He was brought up in the Mormon faith, As a youth, he attended the local LDS church's Young Men's Mutual Improvement Association and occasionally gave inspirational "three-minute talks".
Hinkins described his childhood as "typical", distinguished only by an early belief that he could spot auras, colorful fields that some people believe surround the human body.
Hinkins maintained that humans are locked in an eternal cycle of reincarnation and karma, and can only escape by ascending from Earth's negative realms into "a totally positive state of being" called "soul consciousness."
"[1] In 1968, five years after his coma, Hinkins began to hold seminars as an independent spiritual teacher in homes of friends in Santa Barbara and Thousand Oaks.
The demand for his seminars grew, until in 1971, Hinkins resigned from his job as a high school English teacher and formally incorporated the Church of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness.
[23][24] In the 1980s and early 1990s, several former members of MSIA accused Hinkins of various crimes and abuses, including high-tech charlatanism, the sexual coercion of young male staffers, brainwashing and intimidation, and plagiarism.
These allegations, as well as the revelation of the high-profile Arianna Huffington's association with the group, led to a series of investigations by publications such as People, Playboy, the Los Angeles Times and Vanity Fair.
[25]Dissidents in the organization say Hinkins employed covert listening devices at MSIA's Santa Monica headquarters to support his claim of possessing extrasensory perception.
"[8] Former MSIA member Terry O'Shaughnessy described to the Los Angeles Times how, in the course of installing sound equipment he and a co-worker found tiny microphones hidden in every room of the Insight headquarters.
[26] O'Shaughnessy's wife, Susan, recounted that former MSIA member Michael Hesse told her he had installed recording devices on the telephones at the Insight headquarters.
The Whitmores claim that MSIA members had been led to believe that Hinkins had taken a vow of celibacy, and therefore did not question the series of attractive young men that stayed in his house.
[8] Former MSIA members charge that staffers who submitted to their leader's sexual advances were promoted to positions of authority and were praised by Hinkins for their spiritual qualities.
[8] Wesley Whitmore, Wendell's twin brother and also former MSIA staffer, recalls that in "contrast to his public behavior, Hinkins in private was often angry, vindictive and bizarre, occasionally shouting that he was under attack from negative forces".
She claims that Hinkins would declare that people who questioned him had placed themselves "under the Kal (a devil-like spirit) power and its field of negativity, known as the Red Monk," and would essentially be warning that members who associated with defectors risked spiritual disaster.
seemed to me to be a scare tactic to keep people from talking to each other," said David Welles, a chiropractor who worked at the John-Roger Foundation's holistic health center before leaving the movement in 1984.
[26] The Whitmores also claim that after they left MSIA, their cars were vandalized, they received obscene letters accusing them of homosexuality, and phone calls in which threats were made on their lives.
This included setting up a front organization called the "Coalition for Civil and Spiritual Rights", an act which was eventually traced directly back to Hinkins.
Many of these have centered on the reportedly close similarity between certain MSIA materials and doctrine and that of Paul Twitchell's Eckankar, known prior to 1985 as "The Ancient Science of Soul Travel".
Hinkins also appears to have clearly plagiarized in his work Affirmations (1981) from Florence Scovel Shinn's book, The Game of Life and How to Play It (DeVorss & Company, 1925).
McWilliams claimed, among other things, that he was the sole author of the highly successful Life 101 and several subsequent books purportedly coauthored by Hinkins (as "John-Roger"), who was his spiritual adviser and church leader at the time.
[30][31][32] Shortly after the publicized scandals that rocked MSIA during 1988 Hinkins announced that he had passed the "keys" to the Mystical Traveler Consciousness to protégé John Morton.