
This financial motive drove the group’s organisation over the

next five decades. It has enabled them to survive to the
present time, despite a remote and uncaring leadership and a
demoralised membership.
The cult develops: 1970 - 1990
The scandal-ridden story of Eckankar’s trail through the 60s

and 70s, through leadership adultery, sex and financial
scandals, and litigation, is extensive. The key points are
covered here.
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Impact of Twitchell’s death in September 1971
Briefly, after some five years of successful development of the

organisation, Twitchell was ill in his last year 1970 – 1971,
and depended on his wife and a rising initiate called Darwin
Gross to run things. Unfortunately, Gail was by then
disenchanted with Twitchell. She started an affair with the
younger, charismatic Gross.
When Twitchell died unexpectedly of a heart attack in

September 1971, Gail, as his widow, nominated Gross as
successor.
The appointment of Gross as the new Master was not exactly

consistent with Twitchell’s claim that the living eck master
was personally appointed by God on the 14th plane.
Gross proved a good appointment. He devoted himself with

drive and charisma to building up the group around the
world. Gross was a disciplinarian notorious for harsh
criticism of anyone who didn’t do what he wanted.
Darwin Gross
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Gross was also an accomplished jazz musician, specialising in

playing the vibraphone and pulling in experienced musicians
to make up jazz bands that performed at the cult’s seminars.
Gross had difficulty articulating his ideas, and was more
communicative in expressing himself in music.
Gross was also prone to sentimental displays at cult seminars

when he had finished his speech and it was time to leave. He
appeared lonely, and emotionally unsettled.
By the late 1970s Gross had broken with his wife Gail
Atkinson. He began a series of sexual affairs with members’
wives, the most long-lasting with Bernadine Burlin who he
called ‘BB’.
When he wasn’t sleeping with married women in the

organisation, Gross picked out the prettiest female members
from London, Norway, and other countries as temporary
wives or girlfriends.
The Board of Trustees deposes Gross
In 1981 Gross was deposed by the Eckankar Board, and

replaced by a compromise candidate, the apparently weak
and inoffensive Harold Klemp.
Gross decamped to Portland, Oregon, where he started his

own group, Atom, claiming to be the real Master while Klemp
was the fake. A large number of initiates followed him.
Gross continued to release jazz tapes as a band leader based
around his vibraphone playing.
There followed several years of litigation in which Gross was

accused of stealing $2.5m from corporate funds.
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Who was Harold Klemp?
Klemp was an unpopular choice. He never recovered from

the shadow of the dynamic Gross, whose drive and charisma
pushed up membership in centres around the Western world.
The organisation’s Board on his first day as leader in October

1981 was Gross’ Board. Half the membership left and went
with Gross. Klemp faced bitter personal criticism from senior
members. He spent his career from that point on trying to
prove Gross was not the real Master.
Klemp worked hard to prove another claim: that Twitchell

had personally trained him and chosen him as his successor.
That ran up against documented fact: the Eckankar Board
officially chose Klemp as Gross’ replacement in or about 1981.
Klemp, like Twitchell, had psychiatric problems. He was

born in Wisconsin on a remote farm. As a young man he left
and found work as a proofreader in Milwaukee.
In 1970 Klemp had a complete mental breakdown. He

walked the streets one midwinter night. Having found
himself on a bridge, he jumped off it, believing he had to
prove to God that he was prepared to commit suicide.
Landing in the water, he hid his conduct and escaped home.
He suffered hypothermia and was hospitalised.
Later that year, Klemp was arrested for public indecency in

Milwaukee airport, and detained in the County Jail. He was
duly convicted of public indecency in a Milwaukee court.
Klemp was sentenced to psychiatric detention in Milwaukee

County Hospital. This was a sprawling hospital in on 92nd
and Wisconsin in Wauwatosa, Milwaukee.
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Milwaukee County Hospital (1940 - 1970)
Milwaukee County had a psychiatric facility in the grounds,

the Milwaukee Psychiatric Hospital. This was the old
Milwaukee County Asylum, built in 1878.
M
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a
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C
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Klemp’s account in his autobiography Child in the Wilderness

freely admits the above-cited events. He describes the main
hall of the Wauwatosa psychiatric facility and the leisure
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activities available there. His description is similar to online

official and blog accounts of the premises.
As a matter of record, the Milwaukee County Hospital where

Klemp was initially sent was renamed Froedtert Memorial
Hospital in the early 1970s and over time partly demolished
and rebuilt.
The Wauwatosa hospital was demolished and rebuilt in the

1970s. Its history is detailed online at:
http://www.asylumprojects.org/index.php/Milwaukee_County_Asylum. It was
later renamed the Aurora Psychiatric Hospital.
Klemp’s account describes his difficulty in convincing staff

and doctors that he should be released.
A curious fact about Klemp’s hospitalisation as a psychiatric

patient is that this is precisely what happened to Twitchell in
1954 - 1955. There is an aura of insanity around the
Eckankar leadership. One way of reading Gross’ compulsive
adultery was it was distraction from the toxic atmosphere in
and around the Eckankar International Office.
Research is continuing into the psychiatric and criminal

records of both Twitchell and Klemp. Reviewing their
behaviour, one might think that a leadership principally
comprised of adulterous psychiatric patients is very far from
being a prime indicator of spiritual, let alone ethical
leadership.
Escape to Minnesota
In the late 1980s Klemp decided to move Eckankar to

Minnesota. He wanted to escape the quarrelling members in
California. It was a move back home, to the North. He chose
Minnesota as it was similar to Wisconsin, without the history
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he had in his home state. It was a clean start, away from

Gross, the split membership, his past history.
Klemp at that time split with his wife ‘Marjorie’ (born

Margaret Burgon) and their young daughter, and married his
young blonde secretary, Joan Cross, and started a new life in
Minneapolis.
Ms Cross (if that is her unmarried name) was a spousal

veteran, having previously married at least once, to a Mr
Tilton, and perhaps to another man.
Mr Klemp thereby kept up the record of Eckankar leaders of

being firmly committed to adultery.
Klemp resolved to rebuild Eckankar by the old expedient of

creating a building at huge expense around which everyone’s
interest could be focused.
He raised $10m from the membership and built a bizarre

temple structure in Chanhassen, Minnesota. It featured a
Persian ziggurat, from the ancient Mesopotamian era. No
explanation was provided.
The plan didn’t work.
The problem was, in fact, Harold Klemp himself. Having

benefited from Gross’ in-house removal, Klemp lacked his
dynamism and charisma.
Instead of Gross’ emotional speeches free of theology, mixed

in with his jazz music, Klemp could only offer the simple
stories beloved of a Christian Sunday School teacher facing a
group of under-10s.
That didn’t wash with the membership. Klemp’s honeymoon

faded, senior members were fed up, Gross provided robust
competition from Portland having taken half the membership
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with him, less money came in, and things went from bad to
worse.
Klemp’s personal life was no better, with the strains of a

distant young daughter and truculent first wife to deal with.
Makeover 1990 – 2019: a quasi-Christian cult
In the 1990s the leadership gave Eckankar a makeover. It

turned from a New Age Hindu hierarchic cult into a quasi-
Christian cult.
To ensure nonprofit status, which defined religious groups in

Christian terms, the group claimed it was ‘a church’. It had
‘priests’. Its members used ‘prayer’. It believed in ‘God.’
This was new wine in old bottles, save that the substitute was
thin and sour.
There was not a whit of the compassion of a Christian vicar

for his or her flock. There was no deep spiritual collective or
mutual encouragement, only superiority and elitism. There
was no feeling of goodwill and love in the Minnesotan
headquarters, only fear and paranoia.
A glimpse of what was happening is provided in the legal

Complaint of Carol Geraci against the cult. Carol Geraci
worked in the so-called Temple in Chanhassen, Minnesota.
She testified in her employment law litigation against the
cult, and to the writer, about the fear and loathing prevailing
in the office.
Everyone was afraid. They were afraid to say the wrong

thing, in case leaders attacked them, by Carol’s account with
ferocity and hatred.
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Klemp retreats from the membership
By the early 1990s, Klemp increasingly retreated to his home

study. He minimised contact with the Board of Trustees and
senior management, avoided contact with the membership,
avoided the outside world.
When he had to move house on one occasion, he refused to

leave his study even to see the house removers.
He claimed to spend his time writing letters to members, but

that would not account for most days of the year. His regular
appearances at seminars in the US and Europe turned into a
single appearance at one seminar in the US per annum,
sometimes by videolink and then recorded video only. The
paranoia visible in his autobiographies may have taken hold.
Current status: A failed cult
As of today, Eckankar is a failed cult. After just three leaders,

Klemp has put it about he is the last ‘Master.’ One can see
why. There is the smell of death about the cult. Klemp is
rarely seen in public, now in his mid-70s. Members are
drifting, demoralised, and leaving.
There is a lack of purpose afflicting the organisation. There

have been no new ideas and no new blood for decades.
Organisations by their very nature require renewal and
reformation to survive.
Despite that, the Eckankar leadership churns out the same

formulaic publications, tediously similar to the previous ones.
The group culture resembles the dying days of the Soviet
Union, but without a leader with the honesty and drive of a
Gorbachev.
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Membership is falling hard, money is drying up. The cult is

dying. The punters are no longer flocking to the show. It
should have closed long ago.
Institutionalised sexism
There are other reasons for its current failure state. In an era
of gender equality, an organisation claiming to be a religion is
in trouble where it claims that the highest privileges are the
preserve of males.
Eckankar continues to claim only a man can be its Master.

