I could come up with a better religion than this..

From a book review in the New York Times, about a young-ish enlightenment seeking trekker (and internet figure) who disappeared in a Himalayan valley knows for its trekker disappearances:

What animates Shetler? We learn that he’s the child of divorce, on the one hand having a father whose own experiences in India heavily influenced Shetler (as did their father-and-teenage-son partaking of hallucinogens) and a mother whose spiritual influence can be attributed to the Hindu-inflected Eckankar religion, birthed in the 1960s by Paul Twitchell, a onetime colleague of L. Ron Hubbard, promoting “soul travel,” the chanting of the word “Hu,” and a belief system said to have begun when an essence known as Gakko came to Earth six million years ago from the city of Retz on Venus.

I have heard of Eckankar, but never bothered reading up on its esoteric beliefs.