Seed for Contemplation

The tests of Spirit are unlimited. They reach you in a totally unique way.

—Harold Klemp
The Language of Soul

Seed for Contemplation

The secret is that one cannot live without love. You’ve got to find the kind that agrees with your spiritual makeup. Once you have it, you find it a delicate thing that can slip away like water through the fingers.

—Harold Klemp
The Language of Soul

Seed for Contemplation

The quest for God is the quest for true happiness.

—Harold Klemp
The Language of Soul

Seed for Contemplation

As Soul, you are like a balloon that rises above the ground. The higher you go, the farther you can see. And the farther you can see, the better you can plan your life.

—Harold Klemp
The Language of Soul

Seed for Contemplation

You can’t make yourself closer to God by hating someone else, whether you believe it’s righteous anger or not. The relationship between Soul—which is you—and God is one of love. And where there’s pure love, there is no room for anger of any kind.

—Harold Klemp
The Language of Soul

Seed for Contemplation

Those living the high spiritual life are the knowers, not believers. There is a world of difference between knowing and believing.

—Harold Klemp
The Language of Soul

Seed for Contemplation

You cannot measure spirituality by the number of bad habits you have or not. Nor by a certain number of experiences. Awareness of the moment and a joy for living can also be an indication of where you are spiritually.

—Harold Klemp
The Language of Soul

The teachings of ECK define the nature of Soul. You are Soul, a particle of God sent into the worlds (including earth) to gain spiritual experience.
. The goal in ECK is spiritual freedom in this lifetime, after which you become a Co-worker with God, both here and in the next world. Karma and reincarnation are primary beliefs.
. Key to the ECK teachings is the Mahanta, the Living ECK Master. He has the special ability to act as both the Inner and Outer Master for ECK students. The prophet of Eckankar, he is given respect but not worshipped. He teaches the sacred name of God HU. When sung just a few minutes each day, HU will lift you spiritually into the Light and Sound of God - the ECK (Holy Spirit). This easy spiritual exercise and others will purify you. You are then able to accept the full love of God in this lifetime.
. Sri Harold Klemp is the Mahanta, the Living ECK Master today.

Foreword
Flute of God

For one to write his own philosophy of life it might take five minutes or five years. This depends upon the individual and his complexities, gathered during the many incarnations of lives lived in this universe over the years.
The simple man or anyone who has a clear mind will in general say, with a few words, that life goes in certain directions, while the person with many complexities will use words upon words to describe his philosophy of life.
I remember very well when Sudar Singh, the great ECK Master, said, "When someone asked Bertrand Russell what his philosophy of life was, he wrote several volumes of books on the subject."
When Jesus was asked the same question by his disciples, he said, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbor as thyself."


Sri Paul Twitchell
The Flute of God

Frankly, very few are able to do anything of themselves. Therefore, they must have a teacher to show them the approach to God. A master is necessary until the disciple is able to walk alone and perhaps become a teacher himself, quite possibly the Master.
. This is the cycle of God for man, for man must become as God eventually. There is first the child who seeks, then becomes the man who looks for God everywhere but in the right place. He finds the teacher, becomes the disciple, and finally becomes the Master himself.
. This is so very simple. It need not take incarnation after incarnation.


Sri Paul Twitchell
The Flute of God

There are a great number of people who love to show what they know. They will invariably talk to you, expressing their opinions and beliefs about God; telling you how much they can help you, even advertising in the press to this effect. Always be skeptical - question everything and everyone. It might be but a dishonest effort on their part to make themselves a living - nothing more. What they know comes a great deal from books with little experience of learning from other teachers, and seldom, if ever, from what God gave them directly. A person who is truly knowledgeable will rarely do a great deal of talking on any subject.
. There is no point in resisting these false masters; simply accept them as they are and leave them alone.


Sri Paul Twitchell
The Flute of God

The Supreme Consciousness will appear to anyone, provided the individual furnishes the state of consciousness through which it can appear. Therefore, whatever anyone is receiving or lacking in the expression of his consciousness is his own responsibility. It is the result of his own consciousness. Until you can understand this, you can never have true freedom and liberation from this world.
Until you can understand that nothing can happen to you, nothing can ever come to you or be kept away from you, except in accordance with the state of your consciousness, you do not have the key to life.