Only a man can travel to the highest spiritual planes.
Sexism and sex discrimination are alive and well in the

Eckankar organisation.
No real spiritual change
The main reason for the group failing, however, is the lack of
results on a personal level. The core problem is: no-one
actually gained spiritual change.
The kind of real personality change promised by Indian guru

systems never happens in Eckankar. The cult promises it, but
does not deliver.
Eckankar assures members that if they remain members,

patiently subscribing every year, patiently making other
donations, patiently turning up to study classes and
practising looking in the mind’s eye for Mr Klemp to appear
to them, they will achieve it. Quite how is not spelt out.
Leaders from Twitchell onwards had made members grand

promises, using terms copied from Hindu theology such as
‘self-realisation’ and ‘God-realisation.’
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Twitchell claimed to have achieved both. However, the

account in ‘The Tiger’s Fang,’ his supposed spiritual journey
to God, was invented, the content copied from chapters in JP
Johnson’s early 20th century text ‘The Path of the Masters.’
When Twitchell sent the book in draft to Kirpal Singh at his

headquarters in India, the two men fell out. It is said by
senior Eckankar members that Mr Singh did not approve of
the substitution of his name as Twitchell’s guru for the
mythical name of ‘Rebazar Tarzs.’
It is inferrable Mr Singh did not approve of the invention of a

spiritual journey based on another man’s book.
In short, the Eckankar leadership from 1965 was involved in

deception of the membership.
The academic David Lane’s view is that Eckankar is based on

untruths. He is plainly right. As we have noted, Twitchell
was driven by the economic motive to fashion a group that
was different to other guru groups and which would therefore
be marketable.
Apart from the economic motive, Twitchell had little real

reason to fabricate such an elaborate structure for his group,
coloured by claims of 14 planes of existence, a God called
Sugmad, and an ancient and unbroken series of ‘Masters’
running back to the dawn of time and which claims
household names such as St Francis of Assisi and the poet
Rumi for its group.
The Hindu groups from which Eckankar continues to draw its

primary inspiration (and unacknowledged borrowed
material) have the humble goal of helping members to
improve their personal lives by religious focus. They have no
need for such elaborate clothing.
The elaborate system Twitchell created is comparable in

conception and economic drive to the Apple computer
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company. The founder of Apple structured its computer

products so they would not interact with other computer
company products such as those of Microsoft.
This structural principle created the well-known

phenomenon of the devoted Apple user, paying more than for
other similar products, religiously attached to their iPhones,
iPads and other products, as a world apart from non-Apple
products.
Twitchell’s canny marketing sense appears to have motivated

to create a world apart for members, one that once they
entered they need never leave – and would find it difficult to
leave. That ensured product loyalty and continuing revenue.
The drawback, of course, was that this was nothing more than
mass deception. Distracting members with the contents of an
elaborate mental world is not a substitute for the promised
personal change. Eckankar members have been sold goods
that do not match their description.
Members don’t rise spiritually: they just get older
The results of the Eckankar leadership’s elaborate deception

of the membership as explained in this book are that initiates
stew in their own personality, experience short-lived sensory
visions of coloured lights or dramatic fantasy locations, and
make adjustments that the average person makes as they get
older. Worst of all, cult initiates experience no spiritual
change whatsoever.
Twitchell once remarked a person should not end his life in

the same state of consciousness he began with. That is
precisely how his life ended, and how Klemp’s will end. And
how each initiate’s life will end.
When the writer of this book left the cult, he realised that
while his body was 14 years older, his emotional and mental
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state were still aged 23, the age at which he joined the
organisation. He had not matured at all. Over the next 25
years, his emotional and mental growth gradually caught up.
The cult exists in a dead zone, where nothing grows.
In The Eckankar Journal, an annual publication, there are

stories of members seeing Harold Klemp in their mind’s eye,
and taking them to mysterious new places. This type of
sensory overload does not produce actual emotional, mental,
or psychological change. Eckankar members remain as they
were when they joined, only older.
If this seems hard to believe, let’s look at the current leader,

Harold Klemp. His first autobiographical book, the Wind of
Change, paints him as insecure and unsure of himself, unless
on a mission for the cult, firing him with zeal.
Klemp’s later autobiographical books Child in the Wilderness

and A Modern Day Prophet repeatedly try to prove he is a
legitimate ‘master.’ Klemp does this by citing and reciting his
real life and imagined meetings with Mr Twitchell, and by
contrasting himself with the failed scandal-ridden leader
Darwin Gross. Klemp is lamentably focused on internal cult
politics. His tone is emotionally insecure, desperate to be
accepted.
But his personality defects don’t end there. Klemp’s books

tell how he took his clothes off in Milwaukee Airport and
made a serious suicide attempt in desperate attempts to obey
the voices telling him what to do, and to prove how close he is
to God.
The man’s emotional insecurity and lack of personal stability

bounce off every page. The calm one reads about with great
spiritual leaders like Jesus Christ, St Francis of Assissi, and
Mother Teresa, is entirely missing.
29
Klemp’s autobiographies are not evidence of spiritual change

in the man. They are evidence of exhibitionist behaviour
from a narcissistic, paranoid personality.
It is no surprise Klemp was arrested, charged, convicted and

sentenced to Milwaukee County Hospital in 1970. A detailed,
if airbrushed, account is provided in Child in the Wilderness.
It is equally no surprise that Twitchell before him was

arrested, convicted and locked up for displays of psychotic
violence in a psychiatric facility in Washington DC in the
1950s.
Eckankar is a place where a member’s mind and emotions get

locked in by its internal culture of deception, submission and
control. Escaping its prison is not easy. And Klemp may
choose to fight the prison escape.
One of the aims of this short book is to provide insights and

clues for initiates seeking a way out of the Eckankar prison,
and for ex-members trying to understand what happened to
them during their time there.
30
31
Claims vs. Reality

Eckankar publications make outlandish, sometimes
fantastical claims. This chapter separates the claims from
reality.
Key claims
The group’s main claims are:
(1) The name of God is Sugmad
(2) Sugmad appoints the living eck master
(3) The living eck master must be a man
(4) The living eck master is preceded by an unbroken line

of masters
(5) The living eck master is the highest spiritual

leader in the world
(6) Anyone who disobeys the living eck master will

be destroyed.
(7) Man can only find God through the living eck master.
32
(8) Jesus lives on the Mental Plane.
(9) Eckankar is the wisdom of God, brought back

into the modern age by Paul Twitchell.
(10) You can travel to heaven through Eckankar

exercises.
The reality in answers to Eckankar claims
Each of the above claims is now briefly examined.
(1) The name of God is Sugmad
Twitchell’s renaming God as ‘Sugmad’ was a desperate

attempt in 1965 to be different. He clearly thought
redefining God would not be enough. He had to rename
Him. There is no religious or semantic basis for this
purported name. An example of Twitchell’s habit of
fabricating information he cannot find in a book and copy.
(2) Sugmad appoints the living eck master
Eckankar records contradict this fabrication. Twitchell

appointed himself, there being no predecessor. Darwin
Gross was appointed in October 1971 by Twitchell’s widow
Gail Twitchell, following her husband’s unexpected death in
Cincinnati in September 1971. Harold Klemp was appointed
by the Eckankar Board of Trustees, headed by Peter
Skelskey in 1981 after the Board deposed Darwin Gross. So
much for the role of the imaginary Sugmad.
As a footnote, despite Twitchell’s claims of an endless line

of Eckankar Masters, Klemp has stated there will be no
successor. The line ends with him. Sugmad has apparently
retired.
33
More seriously, the test of a man’s spirituality is of course

his actual conduct. By their fruit shall ye know them.
Twitchell was a pathological liar, driven by the desire to
obtain money, not to foster religious education.
Gross was terminated by the Board of Trustees in 1981

while sleeping with senior initiates’ wives, then sued in the
courts in Portland, Oregon in 1983 – 1987 for the return of
$2.5m he allegedly stole from the cult’s accounts.
Klemp added a quasi-Christian gloss to Twitchell’s Hindu

theology and practice, to make the group more appealing to
the late 1980s. ‘Regional eck spiritual aides’ (Resas)
became priests. A New Age temple was built, and called ‘a
church.’ The meditation exercises were called ‘prayer.’
None of this had anything to do with any form of
Christianity. It was pure marketing, out of the Twitchell
playbook. It was another, corporate deception.
Sexual misconduct is another common characteristic of

Eckankar leaders. Klemp and his predecessors have all
been adulterers.
Twitchell previously married Camille Barlowe in Kentucky

in the 1930s. Gross married Gail Twitchell, then younger
Eckankar members, and had multiple relationships with
senior initiates’ wives including Bernadine Burlin.
Klemp married Margaret Burgon (known as ‘Marjorie’),

then Joan Tilton Cross, herself twice married before him.
Summarising all this, one gets quite a list: financial

acquisition; multiple adultery; theft; deception. The list is
inconsistent with spirituality, let alone ‘mastership.’
34
The reality is Eckankar is just another pseudo-religious

group or cult. And Klemp is just another leader of said
group trying to obtain money by deceiving the membership.
(3) The living eck master must be a man
Twitchell repeatedly said the Eckankar leader can only be a

man. Secondly, that the female form is inferior, and not
able to hold the power of God. Klemp repeats this sexist
idea in his books (‘How to Find God,’ p63).
It clearly has not occurred to the Eckankar leadership that

God by definition is not male or female, therefore it is
unlikely that the ‘Godman’ that Klemp professes to be
would of necessity be male or female.
Worse, Eckankar, following JP Johnson’s In the Path of the

Masters, claims gender or difference ends with the 5th
Plane. In which case, being a man or woman would be
unecessary.
Query whether Eckankar is in breach of sex discrimination

law at the state and federal levels.
(4) The living eck master is preceded by an

unbroken line of masters
Twitchell claimed there was an unbroken line of Eckankar

Masters. This was a blatant and cynical piece of false
marketing. It was an apparent attempt to borrow the
credibility of the unbroken line of US Presidents, with
similar terminology.
Twitchell’s list of purported masters is filled out by well-

known names such as Lao Tse, renamed Lai Tsi; St Francis
35
of Assissi (with the writer’s apologies to this departed

saint); the poet Rumi.
Twitchell made up the rest of his list of Masters. One was

Gopal Das from Egypt. He was plainly fabricated as Gopal
Das is a common Hindu name while the picture of this man
is of a Scandinavian.
Twitchell’s claim was somewhat undermined by Klemp’s

announcement he was the last Master.
(5) The living eck master is the highest spiritual

leader in the world
This claim fails given the clear evidence of misconduct at

the basest level by the three Eckankar leaders to date (see
above).
(6) Anyone who disobeys the living eck master

will be destroyed
This threat, made by Twitchell in several books including

the Shariyat ki Sugmad volume II, and in Letters to a Chela,
was designed to intimidate the early membership.
(7) Man can only find God through the living

eck master
This outrageous, arrogant claim has no basis in fact.

