MSIA also offers its students a twelve-year study support subscription called Soul Awareness Discourses.

Topics covered expose students to the teachings of MSIA and educate them to stay focused on their individual spiritual practices and service to others.

While it is legally incorporated as a church and provides tools and techniques for Soul transcendence for those who are looking for them, it prohibits members from evangelizing; it spreads primarily by word of mouth.

He then moved to San Francisco to work as an insurance claims adjuster before getting a job teaching English at Rosemead High School in a suburb of Los Angeles.

In late 1963, Hinkins underwent a kidney stone surgery, which led to a nine-day coma and near-death experience.

Shortly after this, Hinkins visited two trance-channelers and claimed to have encountered a higher consciousness named 'John within himself', and began referring to himself as John-Roger.

In his book McWilliams asserts that Hinkins suffered from narcissistic personality disorder, possibly due to his 1963 coma.

"[7] In his book The Missionary Position author Christopher Hitchens criticizes both Mother Teresa and John-Roger for a staged photo shoot where the two posed together in a studio with a blank backdrop.

Hitchens questions the ethics of such a shoot, as well as Mother Teresa for accepting US$10,000 as part of an "Integrity Award" from MSIA, which he describes as having been "exposed in print as corrupt and fanatical".

Both the movement and its founder have been through alleged scandals (published in People Magazine and the Los Angeles Times among other publications) suggesting financial improprieties as well as sexual misconduct by Hinkins.