The Life and Wisdom of Darwin Gross
Part 6 of 7)
Over time, the strain started taking a toll, and Darwin Gross began to consider stepping down as the primary spiritual focal point of Eckankar. By 1979-1980, he began quietly floating trial balloons regarding the possibility of him stepping aside as the Living Eck Master, turning over that responsibility to someone else, and instead serving as a sort of semi-retired “Master Emeritus”.
As far as I know, such a thing had not been done in modern times. In the annals of Sant Mat, there is no reference of a Living Master turning over the mastership to another and retiring from the position while still maintaining a physical body. Formal transfer of mastership has coincided with the previous master’s death almost immediately thereafter – and there can even be an interregnum (period of public quietude), before the successor begins giving Satsang and offering Initiation.
As a result, there is no modern precedent for what occurred on October 22, 1981, when Darwin Gross passed the spiritual authority to Harold Klemp to lead Eckankar, and then went into semi-retirement in Oregon. For the first year or so this arrangement seemed to work out all right. But by mid-1983, problems were brewing underneath the surface (see “Soul Travelers in the Far Country” by Harold Klemp, and “My Eck Master Affair” by Bernadine Burlin, for fuller accounts)
Since there was no modern precedent for a master to remain living after turning over the mastership, Harold and Darwin appeared to be defining the parameters of their relationship as they went along. Darwin seemed to believe he was entitled to substantive input regarding Eckankar policy, felt that the chelas initiated by him remained under his care (which is consistent with Sant Mat tradition), and that Paul Twitchell had specifically entrusted him to be the custodian of Paul’s writings. Sri Harold apparently felt that Darwin, having made him the new Living Eck Master, should now step into the background and let him (Harold) run the entire show without interference. Like I said, they were, essentially, boundary issues.
In any case, in August of 1983, the Eckankar Board of Trustees had a secret meeting for which Darwin was not invited. At this meeting they decided to remove Darwin and two other board members from any positions of leadership, not only on the Board (Darwin was board president at the time) but in Eckankar in general. When Darwin arrived for the regularly scheduled meeting (as I recall, it was held the next day), he was stripped of any organizational rights or responsibilities and sent packing to Oregon.
Two months later, at the 1983 Worldwide of Eck, not only was Darwin not invited to attend or speak, several of his supporters were also prevented from entering the building. During the seminar, Harold held a special meeting with the Eckankar High Initiates (5th and above), during which all grievances with and charges against Sri Darwin were aired, without Darwin being there to represent and/or defend himself. None of these proceedings were mentioned to the Eckists at large. I was one of the attendees at this seminar and had looked forward to seeing both Darwin Gross and Harold Klemp on the same stage. But Darwin was nowhere to be found.
Less than three months later, in January 1984, Sri Harold sent out a letter to all Eckankar members stating that not only was Darwin no longer a member of Eckankar (major news to me, in and of itself), but he was not even considered any sort of Spiritual Teacher. You might say his stripes had been pulled and, we were told, he had effectively been sent to the spiritual equivalent of Devil’s Island for the crime of “spiritual disobedience”.
Just as there was no precedence for Darwin’s role as a “semi-retired” Teacher, so too was there virtually no precedence whatsoever for Living Teacher to denigrate – much less excommunicate – his own Teacher. Harold Klemp even went so far as to imply that Darwin was a “black magician”, and that to avoid his “negative influence”, good loyal Eckists should remove and/or destroy any of His books, tapes or photos they might have in their homes. In retrospect, it was eerily prescient that this wave of book burning and historical revisionism occurred at the dawning of 1984.
The fallout from this event reached far and wide. A significant percentage of Eckists left the organization between 1983 and 1985. I don’t know the actual numbers, but I once heard that membership dropped from more than 60,000 to between 15,000 and 20,000. While a major portion of these people left the path altogether, some Satsangis decided to follow Darji into the wilderness.
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