It is cynically designed to elevate the Eckankar leader
over the saints and founders of world religions
including Jesus, Mohamed, Buddha and others. It is a
statement at the level of a street hustler trying to hook
innocent and naive passersby.
36
(8) There are 14 planes of existence
This claim derives entirely from JP Johnson’s In the Path of

the Masters. Twitchell described the planes in his book
‘The Tiger’s Fang’ in language copied from Johnson.
Eckankar has simply copied Johnson.
(9) Jesus lives on the Mental Plane
This offensive remark was made by Twitchell. It has been

serially repeated by the Eckankar leadership and is widely
understood by the membership as ‘a fact.’ No detail has
ever been given of when, where or why. That is because it
is a fabrication.
The claim is designed to place Jesus Christ in a lower

spiritual position than Twitchell and Klemp. Given
Twitchell and Klemp did not help spiritually a single soul,
while Jesus Christ at the very least introduced substantial
spiritual change for humanity, the claim is worthless.
(10) You can travel to heaven through

Eckankar exercises
The claim is a triumph of belief over fact. The descriptions

given in the Eckankar Journal annually are of sensory
experiences occurring in the mind and imagination of the
member.
Great spiritual men such as Mohamed, who claimed to

have been lifted to the Seventh Heaven, and St Paul, who
said he was lifted up to the Third Heaven, men who
dedicated much of their lives to the spiritual education of
themselves and others, are a world away from the product
promotion of Eckankar literature.
37
(11) Eckankar is the wisdom of God, brought

back into the modern age by Paul Twitchell
Twitchell copied the works of others, to create a New Age

religion overnight. He indulged in copyright theft to a
great extent.
Eckankar’s claims about itself are false. The reality is quite

different.
38
Copyright theft
The key books of Eckankar, its monthly study discourses, its
core theological statements, are said to be ‘compiled’ by the
founder Paul Twitchell. The current leader Mr Klemp has
described Twitchell as ‘the great compiler’ and ‘a spiritual
giant.’
Nothing could be further from the truth. The ‘compiling’

was brazen copyright theft of hundreds of pages of material
from the works of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, Kirpal Singh,
JP Johnson, and others.
It is not ‘compiling’ when you type out in the middle of the

night the precise words of another writer’s carefully written
and expensively published books, It is theft.
David Lane
39
David Lane, the academic and writer, has carefully

identified the materials stolen from Mr Singh, Mr Johnson.
and others: see The Making of a Spiritual Movement: The
Untold Story of Paul Twitchell and Eckankar, revised
edition, 1994, Del Mar Press.
Kirpal Singh
Mr Lane’s view is that Eckankar is a group that is based on

theft and lies.
How did this come about?
Why Twitchell turned to copyright theft
In 1965, one immediate problem Twitchell had to meet was

what content to put in the discourses. He had worked out
the formula for a group that would bring in income for his
family, but needed something to say.
He decided to rifle through his library of Kirpal Singh’s

books, JP Johnson’s The Path of the Masters, and other
works, and recycle them into monthly pamphlets.
40
Julian Johnson
Twitchell’s next problem was how to cover the fact he did

not have a list of publications to sell, for income and to build
up his status as a published spiritual leader.
He knew Ron Hubbard and Kirpal Singh had sold a lot of

books, gained money in the process, and boosted the status
of themselves and of their groups.
But he hadn’t got a library of books to sell.
Twitchell hit on the bold expedient of copying Sant Mat

books, JP Johnson, etc, and using the text for his own
books. He supplied the title, structure and themes, the
latter of which he borrowed.
Due to a perceived lack of time, Twitchell copied hundreds

of pages of other writers’ books into his own. That sped up
the publication process.
David Lane, the academic and Sant Mat follower, has

written at length about Twitchell’s large-scale plagiarism.
What Mr Lane may not have exposed is the sheer extent to
which Twitchell copied the themes and ideas of other
writers. Even if he rewrote them, the content was not his.
In writing about his core ideas, the Sugmad as God, there

being 14 planes of existence, the group leader being the
living eck master, the appointment of the living eck master
41
by God personally, and the need for up to 14 initiations,

Twitchell pretended these were eternal truths.
On the contrary, he copied them all. Sugmad is simply a

fancy, if somewhat bizarre name for a being. The planes of
existence were copied from JP Johnson. The living eck
master was a restyled guru. Appointment by God was a
twisted and degraded version of St Paul’s statement that
Jesus was the Son of God.
One feature of Twitchell’s study materials and books is the

tedious reconceptualization of each idea six times. He does
not merely say one must obey the livin eck master (ie, him).
He says it six times, in almost the same words, with slight
variation. This had the benefit of filling out the pages. But
it made his study discourses and books deadeningly dull.
Therefore, equipped with pamphlets and books, Twitchell

spun tales of mysterious gurus teaching in imaginary
monasteries in Nepal and Venus, and pulled in a growing
income from monthly subscriptions for his ten page study
pamphlets, annual subscriptions to Eckankar, and payment
for seminar attendances.
The state of play
Today, Eckankar, which employs men who claim to be

attorneys, has neither acknowleged the copyright theft from
which it profits, nor paid the estates of the writers the
royalties due.
Instead, Eckankar banks those royalties, and uses them to

pay, for example, for the salaries cars and houses of its said
attorneys.
The writer is in the process of contacting the estates of the

writers that Eckankar has stolen from, and a private lawsuit
for recovery of unpaid royalties is expected to follow.
42
43
44
Terrors of the Eckankar

Masters
A consistent feature of the cult’s leadership is its perpetual
state of inward terror. Not quite what you’d expect from
American gurus?
Yet it’s true: founder Twitchell, consolidator Gross,

remarketer Klemp had and have no inner peace, no self-
confidence, terror of not being liked by members, terror of
being discarded, terror of being found out. Each is
considered in turn.
Terrors of Paul Twitchell
Paul Twitchell’s primary terror was insanity. He could not

control his mental state, which dived into turbulent black
derangement without warning. He had within him a deep
spiritual darkness he had difficulty in managing, and did
not want to confront. He lived in terror that his created
persona of the calm quiet-spoken philosopher would
disintegrate into freefall, as his false mental state fell apart
and left him unable to face others or himself.
45
In his terror of insanity, Twitchell resembles Saul, the King

of Israel, and Saul of Tarsus, later renamed Paul, who led
the disciplines of Jesus after his crucifixion. Both Saul and
Saul of Tarsus (who admitting begging God to release him
from his ‘disease’, once thought to be malaria) were
plagued like Twitchell by descent into an utterly dark state
in which light for a time could not penetrate.
Twitchell’s insane mind, his uncontrollable plunges into

dark states, his need to be busy to avoid those states,
derives spiritually from his attachment to possession and
skilled use of destructive psychic powers.
In this Twitchell is also similar to King Saul, who depended

on dark magic, and to Saul of Tarsus, who occupied himself
in torturing Jesus’ disciples in an underground dungeon in
Jerusalem.
Ironically, even after Saul’s conversion by the light of God

entering him, and his renaming as Paul, Saul of Tarsus
remained subject to spells of insanity and kept himself
avidly busy.
All three men died nasty deaths, abandoned by the God

they had worshipped. Twitchell was poisoned. King Saul
was killed; Saul of Tarsus put to death in the Roman arena.
Klemp tells a story that Twitchell was one day walking

through Washington DC in terror of being seen by Swami
Premananda. With typical superficiality and lack of
insight, and a large dose of smug, false self-confidence,
Klemp leaves the story there. There is much more to it.
Why was Twitchell terrified of the Swami? Because he was

both attracted and repelled by Swami Premananda, the
Hindu Freemason Grand Master of the Scottish Rite and
disciple sworn to Lucifer. Twitchell wanted to become free
46
of himself, and saw in the Swami’s self-confidence a

potential way out. But he had to face the fact the Swami
was himself trapped in a psychic prison created with an
inward attachment to destructive occult power: precisely
what held Twitchell in torment. The Swami had in reality
nothing to offer Twitchell.
In that tortured relationship is the real key to the character

of Paul Twitchell, and of his plagued and tormented inner
self.
It is a truism that each man seeks in others a reflection of

himself. A man’s life is like a marketplace in which each
person he meets reflects precisely a specific part of his
personality.
Twitchell was consequentially drawn to Swami

Premananda as a reflector of his own powerful and
persistent ego.
While Twitchell was outwardly attracted to the Swami’s

compelling personality and knowledge of Hindu mysticism,
he was inwardly attracted to the Indian’s calm self-
confidence and freedom from the kind of mental and
emotional torment that plagued the American.
In other words, Twitchell was attracted to the Swami’s

apparently ability to rise above his personality and material
self. That changed. Twitchell discovered the Swami was at
core an obstinately self-assertive individual, who
demanded obedience as of right.
Those features were, of course, a direct reflection of aspects

of Twitchell’s personality.
If the Swami could skate from self-confidence into

overbearing egotism, Twitchell was prone to switch from
47
his created persona of calm studiousness into panicked

meltdown and collapse into terror.
In the end, the four year experiment was a failure, and

