Dingle, Edwin John (1881-1972)

Founder of the Institute of Mentalphysics. He was born April 6, 1881, in Cornwall, England. He became a journalist, and in 1900 he moved to Singapore to cover affairs in the Orient. There he met a teacher from whom he learned meditation and yoga. In 1910 Dingle went to Tibet, where he studied for nine months and reportedly learned pranayama (breathing control), the remembrance of past lives, and other advanced spiritual disciplines. He returned to England to write books on his experiences and published the important Dingle's New Atlas and Commercial Gazetteer of China (1914), which was a standard reference for many years.

In 1921 Dingle settled in Oakland, California. He began his career as a teacher after being asked to lead an informal class on what he had learned from his teachers in Singapore and Tibet. He taught informally for more than a decade before incorporating the Institute of Mentalphysics in 1934. Dingle taught his students out of his belief that the Tibetans had preserved the ancient wisdom of the Aryans, the founders of the Indian, Mediterranean, and Anglo-Saxon cultures. He taught them the disciplines he had learned and advised a vegetarian diet.

Dingle developed a center in Los Angeles, the International Church of the Holy Trinity, where he not only taught classes but sent out a correspondence course to students across North America. He was generally known by his students as Ding Le Mei, his religious name. In 1941 he founded a retreat center in Yucca Valley, California, now the headquarters of the institute. Following his death on January 27, 1972, he was succeeded by Donald L. Waldrop.

Sources:

Dingle, Edwin John. Borderlands of Eternity. Los Angeles: Institute of Mentalphysics, 1939.

——. Breathing Your Way to Youth. Los Angeles: Institute of Mentalphysics, n.d.

——. The Voice of the Logos. Los Angeles: Econolith Press, 1951.