Sri Paul Twitchell
The Flute of God

Seed for Contemplation

We do all we can to keep the goodwill of others as we go about gathering our rich spiritual experiences in this life. But we do recognize limits.

—Harold Klemp
The Language of Soul

Spiritual Exercise of the Week


When You Have a Busy Day

When you have a job that doesn't leave time to do the spiritual exercises regularly, or at the same time each day, here is a technique to try.

Chant your secret word or sing HU quietly to yourself. Do this for a while during the day and as you go to sleep at night. If your schedule is such that it doesn't allow time for you to sit up and do the twenty-minute spiritual exercise, you can also do a technique that I have used fairly often myself.

Just before you go to sleep, you can say to the Inner Master: "I give you full permission to take me to the place that I have earned or where I can learn something." Then go to sleep, and don't give it another thought.

The Inner Master will begin working with you in the dream state. Often you will find that as your consciousness changes, your outer circumstances may change too. It may take a couple of years. This is the physical world, and often it's very hard.

But the ECK Masters begin working with us where they find us. In the spiritual works, we begin at the point where we are. We can wish for all the leisure time in the world, but the fact is, we have to really look at where we are and then consider what we are going to do in our own circumstances.

The ECK will take us one step at a time inwardly, and this will reflect outwardly in some way. Your life may not be easier, but it will certainly become more adventuresome.

—Sri Harold Klemp
The Spiritual Exercises of ECK

Seed for Contemplation

Those with pure love do all they can to let their mates grow in every way. Detached love means to let others exist without forcing our will upon them. That is spiritual love.

—Harold Klemp
The Language of Soul

Soul gets spiritual freedom by passing through three seasons in Its journey to God; (1) innocence, (2) complications, and (3) fulfillment. The passage of Soul is as sure as the sun's; and through the morning, noon, and eventide of life's experience, It climbs steadily up the rugged mountainside to God-Realization.
But the climb is tortuous. Grief, loneliness, hunger, and disease sour the drink of life. We want God, but this spiritual odyssey takes us to unknown places in the far worlds of consciousness. But of all things learned, nothing is more necessary than how to become one with the ECK, a Co-worker with God.


The Living Word Book 1
Sri Harold Klemp
The Mahanta the Living ECK Master

"There is neither happiness nor unhappiness in this world; there is only the comparison of one state with another. Only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate bliss." Likewise, an immature Soul is incapable of God Consciousness.
. Life is nothing more than Soul meeting Itself in the reflection of the outer world. Beyond the pages of a novel, It can only reap what It sows.
. The odyssey of Soul teaches us to cooperate with the laws of God. It takes many lifetimes of bumps and bruises before all the lessons of Godhood sink in. And when they do, we are granted the grace to partake of the highest aspects of sainthood.


The Living Word Book 1
Sri Harold Klemp
The Mahanta the Living ECK Master

Seed for Contemplation

The ECK is the true reality, that shining essence of the Sugmad which cannot be found by worldly eyes, senses , and perceptions. it is only found in the true self, that which is known as Soul.


The Shariyat - Ki- Sugmad
Vol 1

Watching Your Dreams

The dream world and its people are real. It is only our recall and understanding of it that are incomplete. Our link with the inner worlds is usually through dreams, but illusion can make our memory of inner events faulty.

What about the dream people who appear to be just symbolic parts of ourselves? Let's start with the waking dream. The Mahanta uses it to give someone a spiritual insight from an experience in his daily life. The Master draws on the individual's experiences with real people and real events to point out some personal truth.

Apply the principle of the waking dream to your dream world. The people you meet there are Souls, just like you. However, the Mahanta can turn your experiences with them into an open window of understanding, to unlock your desires, needs, and goals.

Keep a journal of your dreams, and begin to note any parallels between them.

—Sri Harold Klemp
The Spiritual Exercises of ECK

We are in a peculiar conflict while in this body. Most living things try to keep alive at all cost. But as Schopenhauer, the nineteenth-century German philosopher, observed, when"existence is assured," people don't know what to do with it. So they try to free themselves from"the burden of existence, to make it cease to be felt, 'to kill time '. "
. This is a case of Soul in the second stage, the stage of complication, spoken of before. Being freed of want and care, almost all such people become a burden to themselves. This boredom opens the door to the social consciousness, which drives"men to the greatest excesses, as much as its opposite extreme, famine."
. The odyssey of Soul is worth every sacrifice, for it leads to God.