Twitchell paid for it with arrest for violent fighting and a
lengthy incarceration in the St Elizabeth psychiatric
hospital in Washington DC.
In creating Eckankar, however, Twitchell retained a great

deal of what he observed in the Swami’s Washington DC
compound. The Eckankar version 1 he created is properly
characterised not as a spin-off from Sant Mat via Kirpal
Singh’s guru style, theology and techniques, but as a variant
of the Freemasonry of the Scottish Rite Twitchell
discovered through Premananda.
One of its facets is the focus on ritual, exotic naming, and

objects of worship. Look at the sheer number and polish of
Twitchell’s invented rituals, names and objects. Rituals
include 14 initiations (instead of the Scottish Rite’s 33).
Exotic, Hindu names include ‘mahanta’, ‘sugmad’, ‘eck’,
‘living eck master’, the ‘five marching men’, the ‘five
bodies.’ Objects of worship include painted pictures of the
leaders, fantasy scenes in Tibet peopled with a large
number of supposed historic cult leaders, the ‘ek’ sign.
Twitchell added a sprinkling of Hindu titles and sounds to
emphasise the cult’s Hindu origins: ‘Sri,’ ‘satsang, ‘master’.
Twitchell’s fear of murder
Twitchell also had a terror of being murdered. This is

perhaps unsurprising given his tendency to fall into the pit
of insanity, and his psychopathic disregard for others.
He relates the story of being in a house as a young man,

and being aware of two men there to kill him. He escaped.
Later in life, he related the story of how a young man
48
attended a seminar and gave him a glass of grapefruit juice

to drink, in which poison had been mixed. Twitchell boldly
drank it, and the acid in the drink burned his stomach and
intestines, as he tells it.
The real question, of course, is why at least four men tried

to kill him on his account: the two men in the house, the
ashram cook, the young poisoner. What had he done to
them?
The reality is Twitchell provoked, and apparently liked to

provoke, others until they lost reason and wanted to kill
him. This character trait ran through his life, making him
emotionally wretched a great deal of the time, a condition
he sought to escape by getting lost in reading and writing
books about religious matters.
The trait also made him afraid of others, and paranoid

about their dislike of him. That is probably why he
provoked people, to avoid being the open object of their
dislike.
One clue may lie in the fact Twitchell was a false discipline,
a renegade worshipper. Idle descriptions of him as a
perennial seeker gloss over the reality. Twitchell repeatedly
tried to convince apparently stable, powerful men – men
like Premananda, Kirpal Singh, and Ron Hubbard – that he
believed in their system. He didn’t, of course. He couldn’t
commit to them, with his mind being torn apart mental
instability, paranoia, and insanity. What he did was to
absorb what they had to say, and refashion it in his own
mind. It was a way of taking control of what he had
learned, without becoming subordinate to it or its
exponent. Because at the heart of Twitchell’s terror of
insanity was his terror of losing self-control.
This trait was at its most pathetic in his relationship with

Kirpal Singh. The Hindu guru loved him and wanted to
49
help him escape from himself. Twitchell’s stubborn self-

regard would not permit him to accept the older man’s
spiritual love, and their relationship eventually broke
down. They quarrelled in letters about the naming of Singh
in a book; that was mere pretext.
Paul Twitchell’s twisted relationship with himself is at the

psychic heart of the cult he constructed and polished, in its
first version. Recognition of this essential fact is the first
real step towards freedom from the cult.
Gross
Gross’ final period is one in which his own terror of losing

control overwhelmed him.
His late letters relate how he feared Klemp’s practice of ‘the

dark arts’ and ‘necromancy’ against him. An English
girlfriend wrote how he would not allow her to go into his
clothes drawers, where his clothes were carefully arranged.
He was afraid she would touch them, and, in touching
them, bring in an undefined negative power
When Gross was thrown out of the cult by its Board of

Trustees, he set up his own cult in Portland, Oregon, called
ATOM. However, ATOM was set up as a virtual replica of
Eckankar. He was, again, the Living Master. He sold
books and objects of worship. He made tapes of himself
talking and playing jazz. He took a large number of the
initiates with him. It was as if he had never left, merely
moved office.
What does that tell us? Gross was obsessed with recreating
the false persona and personal power of the ‘living eck
master’ he had had as Eckankar leader 1971 – 1981.
50
Driving his obsession was, inferrably, fear of losing

personal power and the sublimation of his personal
inadequacies it provided.
Drawn to leadership by a desire to go beyond himself,

unscrupulous and animalistic in his attitude to women who
he treated as providers of comfort, and pathetically
attached to the power it gave him, when it was taken away
he was left only with terror.
Klemp
A key to Klemp’s terrors – those of another inadequate

personality – is provided in the cult book In the Company
of Eck Masters by initiate Phil Morimitsu. In one chapter,
Klemp shows the initiate an illusory scene of the supposed
historical Atlantis.
However, he does something important first. Klemp does

not show the scene straight away. You would have thought
he could have done. Instead, Klemp asks him to do
something. He asks the initiate to go to a library.
The initiate obeys. He describes in detail how he walks to

the library. At the library, amongst the shelves, Klemp
appears to him and subjects him to the illusion he is in
Atlantis.
Excuse me, what just happened? Klemp got the initiate to

obey. By doing that, Klemp persuaded him to put himself
under Klemp’s power. He was then open to Klemp’s
thought control ability.
This essential ritual of ceding personal power to the leader

is participated in by Eckankar members all the time. Each
time they lose a bit more of who they really are, and
51
become a little bit more blind and deaf to reality and a little
bit more under Klemp’s controlling power.
The same desire for power over himself and others that
afflicted Twitchell and Gross repeatedly tears Klemp apart,
because he does not have it, and fears he is not good
enough to get it.
Hence the little trick with Phil Morimitsu in getting him to

obey him. He establishes control over the initiate, and
thereby control over his own fears and over the person he is
dealing with.
Klemp’s terror is openly admitted in his books Child in the

Wilderness and A Modern Prophet, in which he describes
his own collapse into terrified states, and the period of
detention in a psychiatric hospital that resulted from some
of those episodes.
In other accounts, he has been described as unwilling to

leave the room in the house in which he hides, even when
removal men come to empty the house. Or a woman says
something to him in a shop, and he has to call his wife to
obtain emotional stability.
This kind of terror controls the man through and through.
52
Psychic locks
The surface of Eckankar theology and practice hides

something thoroughly nasty. The use of locks to control
members’ minds. These are established in initiations and
deepened by Klemp’s adept practice of thought control and
mental reconstruction.
Whereas Indian guru systems like Sant Mat prioritise

individual spiritual development through religious
education and practice, Twitchell and his successors
prioritised obtaining iron control over the member’s mind,
destruction of their individual characteristics, and
imprisonment in a false personality constructed of
substituted thoughts and emotions.
This is a complex control system that deserves detailed

explanation and careful consideration.
Unlike the guru system, which helps individuals to grow

out of lower emotional states and thought patterns, the cult
leaders use locks on the minds and emotions of members to
control them.
These locks are of various types.
53
Firstly, locks on thought patterns. These include fear of

one's spouse/parent/friend/associate/school friend etc.
This type of lock is carefully developed from negative
thought, feeling or memory about that person that is
present in the member being targeted.
A thought lock can be established by tricking a person into

a modest, simple agreement. The story of Klemp getting
the author Morimitsu to obey him is a clear example.
Another example is the fear that a person is 'bad' for the

member's 'spiritual' life. Then the member is invited or
pushed to take a particular step against the person. That is
the key moment. As soon as the step is agreed and
performed, the member is locked.
If he or she at some point disagrees with the lock, and

wants to undo it, they will be at first persuaded, then, if not
compliant, attacked.
Klemp routinely uses locks on each member consisting of

substitute states of emotion, memory, and thought. The
substitution is of new images, thoughts, emotions for those
within the member as a result of his birth, becoming an
adult, work, marriage, and maturing as an adult. All of
these elements of the mind are obstacles to control.
The lock establishes the cult leader's control. Multiplied

over 10 or 20 locks, this establishes good control. The
purpose is to give the leadership real power over members.
Locks are first established at initiation. At the initiation of

the member, every 2 - 4 years, a deep lock is fixed in the
member's mind.
This is the agreement to the use of a new sound and often a

new light entity that appears during the initiation
ceremony for making contact with the cult leader.
54
This agreement locks the member into a practice entirely

different from their birth personality and pre-membership
mental and emotional growth.
By the fact of agreeing to a new, cult-only practice, the

member enters a psychic territory that he thinks he
understands, as a world of contact with other worlds and
the master, but which is treacherous and destructive to his
inner, real self.
Eckankar's control over the (usually unknowing) member is

a sophisiticated and cruel version of the initiation system of
the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, in which at each
initiation the member sacrifices personal individuality to
the control of the Grand Master and his officials, by rituals
successiveiy expressing psychic suicide.
To obtain freedom from the Eckankar cult's psychic mental

and emotional locks, the ex-initiate must take extreme
steps. It requires absolute repentance of all cult activity,
associations, initiations, etc, and humility in confession of
involvement in these evil practices before God.
55
56
Destructive practices
in the cult
Litigation against groups such as the Unification Church of

Reverend Moon (the Moonies) and Scientology often
accuses them of brainwashing or mind control. Civil appeal
decisions have summarised caselaw on the issue.
The cases fall into two broad classes: those in which former
members allege a group brainwashed them as a result of
their procedures, and those in which a group is alleged to
have used brainwashing or mind control techniques to
cause others harm.
Eckankar falls into the second class in the writer’s

experience. Eckankar and Mr Klemp use thought control
techniques, based on an influence over the member’s mind
established over years of membership, to control the minds
of its members, and to harass and terrify them if they do
not willingly do the will of the leader.
Eckankar therefore harms members in two ways. Firstly,

by establishing a high degree of control over the member’s
mind. Secondly, by using that control to punish the
disobedient member.
57
The writer’s view is that both practices are harmful.

