From Ruhani Satsang Student to Living ECK Master

Before he was known as the founder of Eckankar, Paul Twitchell moved through a series of American spiritual and esoteric circles, including a period with the Church of Scientology in its Dianetics era and a period of correspondence-based study with Kirpal Singh's Ruhani Satsang, an American offshoot of the Indian Radhasoami tradition built around the practice of surat shabd yoga, meditation on an inner sound and light.

Twitchell publicly broke with Kirpal Singh's organisation in the early 1960s, and by 1965, formally incorporated in San Diego on 22 October of that year, he had recast much of what he had studied as a new and independently ancient teaching, Eckankar, the Ancient Science of Soul Travel, with himself installed at the head of a lineage he said ran back through 970 previous Living ECK Masters to the dawn of the practice. He led the small but growing movement until his death in 1971.