A Tour of 'Benares on the Charles'

America is a land of invention, with a long tradition of the pioneer spirit of doing-it-yourself. Nowhere is this creative genius clearer than in the field of religion, for in its short life as a nation America has yielded up Mormans and Pentecostals, Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses and Christian Scientists, Theosophists and Transcendentalists. Immigrants from all over the world have brought their native faiths to the U.S., further increasing the potency of the mixture. But at no time in the nation's history have there been so many and varied spiritual practices, some wholly new, some newly interpreted in modern terms, competing for the allegiance and support of American seekers.

According to popular myth, however, you must go to California or Colorado to find a community thoroughly steeped in "alternative consciousness." Not true. Right here in Cambridge and Boston there are enough swamis for a softball team. Harvey Cox, Gallagher Professor of Divinity, said in his book Turning East that Cambridge is so full of holy men it should be rechristened the "Benares-on-the-Charles." Just walking through the Square you can hear an impassioned plea for a peculiar form of world peace from a member of the Unification Church, sample being "processed" by Scientology aficionados, and glance at a poster asking "have you seen the Lenticular Clouds today?" which discusses the conscious, playful clouds that have "been appearing" lately. If you head for a little respite to a quiet lunch spot, it may turn out to be run by white-turbanned members of the Happy, Healthy, Holy Organization.

Where did these groups, as well as the assorted Sufis, Bahais, Buddhists, Hare Krishnas, occultists, psychics, Transcendental Meditators, and natural healers, come from? What is their appeal? What is their message? I visited a number of spiritual centers, healing clinics, health food stores and bookshops in search of The Answer. The groups discussed should be considered illustrative but not necessarily typical.

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Soul-Joy in Body-Fort Health Foods is a small but colorful storefront set amid the continuous wall of dull brick that makes up Beacon Hill's Charles Street. Behind the counter, Marion Lennihan, dressed in a flowing yellow sarong, finishes cutting up enough tofu and egg salad sandwiches for the expected lunchtime rush from nearby Mass General Hospital. Lennihan is a disciple of Sri Chinmoy, an Indian teacher who arrived in the U.S. in 1964 and began attracting followers soon after. Several pictures of the guru hang on the wall, showing Chinmoy playing tennis, jogging, and sitting on a ledge smiling out at the world with a beatific air.

Chinmoy "comes out of the Hindu tradition, but he isn't very Hindu now, he's more universal, very Western," Lennihan explains. Chinmoy teaches "heart-centered" meditation, an "easy, natural form," she continues. "Mind is fearful, it panics if you get too 'cosmic,' but heart is peace, love, trusting. The soul is throughout the body but hangs out more, so to speak, at the heart."

There are 30 Chinmoy followers in the Boston area, including five or six Harvard-Radcliffe students, but hundreds more are exposed to him through free meditation classes, concerts and art exhibits. Chinmoy himself is based in New York, where he leads meditations for diplomats and clerks at the United Nations. There are nearly 20 Chinmoy centers in the U.S. and 40 others in nations such as Germany, Japan, Canada, Iceland and Australia.

For the last two years, Chinmoy has taken up running as an active meditative discipline well adapted to an outer-directed West. In March 1979 he ran his first marathon in San Francisco (a leisurely 4:31) and now encourages all disciple to run at least two miles a day. Chinmoy himself, according to Lennihan, "is in a state of constant meditation," and doesn't have to meditate formally, "like any illuminated master."

Lennihan was a Radcliffe senior when she took her first meditation class with the Chinmoy group six years ago. Earlier the turmoil of the widening war in Indochina and the student strikes led her to take a year off to explore different forms of yoga and meditation. "I was into radical politics, women's liberation. It was a time of great searching, and I was looking to help make the world better," she says. "For each person looking, there's one kind of answer and for me this was it, I just knew it." She continued to live and work outside the center but joined in group activities, as do almost all Chinmoy followers.

"While we have much to learn from the East, Sri Chinmoy also stresses Western values of action, productivity," she says. "He really, really respects Harvard as the pinnacle of Western culture, that's why he's donated so much to the University." Chinmoy has given 300 works to the Divinity School library, as well as music and paintings, and his followers continue to hold regular meditation classes in Phillips Brooks House. Earlier this year several hundred people attended his "Weekend Workshops in Self-Awareness" at the Science Center. Besides the health food store, Chinmoy group members will soon open a gift shop and a chocolate store. Even in a recession, the market for Eastern wisdom is strong.

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John Hollingsworth does "rebirthing," a method of "releasing old patterns" by dealing with long-suppressed aspects of the trauma of birth. Leonard Orr discovered the technique in California and taught people to lie face down in a hot tub, breathing through a snorkel and maintaining a calm mindset. "After 20 to 25 minutes they'd go into a kind of fetal position and their breath would get very labored," Hollingsworth explains. This typically led to an ecstatic "rebirth experience" which was for many people "too powerful, too much of an accelerated growth." Hollingsworth now uses a "dry rebirthing technique" involving special breathing exercises that make it easier for the client to "integrate" the experience into his life.