However, the first is not litigable unless civil harm is
proved.
A group claiming to be a religion, and appearing to be one

in claiming to believe in a God, possess a church, practice
prayer and have priests, for example, has the right to
practice free from government intervention courtesy of
constitutional protections in the United States.
If civil harm is provable, that can be litigated.
As to the second practice, the use of mind control to harm

the disobedient member, that is litigable with proof of
harm. Where the member leaves and the group continues
to use its influence to harm them with thought control, he
or she can litigate civil harms done to them.
Examples of claims are harassment, assault, and

intentional infliction of serious emotional distress.
How do Harold Klemp and Eckankar inflict harm on

members an leavers? Let’s start with the use of initiation
rituals and ‘spiritual exercises.’
The group uses initiations and spiritual exercises to destroy

the member’s emotional and psychological personality and
to corrupt and possess the spiritual inner core of the
individual.
How do initiations and spiritual exercises in Eckankar

work? By the simplest of methods: by agreement.
It is the member who makes all the mistakes. It is the

member who condemns him or herself to psychological
slavery.
He or she agrees to join and thus become a First Initiate.

He or she agrees to accept an initiation ceremony every 2 –
58
3 years for the Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh

etc initiations.
He or she agrees to answer the frequent calls for donations

for local seminars, national seminars, main seminars, book
and DVD purchase, for bequests, for special projects.
More importantly, it is the member who agrees to sit down

and look in his or her mind’s eye, chant ‘hu’ or another
word, imagine the face of Harold Klemp and look for him to
appear in front of them.
Each act of submission to Klemp, of this kind, is an act of

spiritual suicide. The body may remain intact. The spirit,
however, is enslaved to another spirit’s will. This is not the
way of the spiritual life. It is the path into the deepest
circles of hell.
The closest comparison is with Freemasonry, of the

Scottish Rite. Here there are 33 degrees, instead of
Eckankar’s 14. Here the final degree requires complete
submission to a being. In the Scottish Rite, the being is
Lucifer. In Eckankar, it is called ‘Sugmad,’
Each initiation in Freemasonry is more obviously an act of

spiritual suicide through submission. For example, at the
3rd degree the Freemasonry initiate is required to enter
blindfold and bound with rope, to symbolise his giving up
of sight and freedom.
Other Freemasonry initiations similarly involve fake deaths

such as being shot or guillotined. The overall theme is the
same: the willing loss of one’s emotional and psychological
individuality; submission to the Master of the Lodge or the
Master of Eckankar; ultimately each step goes closer to
submission to the controlling being, whether it is called
Lucifer or Sugmad.
59
These rituals and acts of spiritual self-destruction are a

world away from the peace, harmony, personal freedom,
spiritual gifts, spiritual empowerment and spiritual beauty
bestowed by a true spiritual path.
The purpose of these rituals is to chain the member into an

enslaved state. That is why the main experience of
Eckankar membership is inertia. Nothing changes. There’s
a lot of promise – but no fulfilment.
Year after year, initiation after initiation, donation after

donation, book after book, satsang discourse group or
seminar attendance or leadership meeting, the activities go
on.
But there is no personal change. Why?
They key to any organisation’s psychological culture is the

character of its leadership. I remember a senior initiate
saying Harold Klemp could just zap us and we would be
transformed. Sadly, that is untrue, because Mr Klemp is
untransformed.
Read his autobiographies, The Wind of Change, Child in

the Wilderness, and Modern Day Prophet. The pages
disclose the same insecure small man struggling to get
others to believe in him. He has no personal charisma, or
gifts, or charm. His only special abilities lie in establishing
telepathic contact with the mind of a member, and
controlling their mind and their thought content with
thought control. That’s all he’s got.
No wonder that no-one including him experiences any

personality change or spiritual transformation. It is not
available in Eckankar at all.
What is available in Eckankar, and there is a lot of it, is

corporate deception compounded by individual self-
60
deception. Members induce themselves to believe they are

spiritually changing, because of their initiations, their
organisational status, their feeling of superiority, their
belief they are part of an elite, etc. All this is so much
mental junk.
The best example of elitist superiority? Harold John

Klemp. No more smug, superior person is to be found in
Eckankar. There are plenty of peacocks and bulls, sure.
But for sheer superiority, this frightened man wins the
prize. His view of members, in particular high initiates – in
case anyone thinks otherwise – is harsh contempt.
Mr Klemp regards his colleagues as self-aggrandising, self-

important, puffed up with one thought or attitude or
another. He regards himself as not self-important, because
he still feels broken inside by the violent, brutal treatment
he received from the founder Paul Twitchell (read Child in
the Wilderness for a sugar-coated but still unseemly set of
incidents of such treatment).
Herein lies the trick: Mr Klemp is unaware that he is victim

to a worse trait, that of false humility. He is only humble in
self-perception because he is broken. If he had not been
broken, he would not be humble.
Hence his humility is temporary and circumstantial.

Change the circumstances, and he’s right back believing he
knows best, the others are all misguided, and to hell with
them anyway.
If you read Wind of Change, you see the precursor to his

later false humility. That precursor is personal fear. Mr
Klemp was so afraid of interacting with others, so
crucifyingly unconfident about who he is and how he can be
to others, that he can only interact through a ritual,
procedure, a conversation prompted and controlled by a
simple purpose.
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This is not the Spirit of God at work in a man. It is the

spirit of fear.
Hence, breaking him, as Twitchell clearly did, achieved

precisely nothing. At the centre of Klemp is terror, masked
by a hard shell of obstinacy.
Any member who has tried to cross him will have

experienced that hard shell. But did they see through it to
the terror inside his surface personality? It is unlikely.
In the result, Eckankar is a group led by a frightened man.

The character of a leader reflects on the character of the
organisation he leads. In Eckankar’s case, this has the
effect of imparting fear and obstinacy to the members of
the organisation.
Members stubbornly stick to their belief he is the highest

spiritual leader in the world, the so-called ‘living eck
master’, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary. But
they cannot avoid the shadow of fear that entombs the
group.
Hence members attending seminars walk about

distractedly, uncertainly, depressed the group is going
nowhere, and they, through the lack of effective leadership,
are going nowhere.
This is what Eckankar is today. A failed cult, a hole in the

ground that holds up to 30, 000 people scattered around
the world, mainly in the United States, mainly in the main
cities. It holds them tenaciously, with grim determination,
wanting the lifeblood of their subscription and donation
monies.
It holds them through the cumulative effect of their serial

acts of submission to the will of Mr Klemp and his leaders.
62
The effect is to bind them body and soul to the power of his
influence over them. Through that influence Mr Klemp
holds them and does not want to let them go.
One of the ways Mr Klemp keeps this failed cult going is to

enforce his control over members brutally and sadistically.
He uses his ability to project his appearance into a
member’s mind to question them if they stop believing, or
wander away in their thoughts.
He will subject them to ferocious torment of their mind and

of their physical body if he considers it useful. He routinely
uses assault on body parts, including creating the
experience of sticking knives into the stomach, or fixing a
bestial creature on the back or the head of the member, to
terrify them.
He will chase a leaver into their home, workplace, friend’s

house, breaking their employment, marriage, friendships,
until the leaver is alone and scared and willing to listen to
the choice of more torment and destruction, or returning
compliantly to the cult.
More specific detail of the leadership’s assaults on leavers is

provided later in this book.
The authority for his enforcement actions is clearly stated

in the founder’s books including Shariyat ki Sugmad II.
The result is that anyone in Eckankar is strongly advised to

seek counselling from cult experts about an immediate
departure, and help with dealing with the invasive, violent
thoughts and experiences that will follow in daily life and in
dream states.
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Destruction of relationships
Klemp furthers his aim, establishing utter control over
members and therefore greater power for himself, by
destroying their relationships with school friends, partners
and spouses, family, and work colleagues. These
relationships represent obstacles to control.
In this book, we cite the example of the leaver who became

a Lutheran, and was bombarded by offensive comments
from Klemp and his colleagues, losing her marriage and her
job, until she finally gave up the fight and returned to the
cult.
The writer has personal experience of seeing one

friendship, work relationship and even love relationship
after another targeted and destroyed by Klemp.
64
Abuse of initiates
The cult routinely attacks initiates and also leavers who do

not obey leader Harold Klemp.
That is because the Eckankar cult requires obedience to the

will of ‘the living eck master’, Harold Klemp. The
alternative is destruction, through torment inflicted by day
through thought control and by night through terrifying
attacks on the mind and through violent disturbing dreams.
Key methods
Two favourite methods used by Klemp and Eckankar to

break someone are to deny sleep, and destroy their
digestion.
Sleep deprivation
Denial of sleep is a preferred torture method worldwide

and down through the centuries.
65
Klemp’s particular variation, as alleged by the author of this

book, was firstly to attack him with violent thought control
at the time of preparing for sleep.
The consequential distress caused the author delays or

prevents his ability to sleep. Sleep time is lost while the
victim tries to recover. For example, by praying, reading,
watching TV, or drinking or eating something.
Secondly, Klemp’s system was to wake the author every 45 -

60 minutes over a 4 - 5 hour period.
This ensures no solid sleep. No deep, repairing sleep.
Thirdly, Klemp’s system was to wake him between 330am

and 4am and hit him with more thought control assaults to
prevent sleep.
The results of these methods are foreseeable: exhaustion,

fatigue, progressive demoralisation, loss of of will, and
deterioration of personal behaviour.
Klemp used this system of sleep disturbance and

deprivation to destroy emotional and mental balance,
inflict intense and frequent emotional distress, make him
routinely late for work in the morning, and put his
economic survival in jeopardy in having to work in his law
job while suffering exhaustion and fatigue.
Digestive attack
A second method preferred by Klemp is more skilled and

complex. Again, like the first, it does not appear anywhere
in, nor is admitted in, in Eckankar’s official or membership
literature.
The key to this second method is stripping the body of

energy through the digestive system.
66
It worked in parallel with Klemp stripping the author’s

body of sleep. He has the ability remotely to drain the
target person’s stomach and intestines of energy and
health. Diarrhoea, loss of health and loss of the ability to
counter the attack results. Of course, the attack can be
combatted with determination.
The two combined together are lethal. They rendered the

author very ill at times. He survived physically - at times it
felt Klemp was trying to terminate his life - through his
Christian faith.
There are many other techniques used by Klemp and

