INTEGRAL WORLD MAILING LIST http://www.integralworld.net Newsletter Nr. 658 Amsterdam, May 28th, 2017 STUDYING CULTS - A Forty-Year Reflection - DAVID LANE For the first twenty or so years of my career I concentrated on the study of relatively new religions in India and their impact on cults in North America and elsewhere. My first book was actually completed when I was 20 and over the next couple of years after that I added significantly to it. It started out as a term paper on Eckankar but quickly evolved into a much longer study entitled The Making of a Spiritual Movement: The Untold Story of Paul Twitchell and Eckankar. This caused a major stir in the movement and it has been widely cited for the past four decades, primarily because the book claimed that the founder of Eckankar had plagiarized many of his sacred writings and had lied about his past. After this I co-founded a journal with Brian Walsh called Understanding Cults and Spiritual Movements, which was published over the span of four years. We did critical studies on John-Roger Hinkins and the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness (MSIA), Adi Da, and Sathya Sai Baba, among others. It generated a lot of controversy and at one point my life and others associated with me were threatened by John-Roger Hinkins, who eventually robbed my home in Del Mar, California. Peter McWilliams famous book, LIFE 102: What To Do When Your Guru Sues You has an entire chapter devoted to how John-Roger orchestrated a smear campaign against me and other researchers. Read more: http://www.integralworld.net/lane125.html