The Living Word Book 1
Sri Harold Klemp
The Mahanta the Living ECK Master

How to Make Good Decisions

Everyone wants to make good decisions. But how do you know when you are being guided by the ECK or by the mind? Here's a simple way to tell.

If guided by ECK, you are more likely to change your mind when new information comes along. You're quicker to admit that an earlier decision based on sketchy information needs to change.

The mind has the power to make you believe you are always right. That's why a head-strong person acts so smart. He thinks he's always right, though he's often wrong.

—Sri Harold Klemp
The Spiritual Exercises of ECK

I am aware that there are many approaches to God. No one individual has monopoly on these approaches. What Mary Baker Eddy used as an avenue to Truth would completely awry with that used by the Master Saint Ramakrishna, founder of the Ramakrishna Mission, an order in the Vedanta religion of India; or what Moses or Sankara used in their respective philosophies; and even with that of the greatest Sufi Saint, Shamus-i-Tabriz, in ancient Persia.
. So the whole truth is. And nothing more. It is that we must find our own way to God. There is no teacher, living or past, who can give us the actual understanding of truth. A teacher can only put our feet upon the path and point the way. That is all. It is wholly dependent on the individual to make his way to truth.


Sri Paul Twitchell
The Flute of God

In a way, man lives in two worlds. The outer life that man lives is limited, but the Prince of God lives in a boundless inner world. One can become a slave to the influences from without instead of being free, influenced from within as Soul.
. Now you must remember that until coming into the awareness of "I AM THAT" or God Itself, you are still the Prince, the potential heir to the throne. Each of us must learn the responsibility of the throne which we, as individuals, will inherit someday, as well as the principle by which the King, Our Father, governs all His subjects.


Sri Paul Twitchell
The Flute of God

None of us differ as beings in this universe in the amount of power we possess-our only difference is the amount of power we realize we have, and use. Until man realizes this and masters himself he cannot hope to exert influence beyond himself. Unfoldment can be swift or slow; it depends upon the realization of the power within, and this takes us back to the point made on a previous page. That is, Spirit can give us only what we take. This is the way of the ECK power in this universe, and there is no other way. It depends upon our consciousness to act in this manner, not by an act of violence or strong determination of the will.
. Realization in the consciousness is very necessary; we must know that it is there before it appears to us.
. Does this seem too simple? In truth, it is simple. There is no complexity in it at all. It is being certain of receiving. The act of knowing that it is there is the greatest and most important thing in the world. For this is how awareness is brought about.


Sri Paul Twitchell
The Flute of God

Soul's whole purpose for being in this world is to find divine love. People come to the teachings of ECK for a number of reasons. Some come for the phenomenal things, like the gift of prophecy. They want to learn Soul Travel, which is a spiritual art. Or they want the gift of healing.
. But those who are farther ahead spiritually come to ECK with the desire to find love, divine love. In fact, before they find ECK, they have often asked, "Show me how to find love." Then they find ECK .
. This is not to say that people in other paths don't do the same thing in their particular religion. God has established all religions because each religion serves a purpose. Each religion fills the needs of a certain group of Souls. And within each religion, there are those who are more advanced spiritually and those who are just starting out on the spiritual path.
. This accounts for the wide range of behavior in people. Just because someone is a Christian is no guarantee that person will be an ethical and morally upright person. Just because a person is an ECKist offers no similar guarantee. In ECK , we also have people who are far advanced spiritually and others who are just beginning the spiritual path. But for whatever reason a person chooses a certain religion, it answers that Soul's spiritual needs of the day. And this day may last a lifetime; it may last several lifetimes. It may last a year or only a week.
. The point is, we are where we belong in our state of consciousness.


The Secret of Love
Sri Harold Klemp
The Mahanta the Living ECK Master

One of the ECK members remembered all the times I'd talked about my daughter getting interested in softball. She was a tiny tot back then - eight or nine years old.
. Now she's just turned twenty-one. Time goes so fast. One day, they're five. Then they're nine. Suddenly, they're twenty-one. At the age of fourteen, she was saying she couldn't wait for her fifteenth birthday because she'd be a grown woman. You want to laugh when you hear somebody just starting in the teen years saying, "Well, I'm now a full - grown adult." when you get to be about my age, in the fifties, you look back and say, "I knew so much then. And now there's so much more to know than I could even begin to know. What a great life."
. But when you're that young, you think you know it all. When you get older - if you have any sense at all, if life has beaten you around any bit at all - you just say, "I'm grateful for what I have."
. You find that love comes in small ways and small places. And those ways and places are just as precious as when love comes in a big wave.
. Life is a series of these experiences all put together: the big, the little, the important, the unimportant. So we go through this journey of Soul, becoming more godlike in wisdom and in divine love - that is, of course, if we are moving forward spiritually.