Eckankar leaders to discipline the non-compliant and the
prized leaver. These are based on thought control, itself
grounded in the psychological and emotional influence
established over the individual while a member. It is a
unilateral, aggressive assault on the leaver’s mind, with the
aim of creating a Stockholm Syndrome.
Klemp and his leaders are expert in using that grounding of

influence in the mind of the leaver to project thoughts and
feelings into their mind.
These range from disorientating and disturbing physical

and emotional sensations to full-on illusions of quasi-
physical appearances of Klemp in the leaver’s home, office
or other places.
The purpose of these attacks is to weaken the leaver’s

resistance to a mix of entreaty and command to return
obediently to the cult.
These attacks are, of course, variants of the official

Eckankar technique of looking into the mind’s eye, seeing
the leader appear to them, and experience travel with and
conversation with the leader.
67
In a departure from the official, consensual use of thought

control between the leader and members, Klemp’s books
‘Child in the Wilderness’ and ‘A Modern Prophet’ and
transcripts of his talks feature examples of the same
oppressive, unilateral use of thought control to terrify and
discipline both member and leaver.
Klemp describes, for example, how a female member left

and became a Lutheran. Eventually, her will broken by the
rapid destruction of marital and employment relationships,
and harsh criticism from leaders appearing to her, the
member returned.
In his autobiographies, Klemp describes how his own will

was broken by Twitchell appearing to him in various guises.
That led him to attempt suicide by jumping off a bridge in
Milwaukee in mid-winter. That led him to take his clothes
off in the public lounge in Milwaukee International Airport.
That in turn led to his arrest, conviction and detention in a
psychiatric hospital.
These are harsh methods used to control certain members

and leavers. Arguably, they are both criminally and civilly
actionable. They certainly have no place in a civilised
society.
68
Statements by leavers
A number of leavers have provided written testament to the

harmful practices used against them by Eckankar leaders.
These practices are not officially admitted in Eckankar

literature. However, they appear openly in writing in
Twitchell’s and Klemp’s books.
Zuma: ‘Eckankar - A FULL BLOWN CULT!’
Author: Zuma
Date: 1997/04/17
Forum: alt.religion.eckankar
I was once a hibernating Roman Catholic and found

Eckankar too. I started reading some books, meeting some
folks, going to Satsangs, subscribing to the discourses, and
finally keeping a dream log that is full of wonderful
experiences with meeting Masters and flying through
glorious landscapes of unspeakable beauty. I enjoyed falling
asleep at night so that I may once again hear the Light And
Sound. All of this in the course of two years. I knew that
69
religion by any other name paled in comparison with the

unfathomable Truth known as Eckankar.
Then, a Christian friend told me that I had better take a

good look at what I left for Eckankar; that I owed it to
myself to know for sure that what I found was the real
thing. I too started "feeling" something wasn't right with it.
Once the honeymoon was over, I started reading Twitchell's

long-winded fragmented books again. I became suspicious
that the original lure of Eckankar and its promise "why
wait, now you can touch the hem of God" wasn't what is is
cracked up to be. I read Brad Steiger's biography of
Twitchell and for a time became enamoured with Eckankar
again, but it was short lived when I came to my senses.
My good Christian friends were warning me that perhaps

all these things I felt and saw were real, but that does not
mean it came from the God I grew up with. Maybe these
visions were the work of the Evil One. After all, long before
Paul landed on Earth, the Bible speaks on numerous
occasions about false prophets and the wicked treachery of
Satan and how he will do everything in his power to pull
you away from God.
It all became clear at that point that I had fallen into the
trappings of a full blown CULT!!!
It's leader wooing me and dazzling me, and promising me

the keys to heaven, like all good cult leaders do...telling its
followers what they want to hear!! Suddenly the Internet
explodes and lo and behold I see an army of Ex-Eckists
battling it out with the chelas.
David Lane's exhaustive research on Paul Twitchell's

plagiarism and his incessant lying just sealed the fate for
me and Eckankar. The reason everyone hates what Lane
says, is because he shakes the very foundation of their
70
spiritual investments, and no one likes to be told they are

wrong. He is lucid, scholarly and extrememly convincing,
sooooo, that's why I have become the monster we all know
today as Zuma. Even Twitchell's ex-wife Gail has said that
Eckankar was concocted under false pretenses...she was
there, she oughtta know!!
In case anyone is interested, I've also read most of the

David Lane and David Rife stuff, and, frankly, I'm not
impressed with either of their attitudes. I've seen more
open minds than those from most people I've met. You
don't have to like their attitudes, Observe, look closely at
what they are saying. They are constantly removing the
bastion of Eckankar stone by stone, and the people inside
are feeling helpless. Time will tell for sure, and I'll bet my
last dollar that this little "Light And Sound" club doesn't
make it through through another decade.
ALBERT C. SILVA
My Resignation Letter
To: Spiritual Services

From: Albert C. Silva #2232760
Subject: Immediate Termination from Eckankar.
Please remove my name from all of your mailing lists. I can

no longer consider myself a member of Eckankar.
I can not support an organization whose founder and

leaders ethics I have grave doubts about.
It may interest you to know that I arrived at this decision

after much soul-searching. It has been said by some of the
71
eighth initiates, that if you cannot trust the inner master

that you are wasting your time with the spiritual exercises.
This for me really came to a head when after I bought my

computer and got on the internet. I got a chance to review
"The Making of a spiritual movement by David Lane. That
and other materials like the experiences of fellow former
eckists who are on the internet, convinced me that what I
have been following is a pack of lies!!
Then I read in Mystic World , Harold's constant pointing

out of the faults of those who leave eckankar. I ask myself, is
this a real god- realized man. I have reached the conclusion
that all your organization is about is separating the
spiritually naive from their money. Why don't you people be
honest about the true history of eckankar and admit it.
I am too angry to write much more!
signed
Albert C. Silva
Joe Sykes: statement
Joe Sykes was a member of the Eckankar cult (‘the cult’)

from February 1980 to June 1993.
He resigned in June 1993 following a threat to kill from

another member, Ebenezer Egunjobi, and a series of violent
and disorientating mind control attacks emanating from the
leader, Harold Klemp.
He joined the cult in Berkeley California, while on a two-

year study visit to the United States following completion of
his first degree at Oxford University, England.
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The cult claimed seductively, but misleadingly, in its

literature and public meetings to provide ‘spiritual freedom’
and ‘self- and God- realisation.’
The key was the cult leader – clumsily titled ‘the living eck
master’. The leader required complete obedience. This is a
common feature of cults.
Relationship of cult leader and member
The cult leader’s role in the member’s life as a member was

critical. On joining the member had to vow to accept the
leader as the ‘Master’ of his personal spiritual and physical
life. Implicit in this vow was a vow of obedience to the
spiritual leader, whatever instructions he should give or
whatever he should do to the member.
Also implicit was the existence of a personal and continuing

relationship between the leader and the member.
In 1981 shortly after the member joined, the leader became

Harold Klemp. The previous leader, Darwin Gross, was
dismissed in 1981 from his post by the cult’s Board.
Allegations included serial adultery with members’ wives
and absconding with funds.
It is understood none of the allegations were true. The

Board found Mr Gross hard to control, as he had realised
that the original founder Paul Twitchell was a fraud and the
cult itself was a fraud. Mr Gross’s first wife Gail, who had
been Twitchell’s second wife, openly called her departed
husband a fraudster.
Mind control techniques and effects on members
Harold Klemp was stricter than Darwin Gross, who was an
73
amiable man and talented vibraphonist. Klemp demanded

strict obedience. Mr Sykes was, expressly or impliedly,
asked regularly to repeat his membership vow to Mr Klemp
from 1981 to the end of his membership in June 1993.
These acts of obedience were required in the annual

membership form; at two- or three-yearly ‘initiation’
ceremonies, at monthly discussion meetings, at seminar
workshops, and in the visualisation exercises the member
was asked to undertake every day.
The visualisation exercises consisted chiefly of the member

visualising Mr Klemp in his imagination as being with the
member. On occasions the member had the experience,
common among members of the cult, of seeing Mr Klemp in
his home or car, as if Mr Klemp was actually with him. This
was in effect an occult hologram,
On these occasions Mr Klemp engaged in mind-to-mind

communication or telepathy with Mr Sykes. This was a
common experience for many members of the cult.
The effect of these agreements and activities was to induce

in the member a loss of independent will.
Although the member found he did not actually benefit from

membership, he felt he simply could not leave the cult. He
therefore stayed a member. He continued to pay
membership fees and make other donations repeatedly
demanded by the cult.
Mr Sykes’ services to the cult
Returning to England in late January 1981, the member was

asked by cult officers to work for the organisation as a public
speaker at and organiser of public introductory talks about
the cult.
74
Organisationally, the member progressed upwards to

discussion group leader (circa 1986-87), editor of the cult
national newsletter in England (1991-92), national seminar
organiser and leader (1992-93), and speaker and seminar
workshop organiser and leader at seminars in the United
States, including Minneapolis, Minnesota (1992-93).
In October 1991, at about the time the member became a

full-time volunteer worker for the cult, Mr Klemp intensified
his communications with the member, telling him he was to
be the next leader of the cult.
Mr Sykes now began to fear and distrust Mr Klemp. Firstly,

he recalled that Darwin Gross had repeatedly promised
various members they would be the next cult leader. This
was a basic form of mind control, getting agreement to a
proposition in order to obtain greater control over the
member.
Secondly, Mr Sykes realised with some horror that the cult

leader had direct access to his mind and who seemed to
have a great degree of control over him.
Thirdly, Klemp now gave Mr Sykes direct instructions about

his physical life. He told the member to live in Ealing, a
district of London, England. The member was reluctant to
move to Ealing. He did not like the area. He now came
under pressure, through visual appearances of Klemp, direct
mind to mind instructions, to obey the cult leader.
Destructive use of mind control techniques and

effects
In September 1992 the member obedently took an

apartment in Ealing.
75
Within a few days Klemp told him his mind was to be

"destroyed", as part of his training, and began a campaign of
physical and mental terrorisation against the member.
The member experienced sharp stomach pains when he

tried to eat, and became afraid to eat. When he tried to
sleep, a sharp sound would begin near the member’s head,
and would continue until dawn, when it would cease for one
hour.
Klemp told the member he had been various people in past

lives, and a member of the cult, Klemp, sometimes
appearing visually to Mr Sykes in the form of Twitchell, told
him he had been the following persons in past lives, listed
chronologically:
Arup, the last leader of Atlantis

