"Cult" moves headquarters to Temecula, California

CultNews.com/November 7, 2003

The so-called "Master Path" recently moved its headquarters from Albuquerque, New Mexico to Temecula, California, a small city 50 miles from San Diego.

The group has been called a "cult" and its "master" is "Sri" Gary Olsen.

Olsen and his group are originally from Fargo, North Dakota, but after much negative media attention there they moved to California for the first time.

The group was based in a suburb of Los Angeles in the early 1990s.

"The Master Path is presenting the most evolved teaching on the planet," Olsen once told the press. "It's an esoteric study of the divine...I am...a representative of the divine," he claimed.

But the growth of the Master Path in New Mexico apparently prompted Olsen to later set up his headquarters in Albuquerque, where he held numerous seminars and conferences.

However, it seems that Olsen never really gave up on the "Sunshine State" and once again has moved his base of operations back to California.

Many of his disciples called "chelas" have followed their master and moved to Temecula to be near "Sri Gary."

The Master Path is actually little more than a rip-off of another Neo-Eastern "cult" called Eckankar.

Much of Olsen's writings were plagiarized from the earlier works of Eckankar founder Paul Twitchell.

Members of the Master Path meditate on Olsen's image and seemingly become infatuated with him and dependent upon the group.

Olsen warns in his writings, "Leaving the Master Path is the worst thing any chela could do & without the Master's protection, he runs into all sorts of troubles which would not have happened had he remained with the Master Path."

One Fargo news report carried the headline "The Master Path is a cult that destroys individual self-identity."