The Secret of Love
Sri Harold Klemp
The Mahanta the Living ECK Master

If you're going to walk a spiritual path or join a religion, you should enjoy it. You put yourself into it - whether you're a Catholic or Lutheran or Pentecostal or an ECKist. If you're going to be on the team, be a good team member. Go out and practice. Do whatever your church says is the right thing to do for your religion to grow spiritually.
. Soul is Soul, and Soul has this desire to go home to God. This is the quest for happiness that people misunderstand today. They want to be happy, and so they take the path of pleasure. But it is all necessary for the total experience of Soul. Because at the end of the line, with complete experience, each of you will then become a Co-worker with God.


The Secret of Love
Sri Harold Klemp
The Mahanta the Living ECK Master

How to Make Good Decisions

Everyone wants to make good decisions. But how do you know when you are being guided by the ECK or by the mind? Here's a simple way to tell.

If guided by ECK, you are more likely to change your mind when new information comes along. You're quicker to admit that an earlier decision based on sketchy information needs to change.

The mind has the power to make you believe you are always right. That's why a head-strong person acts so smart. He thinks he's always right, though he's often wrong.

—Sri Harold Klemp
The Spiritual Exercises of ECK

Thanksgiving is one of the attributes or qualities that come to the person who loves God. To serve others is to love others, and to love others is to serve others.


The Secret of Love
Sri Harold Klemp
The Mahanta the Living ECK Master

Whether it's knowledge of lawn care or knowledge of spiritual laws or spiritual beliefs or anything else, we don't have a right to push our beliefs upon anyone else. Nor does anyone else have the right to push their beliefs on us. This is part of the freedom of Soul.
. God made so many religions so there would be one for every person who wanted one. Every person and every group of people has uniquely different beliefs.
. I often think of some of the different groups of Lutherans. An outsider looks at them and says, "There differences in belief are so slight, it makes one wonder why they aren't all just one big group. "But that's how it is. There are many, many different levels of consciousness in a society, in the world. The divine order has provided a way for each group or each individual to rise to their own level. This is the reason for the different religions on earth.


The Secret of Love
Sri Harold Klemp
The Mahanta the Living ECK Master

The ECK Way to Pray

There are a lot of people who pray to God in the wrong way. They want others to do things their way, so they use prayer to control others and bring about their own wishes. It's like a basketball team praying together before a game: "Dear God, help us win." Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the court the other guys are busy doing the same thing. What kind of prayer is that?

When you ask God for help, you can say, "I am aware of the situation and the problem, and I want your help in whatever way you see fit." This is the attitude of the ECKist. You look to see what you, yourself, can do to make the thing work; how you can overcome your own problem.

When you practice this, you are learning, unfolding, getting experience to become a mature Soul—someone fit to be a Co-worker with God.

—Sri Harold Klemp
The Spiritual Exercises of ECK

Being in ECK involves self-responsibility. No one cares if you do the spiritual exercises or if you don't.
. But if you care about yourself, you should care whether you do them. Because you have this spiritual tool to rise in consciousness so that instead of being a victim of life - as so many people wrongly believe they are - you will have choices.
. The choices don't just happen. You make them. If you make a series of right choices, they will spiritualize you. In ECK , this upliftment comes through the Spiritual Exercises of ECK. This is all I have to offer you.
. My talks go several different ways, and so do the writings. Some of them are instructive where I give actual rules; Do this or that if you want to accomplish this or that. But many of the talks are purely for inspiration. Because as Soul, you have the God-knowledge within you. My main job is to awaken the knowledge and love for the divine things that are already in your heart. You are Soul. You are a child of God.
. And your spiritual destiny is to become a Co-worker with God, to spread divine love to all those around you.


The Secret of Love
Sri Harold Klemp
The Mahanta the Living ECK Master