Alexander the Great
Julius Caesar
Jesus Christ
Rumi, Sufi poet
Henry VIII
Shakespeare
Louis XVI
Napoleon Bonaparte
Wilfred Owen, poet
Charlie Parker, saxophonist
In relation to Henry VIII, Klemp claimed to have been his

father Henry VII! Klemp even claimed Mr Sykes’ mother
had been Elizabeth I of England.
One day in Ealing, Klemp appeared to Mr Sykes in the form

of Twitchell. Klemp instructed him to visit Ealing public
library and read the story of Henry VIII. This was
unecessary, as Mr Sykes had been a history student.
76
In relation to Napoleon, Klemp claimed to have been

Nelson, who defeated Napoleon. Klemp explained that
Wilfred Owen, a World War I soldier, died in the snow in no
man’s land, as a punishment for Napoleon leaving his army
to die in the retreat from Moscow.
One day in Ealing, Ebenezer Egunjobi visited Mr Sykes and

told him he had been shown in a dream a scene of the
member as Napoleon, reviewing his troops.
In relation to Atlantis, Klemp claimed that Mr Sykes, then

called Arup, had engaged in an inter-continental war with
black Africa using lasers based on the Moon! This was had
had the unintended consequence of causing a meteorite to
hit Atlantis, destroying it without trace!
One day in Covent Garden, London, Klemp appeared to Mr

Sykes (who studied Shakespeare at university) and
projected onto him a quizzical, humane state of mind of a
much older man. Klemp then claimed that this was
Shakespeare’s state of mind, and that, again, Mr Sykes had
once been Shakespeare.
At this time a friend of Mr Sykes, Paul Archer, commented

drily, ‘Why is it all the people they tell you about are famous
people?’
Mr Sykes did not believe a word of these stories. Instead he

was progressively alarmed at the lengths to which Klemp
was prepared to go to make him believe fantasy.
Ebenezer Egunjobi, confirmed many of Klemp’s claims

independently in person to the member. The day before Mr
Sykes resigned, Egunjobi made a death threat to him.
Egunjobi said, "You will meet a quick death."
Physically exhausted, emotionally terrified, and mentally

disorientated, the member resigned in June 1993.
77
The member moved away from Ealing into hiding from the
cult and its members. He lived in north London for many
months in fear for his life.
Despite the move away, Klemp used his mind to mind

access to continue to inflict terror on the member by the
cult’s mind control and brainwashing techniques.
Mr Klemp seemed to the appellant determined to break his

will and induce him to return to the cult.
As a result of his horrific 14 years in the cult, Mr Sykes

became a Christian. Mr Sykes moved on to experience the
Holy Spirit for the first time as a living reality.
Instead of rituals based on obedience to a man, he

participated in prayer to God with true personal release
and natural change and growth following.
An Eckankar leaver on website 'Women of Grace'
“I would like to share my experience of leaving the path. It

was a simple question to God. I was an eckist for almost 25
years (Prior to that a Christion since a very early age) and
had reached my 5th initiation .
“My husband and I moved to Northern California, and

things were going OK. We settled in with no real issues . . .
. until my husband had a heart attack. I reached a real low
and reached out to my understanding of God. I challenged
my Higher Power and, in desperation , asked, ‘will the true
Master please step forward?’
“To my amazement that night in a dream, Jesus appeared

in a blinding white light. His silhouette appeared and what
stuck out was the crown of thorns upon his head. That’s all
78
I needed. I came back to my Lord Savior and experienced a

peace I had not felt for a long time. Since then I feel more
on fire for Jesus than ever before. That peace continues in
my heart. It was all about faith and trust. Enough said, I
just wanted to share “that when we ask for answers
spirituality to our God, he will answer.”
https://www.womenofgrace.com/blog/?p=50032
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80
10
Attacks on Christians
Eckankar and Mr Klemp are at their most vicious in their
attacks on people who leave and become Christians.
Harold Klemp, leader of the Eckankar group, a 'cult-like'

organisation according to the Minnesota Court of Appeals,
hates Christians. He was one once, a trainee junior priest
in the Lutheran Church in Wisconsin.
Despite leaving Christianity, he refers constantly to it,

trying to show Eckankar is a better group.
Attacks in Eckankar books
Klemp attempts in his books including ‘How to find God’ to

reduce Jesus Christ to just ‘a spiritual teacher’, a man for
his time (‘How to Find God’, pp 56 – 57, 126 - 127).
In one quote, Klemp effectively claims people who follow

Jesus are suffering from a case of mistaken identity. People
think they see Jesus, but really they see a 3000 year
81
Egyptian called Gopal Das. The fact that this is an Indian

name is apparently not a worry.
Eckankar is openly rude and offensive about Christianity.

Twitchell described Jesus Christ as living on the Fourth
Plane, which he called ‘the Mental Plane’.
In the cult, to be on the Mental Plane is the ultimate insult.

Life begins in the heavenly planes. Stating Jesus now lives
on the Mental Plane is basically saying He is irrelevant.
Despite Twitchell’s insults, Klemp was keen to copy

Christianity to reposition Eckankar as a quasi-Christian
group.
There are several reasons for this. One is the escape from
California in the late 1980s, to escape the scandals around
the Californian membership and in particular the deposed
leader Darwin Gross.
Another reason relates to where Eckankar escaped to:

Minnesota. Settled by Northern European Protestants,
Minnesota would have found it hard to swallow this 1960s
New Age guru cult.
Klemp refashioned the cult’s marketing in Christian terms.

The leaders were now ‘priests’. The cult was ‘a church.’ It
had a ‘temple’ and its Hindu meditation techniques were
‘prayer.’
A third reason was tax. Non-profit incorporation as a

religious group required Eckankar to look like a religion.
Klemp, a former Lutheran trainee priest, opted for a

Christian look. Sadly, Klemp’s efforts did not translate into
better box office. Despite vast claims of 500, 000
members, the cult’s membership is understood to be
declining from a level of some five years ago of 30,000.
82
Most of these are in San Francisco area and Los Angeles in

California, in New York, and other centres.
Attacks on leavers
Klemp and senior cult initiated attack leavers who convert

to the Christian faith or who renew their Christian walk.
Methods of attack include:
1. Appearing to leaver in dreams, rebuking them for

leaving, criticising their decision. Mocking their lives as
leavers.
2. Appearing to them by telepathic projection, telling the

leaver that prayer to Jesus Christ the Son of God is
pointless as:
(1) Jesus is dead
(2) Jesus is currently stationed ‘on the Mental Plane’
(3) Harold Klemp himself performs the duties of the

‘dead’ Jesus, appearing to millions worldwide as
Jesus
(4) Therefore prayer to Jesus is just taking them back to

Eckankar
This last claim, contending Christians are caught in a kind

of closed loop and are in fact worshipping Klemp, is
outrageously blasphemous.
3. Keeping up a barrage of telepathic assaults, and pressure

on immediate family, until the leaver cracks and returns to
Eckankar.
83
Klemp’s campaign against Christianity, away from the eyes

of the general membership, is a direct extra-legal attack on
the constitutional and human right not to be persecuted for
religious choice.
84
11
Is Eckankar legal?
Is Eckankar actually a religion as it claims to be?
The cult is officially incorporated in California and

Minnesota as a non-profit corporation. That claim in turn
rests on its claim to be a religiou. Is that claim truthful?
The cult currently claims to be a religion within the broad

definition permitted by constitutional law. That definition
is conceptually and linguistically Christian. The key
elements are: a belief in a god, a church, priests, prayer.
Eckankar was not founded as a quasi-Christian church,

however, but as a Hindu guru organisation. Its language,
theology and meditation techniques were Hindu. Its
hierarchism in is use of initiations copied Freemasonry and
Scientology. At the same time, the group was not founded
as a non-profit.
It was only under Harold Klemp’s leadership in the 1990s

that Eckankar adopted the language of Christian
institutions, to comply with the language of non-profit
registration as a religiou. For that reason only, Eckankar
called itself a church ror the first time. It claimed its
leaders, in particular its Resas (regional eck spiritual aids)
85
were ‘priests’. It redescribed its spiritual exercises as

prayer. It asserted belief in God, through its belief in the
Sugmad.
This change illustrates Eckankar’s lack of organisational

and ethical integrity. Whatever sells and avoids tax is
deemed legitimate.
Through re-description the group brought itself, therefore,

whtin non-profit law. To that extent, the group operates
legally as a non-profit in two states.
But if it is proven that its self-description, whether as a

