Self-Realization Fellowship, a yoga meditation movement which...

Self-Realization Fellowship, a yoga meditation movement which established headquarters atop Los Angeles’ Mt. Washington in 1925, continues to “thrive” and often benefits from cyclical periods of American interest in Eastern religious concepts, according to a San Diego researcher.

The fellowship’s literature sales soared when public attention was focused on actress Shirley MacLaine’s accounts of her “past lives” and other spiritual experiences, said sociologist Jane Dillon of the University of California, San Diego.

After a four-year study of the group, Dillon read two papers on the fellowship recently in Salt Lake City at the annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.

A fellowship spokesman, Bruce Mars, said that MacLaine’s beliefs and the fellowship’s do not necessarily coincide, but he agreed that the organization receives more inquiries at times of heightened curiosity about reincarnation and other concepts of spiritual identity.

The fellowship, best known in the Los Angeles area for its Lake Shrine gardens and temple in Pacific Palisades, has 300 centers worldwide but is strongest in Southern California where it has additional temples in Hollywood, Fullerton, Encinitas and San Diego. About 250 people are in its monastic order. Dillon and Mars said “hundreds of thousands” of lay people have been initiated in the yoga discipline introduced in this country by founder Paramahansa Yogananda, who died in 1952.

The annual world convocation in Los Angeles has drawn about 3,000 devotees each of the last three years.

Dillon said the movement is nearing a major turning point. For more than three decades the fellowship’s president has been Sri Daya Mata, who is revered by many disciples as a saint, Dillon said. But she is now 75 years old and the next president is likely to be someone who did not know the founding guru personally, Dillon said.

Dillon contended that fellowship leaders “have intentionally slowed growth” until a new administration is in place, but Mars said he had no evidence of that. “It’s been ‘all systems go’ as far as I know,” he said.

ETHICS

Walter A. Zelman, executive director of California Common Cause, will speak on ethical issues in national and local government Friday after the 8 p.m. services at Kehillath Israel in Pacific Palisades. Described as an “ethical watchdog” for the last 12 years, Zelman has been on the Los Angeles County Bar Assn.’s Fair Judicial Elections Practices Committee and is a commissioner of the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power.

MEETINGS

The 41st annual Ministers’ Convocation at the School of Theology at Claremont Monday and Tuesday will feature Old Testament Prof. Walter Brueggemann of Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Ga.; religious educator Thomas Groome of Boston College and retired United Methodist Bishop Leontine Kelly. Registration, which begins at 8 a.m. Monday, is $18.

Religious authority in changing times is the general topic of the annual Catholic-Jewish Women’s Conference to be held Sunday at Mount St. Mary’s College in West Los Angeles. Sister Magdalen Coughlin, immediate past president of the college, is the morning speaker; Rabbi Carole Meyers of Glendale’s Temple Sinai will speak at the afternoon session.

DATES

Evangelical social activist Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourners magazine, will preach on social justice themes at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Holman United Methodist Church in Los Angeles. Also participating will be Pastor James Lawson, a notable civil rights leader himself, and composer-pianist Ken Medema, who is on an eight-city, “Let Justice Roll” tour with Wallis.

The Very Rev. Colin Jones, Anglican dean of the Cape Town Cathedral in South Africa, will give a public talk at 8 p.m. Tuesday at All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena. Jones’ cathedral has been the focal point for several anti-apartheid protests in recent months.