ECKANKAR, Author at ECKANKAR Hub site

Why Do People Commit Suicide?

My husband killed himself. I feel great pain and loneliness, and so do my children. Can you help me understand why my husband did this and what I can do to heal? Why do people commit suicide?

Life simply becomes too much of a burden for some because they look for spiritual love but can’t find it. They feel they have no choice but to end the impasse by taking their own life.

Your husband is in a class now so he can get a fuller understanding of the privilege of coming into a physical body for spiritual maturity. He did not understand this. This does not mean he’s put in some kind of hell for a certain time, because the spiritual structure is designed to educate, rather than punish, those people who harm themselves by suicide.

The greatest misunderstanding is thinking that one needs to withdraw from life in order to be a spiritual giant and successful with the God Consciousness. Nothing could be further from the truth.

One can always take his life, of course. This does not lead to God, but it leads back to a baby body almost immediately. Then all the tests and trials start over again until Soul comes to know what it means to become a Coworker with God. When people write me about this, I usually tell them to seek a trained, licensed counselor who can help them understand some of the responsibilities that go along with living.

All too often a person has damaged himself emotionally and mentally through austerities before he found the path of Eᴄᴋᴀɴᴋᴀʀ, the spiritual way that teaches balance and moderation in all departments of living. By then, their only real aid must come through licensed medical and counseling practitioners.

Self-destruction is not the way. How can one leave the worlds of God?

—Sri Harold Klemp

Overcoming the Loss of a Loved One

Grief Support

My grandmother passed away recently. I need a way to not be sad yet always have her with me. I don’t want to have to think about her passing away. Can you write back to me about this?

In our home, Mother had a plaque on the wall that simply said, “Time heals all wounds.” And it does. It’s likely that you can see the same about your feelings now about your grandmother passing away several months ago.

There is no quick, easy answer about how to overcome the pain of separation from a loved one. But, before long, the pain does get less. Often it goes completely away.

Life offers all of us an unending chain of joy and sorrow. Know that everything is in its rightful place, that a door opens for every one that is shut. Love who you are, what you do, and those who are dear to you. Don’t ever take your family for granted.

I wish I had some great wisdom to give you. The closest anyone can come is to say, “You exist because God loves you.” There is wonder and beauty in that.

—Sri Harold Klemp

Grief: The Passing of a Mate

Grief Support

I am sixty-seven years old, not in the best of health, and I am very depressed. Five months ago, I lost my husband after forty-six years of marriage. We had eight children and a very full life together.

I am so lost and just can’t seem to function. I am a Catholic and always have been strong in my faith in God, but I do not know how to cope anymore. My daughter is an ECKist and feels you can be of some help for me.

Thank you for your letter. No one else can fully understand the loss of a husband of forty-six years, but my love and concern are with you in your present state of unhappiness.

If your health allows, try to help other people in some way as a volunteer. You must do that to fill the awful loneliness inside you. Have young children you like near you. Some children can be a trial to be around, so be with a loving, giving child (as a babysitter, perhaps).

Sometimes it just helps to listen to others who need a friendly ear. Is there some sort of volunteer work you can do for your church? You need to help others again even as you were there for your husband.

I feel so helpless in the face of your grief and loss, because there is no easy way to ever replace someone who’s become so dear to us as life itself. But if you can find a way to help others, at least a little of your sorrow will lift and the love of God will find you.

—Sri Harold Klemp

How Were People Created?

Mysteries of the Beyond

Who was the first person? How did that person get here?

The first person had no name. Speech, of course, had not developed yet, because names are like labels that people create to call one and not another. So, speech takes people, more than one. Even more than two or three or four, or so.

It took a long time before people dreamed up names.

How did the first person get here?

To get the answer, we ask, “So how did the first two people, or more, come into bodies in the high Mental Plane?” (Everything here comes in twos.) They materialized. It was a bit like on the TV show Star Trek, where explorers in spaceships beam down to a planet.

They just seem to appear as if by magic. Yet there are laws of science at work that allow for an orderly transfer of the atoms that make up a human body.

That’s to say, people today have a lot to learn about the laws of science. But the knowledge is growing by tiny steps.

The first people on each plane were created by the Holy Spirit, the ECK, through the arts and sciences of spiritual workers on the plane above. So people on the Astral Plane had the responsibility of seeing to the ways and means of transferring Astral Plane people to the Physical Plane.

—Sri Harold Klemp

Where Did ECKANKAR Begin?

Mysteries of the Beyond

Where or in what country did Eᴄᴋᴀɴᴋᴀʀ begin?

In ancient times, the Living ECK Master gave the ECK teachings to his disciples by word of mouth. Rama was among the first of these Masters. The Shariyat-Ki-Sugmad says he came from the forests of northern Germany.

So where did Eᴄᴋᴀɴᴋᴀʀ begin?

Even before Rama, the ECK teachings were in Atlantis and Lemuria. Modern scholars scoff at the existence of those two lost continents, so we don’t talk much about them in Eᴄᴋᴀɴᴋᴀʀ today. Yet proof does exist. Under the waters off the southeastern part of the United States are huge stone blocks in the shape of a wall or an ancient road. Somebody put them there a long time ago, when that part of the ocean was above water.

—Sri Harold Klemp

The ECK Masters of Atlantis

Mysteries of the Beyond

How long have the ECK Masters been here on Earth helping people?

The first spiritual teachings that man saw in the modern historical era arose from India. This old land, in turn, had its wise men learning the tenets of wisdom at the feet of the ECK Masters of Atlantis. These ancient spiritual travelers included such stalwarts as Decates, Castrog, and Supaku.

India became heir apparent to the arcane knowledge once centered in Atlantis before its destruction by fire and water as correctly prophesied by Castrog. The king-priests, called the Tat Tsoks because of their worship of the supreme Deity known as Tat, ignored Castrog’s warnings about the dangers of black magic. They unwittingly disturbed the natural magnetic forces of the land and doomed it to a grave beneath the dark ocean waters.

The old men of India passed the light of ECK knowledge to new nations that formed after the third worldwide cataclysm of earthquakes and volcanoes that broke up the islands and continents that had been Atlantis. The Egyptians, fond of the mysteries, developed the cult of Isis and Osiris, as well as a simplified but jumbled understanding of the ECK force that they personified in Horus, the sky god.

The Greeks, mere children to both the Hindus and Egyptians in the gathering of the secret laws, learned of the dim history of lost Atlantis only after Solon, Greek patriarch and lawgiver, made a visit to the Egyptian wise men as late as the sixth century BC.

The ECK Stream of consciousness sweeps down through layers of cosmic regions and worlds until Its perpetual message is brought to people on Earth by Its chief agent, the Mᴀʜᴀɴᴛᴀ, the Living ECK Master. The world is never without him, for the line of ECK Adepts originated before the first Aryan people were placed here by colonist from Jupiter.

The Mᴀʜᴀɴᴛᴀ appears with renewed splendor in every age and walks among people today.

—Sri Harold Klemp