Hindu religious group, or as a quasi-Christian group, is
mere surface, and that the reality is the group subjects
members and leavers to emotional and psychological harm,
that is a different matter.
Then Eckankar can be sued civilly on those harms, and

complaint can be made to the relevant registration boards
about its right to describe itself as a religion.
Footnote: Eckankar and local communities
Eckankar poisons every community it inhabits. Its

members’ presence is highly toxic.
There are several ways in which Eckankar members poison

a community. Firstly, they possess a pseudo-spiritual
elitism mixed with a contemptuous disregard for ordinary
people who they regard as ignorant and deluded.
They regard practitioners of Chritianity, the main religion

in the United States and the Western world, as wasting
their time worshipping a dead leader, who himself only
reached the 4th Plane out of a total of 14 planes.
86
By contrast, the Eckankar leader, Harold Klemp, claims to

have reached the 14th Plane. They believe that the real
spiritual leader at the time of Jesus Christ was in fact the
priest Zadok. That is despite the awkward historical fact
that Zadok was the Jewish High Priest in the reigns of
David and Solomon. That was over 1, 000 years before
Christ was born.
Secondly, Eckankar leaders and members teach their

children to distrust Christians and Christian values which
continue to pervade US and Western society and to be the
foundation of morality and law.
Eckankar initiates breed distrust and suspicion and

contempt in their interactions with non-members in every
community in which they live and work.
Thirdly, people who join the cult while in a marriage, with

children, have been known to put their marriages under
intolerable stress, leading to separation, divorce and
custody battles over children.
In a recent case, an Eckankar initiate lost a custody battle

when she played a tape in court demonstrating the ‘group
hu chant’ in which a group of initiates meet and chant the
word ‘hu.’
The court, unsurprisingly, was driven to the view the

mother was unreliable as a parent with bizarre and
abnormal practices such as this going on in or around the
home.
Fourthly, Eckankar initiates are known to attack family

members who resist their attempts to persuade a leaver to
return to the group. Initiates have been known to
intimidate family members with visits to the home and
harassing telephone calls, screaming at family members to
release their (former) member.
87
These are examples of how the cult’s destructive internal

practices spill over into the wider community.
The question of the cult’s legality, as to whether in truth it

is a religion deserving non-profit status and constitutional
protection, or an oppressive group cloaked in religious
forms whose practices unlawfully harm members and
leavers, is yet to be determined.
88
12
Escaping the Cult

How should members escape the Eckankar cult, and how
should ex-members release themselves from persistent
attempts to influence them?
The first question is easier to address than the second.

Both are addressed below.
How should members escape the cult?
Here are simple things to do when a member wants to leave

Eckankar and stay out.
First things first. Resign in writing, and check the

resignation is received at cult headquarters in Chanhassen,
Minnesota by email or post.
Second, delete all email, electronic and written records of

contacts with Eckankar members or about Eckankar.
Third, send a brief message to any close contact in

Eckankar that they will not be in contact again.
89
Fourth, destroy permanently and remove from the home

and office any materials and objects connected with
Eckankar.
Fifth, rearrange daily life so that the time previously spent

on the cult – classes, social contact, seminar travel and
attendance and other time – is filled with something the
person likes, which has no relationship with the cult of any
kind. Such as sports, a part-time extra job, a college course.
Sixth, if the member was previously a member of a religion

connected with their birth culture, they should return to
that and reaffirm it. They should renew their ties with the
people or groups connected with that religion.
There is no limitation on what religion that could be. The

writer has found modern Christianity that practices
deliverance ministry to be the most able and alert at
knowing how to protect the cult leaver and help them to
stabilise their life.
Seventh, the ex-member should reject any approach from

the cult, whether physically, mentally or in a dream. If the
cult leader Klemp or one of his associates appears to the ex-
member, he or she can say to the person:
‘I reject you. You may not return to me again.’
How should ex-members release themselves from

the cult’s influence?
In a case where the cult persists in trying to get the leaver to

return, a sustained firm approach is necessary. The answer
immediately above is essential.
90
But it may happen that Klemp and his associates trespass

on the leaver’s mind and environment, regardless of how
clear the leaver is they are not welcome.
In this case, it is essential the leaver does not waiver. the

form of the assault can be returned immediately on the
person who sent it, in the place where they sent it.
For example, Christians faced with this kind of assault may

pray, ‘Return to sender.’
Twitchell admitted his preferred form of control of a

member was ‘carrot and stick.’ This is that is known as
‘good cop, bad cop.’ Twitchell would mix calm, mild-
mannered charm (Clark Kent) with violent, sadistic attacks
(Lex Luthor).
Klemp’s autobiography ‘Child in the Wilderness’ and ‘A

Modern Prophet’ contain chapters illustrating Twitchell
using both methods on Klemp.
Faced by good cop, the answer is to tell Klemp etc politely

to leave. Don’t get angry; Klemp will be amused and feed
off it.
Faced by bad cop, the answer is to stay firm and as centred

as possible, and turn the attention to something entirely
different (family activity, watching a movie, playing a
musical instrument, meeting a friend).
If the trespass continues despite the leaver taking all the

steps indicated in this chapter, an alternative approach is to
file suit for damages for assault and intentional infliction of
emotional distress.
91
Bibliography
Books
David Lane, The Making of a Spiritual Movement: The Untold

Story of Paul Twitchell and Eckankar, revised edition, 1994,
Del Mar Press
David Lane, Introduction to New and Alternative Religions in

America (ed Eugene V. Gallagher and W. Michael Ashcraft),
Volume 3: Metaphysical, New Age, and Neopagan
Movements. Greeenwood Press, 2003
George D. Chryssides, The A to Z of New Religious Movements,

2001
Melton, J. Gordon, Encyclopedia of American Religions, 2003
Ruth and Noah Samuelson, The dark side of Eckankar1

Robert Pye, Eighteen New Age Lies & the Cult of Eckankar2
Harold Klemp, Child in the Wilderness
Harold Klemp, A Modern Prophet
Harold Klemp, How to Find God
Paul Twitchell, Shariyat ki Sugmad II
Paul Twitchell, The Tiger’s Fang
Paul Twitchell, Letters to a Chela
John Ankerberg and John Weldon, Cult Watch
1 Available online at scribd.com

2 Available online at scribd.com
92
Websites and blogs
http://ecksecretsexposed.blogspot.com/2014/02/how-i-
joined-eckankar.html
https://www.womenofgrace.com/blog/?p=50032
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.religion.eckank
ar/LO6dhewvk9g
http://www.angelfire.com/hi2/eckankarsurvivors/data.html
https://www.quora.com/What-is-wrong-with-Eckankar
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.religion.eckank
ar/sorRfYMKuMU
https://plus.google.com/102796309879720729933
http://ecksecretsexposed.blogspot.com/2014/02/how-i-
joined-eckankar.html
http://www.littleknownpubs.com/Dialog_Ch._Two.htm
93
94
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful for information and advice given by
members and former members of Eckankar on aspects of the
cult’s practices.
The author acknowledges with thanks and admiration the

bravery of all Eckankar leavers who have stood against the
cult, and publicly exposed its harmful practices against
members and leavers.
95

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THE TRUTH ABOUT

Freedom from Cult Abuse Inc.

The Truth about Eckankar

3rd edition, enlarged and updated

© 2019 by Freedom from Cult Abuse Inc. and Joe Sykes

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

Independently published in Kindle, e-book and paperback.

THE TRUTH ABOUT

New material in this 3rd edition includes analysis of the

The Minnesota Court of Appeal describes the Eckankar group

The Truth about Eckankar is a long overdue probe into the

The author cuts through the layers of deceptive claim behind

The information, opinions and insights in this book are based

Eckankar is a New Age group founded in Las Vegas in 1965. It

The cult has had a short history marked by conflict. The

Mr Twitchell was poisoned by a seminar attendee in early

Mr Gross similarly claimed to be chosen by ‘the Sugmad’.

Mr Klemp, once appointed, similarly claimed to be chosen by

In 1983 Mr Gross’s lifetime honorary position was terminated

half by starting his own group Atom. Mr Gross claimed to be

Litigation over the missing money continued until 1987. A

Klemp was liked by no-one. His efforts to impress the

The Board decided to escape. It abandoned its San Francisco

Through the 1990s, however, the battle between the rival

both accused the other of practising ‘the dark arts’,

In 2008, Mr Gross died, and his Atom group closed, leaving

One might think a sensation-packed chronology of this type

The real Eckankar is an obsessive personality cult based

This book is timely as the present era is one in which old

In the case of Eckankar, re-examination and rejection are

The true history of

The Eckankar group was founded in 1965 in Las Vegas,

Twitchell’s career to date consisted of employment as a gym

Postwar, Twitchell attempted a journalistic career in

Twitchell drifted during the period 1950 - 1963 with wealthy

Twitchell was staff writer on the ashram newsletter, the

He later told an Eckankar Youth Conference in 1971 that the

Finally, in 1954 - 1955, one particularly brutal fight led to

Following receipt a psychiatric report on his state of mind the

Twitchell typically put out a false version, claiming he was

St Elizabeths Psychiatric Hospital

In reality, his stay in St Elizabeths is understood to have been

During his period of hospitalisation, Camille separated from

In the early 1960s, following his divorce from Camille in or

was as exploitative and as quick to take an opportunity as

When his new wife threatened divorce unless he gained an

An American guru cult

Twitchell created an organisation apparently designed to look

This formula was not as haphazard as it might seem. It

Getting donations of a few dollars from a visitor to a Hindu

Twitchell’s wife Gail wanted a proper income coming in. She

Twitchell’s solution was to adopt the methods of membership

The key was hierarchism. Conferring status on members as

The secret initiation ceremonies Twitchell had seen in the

In an initiation meeting, a higher status was conferred on the

This was a nice fit with the hiearchical nature of the

The centrality of the Master

Twitchell’s publications in Eckankar – books, discourses,

At the top of the hierarchy was the Master, Paul Twitchell

The alternative to obedience, he explained, was personal

Twitchell began by advertising monthly pamphlets by

Given the high interest in Eastern religion and the occult in

Twitchell rewrote Kirpal Singh’s out of body travel techniques

In ‘The Tiger’s Fang’ Twitchell fabricated an experience twice