"I create an incredibly safe, trusting environment. At home I use an eight foot by ten foot box with four inches of foam and soft music playing through speakers," he says. "The main question is, are you really doing exactly what you want to be doing every moment of your life? The sessions move through emotions, diet, wardrobe, home environment--you pick up every single thing in the house and ask 'Do I have a totally alive relation to you?'--job environment, and finally relationships. We don't replace old dogma with new dogma, we don't tell them how to live their lives," he adds.

Besides making dozens of rebirthing house-calls--"you can't pull clients into Jamaica Plain"--Hollingsworth spends his time establishing the Institute for Wholistic Living, planned as a center for natural healing that will bring together under one roof experts in "diet, yoga, meditation, massage, herbalism, aura reading, Gestalt and Polarity Therapy, the Bach flower remedies and primal scream, as well as a psychic or two." After that, Hollingsworth hopes to organize a National Guide of Alternative Health Practitioners to "try to put a dent in the American Medical Association's monopoly on healing."

Hollingsworth's background is eclectic. "When I was 11 my dad asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I said 'psychiatrist.' A couple of years later he asked again and I said 'priest.' Now I've sort of combined them." After deciding in four months at Hampshire College that "there was nothing to learn in college, he studied primal scream for a year, then took classes in New for a year, then took classes in New York with a healer. He almost made a pilgrimage to India, but instead trekked across North America visiting healing centers in places like Vancouver, Canada, and Berkeley, Calif. He worked for a while in the psychedelic ward of the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, helping people deal with bad trips and good. Back in Boston, he studied macrobiotics and the "Fourth Way of Healing"--a method derived from the esoteric teachings of the mystic Gurdjieff--as well as Silva Mind Control. In between Hollingsworth also slipped in four years of psychoanalysis and many hours of Zen practice in San Francisco and Northampton, Mass. The upshot of all that?

"Methods are for madmen; I strive to become a healing presence," he says. "Healing exists every second of our lives on planet earth. and we merely try to remove the blinders keeping people from it."

More conventional techniques have their place too: "Western medicine is a limited healing system, as is mine," he says. "I can't mend a broken bone. But today's grad schools are turning out psychotechnicians who see people as objects, children as objects to be raised, adults as objects to be actualized, realized, healed, fixed. But that doesn't work, for humans are a constantly changing, moment-to-moment process. You can't buy healing."

Still, each three-hour rebirthing session costs $40 and a series of eight to ten runs into the hundreds of dollars. "I feel a little strange taking money for it, but I do it full-time, sometimes from seven in the morning to when I go to sleep, and I have to eat," he says. "We have to be careful to make sure this healing is not just available to the middle class. When I set up the healing center, one day a week will be a free clinic for those who can't afford to pay. I'm just a struggling New Age entrepreneur myself."

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A comfortable wooden frame house on a quiet, tree-lined street about a half-mile south of the Harvard football stadium is the setting for the Maitreya World Foundation. Inside are purple soft carpets, pillows for meditation, incense, and pictures and statutes of Buddhas and Jesuses and elephant-faced Indian gods. The foundation used to be called the Ashram of the World Mother but "that looked too culty, so we adopted a broader name," Mata Maitreya, the ashram's teacher, explains. "I shouldn't be the only world mother. This is a symbol. I'll be happy if every woman in the world called herself that and did some of the work."

Mata was a psychotherapist before she left the U.S. in 1969 for India, to pursue her spiritual evolution more intensively. She spent seven years there, studying under many teachers and traveling extensively until she discovered her role in the world.

As an old catalog puts its, "Mata Maitreya and specially trained students who reside at the ashram are co-workers and messengers of the Great White Brotherhood, thus called because it is dedicated to the pure White Light of Truth and Perfection." The Brotherhood, also called the Ascended Masters or the Spiritual Hierarchy, are the highly evolved souls who guide Earth's destiny, or so the theory goes. From time to time they enter the world as the great prophets and religious teachers, and sometime in the future one of these souls will return as Maitreya, the Buddha of salvation, sometimes equated with Jesus' second coming.

"We stopped using the words Great White Brotherhood because of the racist and sexist implications," Mata, clad in simple white cloth pants and shirt with a crystal cross around her neck and sandals on her feet, explains. "Then people began to freak on the word hierarchy. But that's how everything run, it is the world government. There are students and teachers, lower and higher teachers, the high masters, the gods, The One."

Usually Mata teaches classes on the spiritual role of the individual and the world as well as on meditation and holistic healing, but the foundation is currently in "a transitional phase" and is planning on relocating within a month or two, so things are at a lull. Most of the people who find out about the group and show up are already "Initiates of the Hierarchy," Mata says. "I don't blow their minds and tell them who they were in previous lives, but I may tell the class as a whole that everyone here is an Initiate."

Right now the only other person at the house is Joshua Estrada, a former student of Mata's who married her one year ago and whose computer job provides all the financial support for the foundation. Estrada went to MIT for a year before taking time off to "look into communities, spiritual things, healing." Once he met Mata, his search was over. Nowadays, he's trying to use computer technology to create a national network of spiritual groups.

"When the time comes, it'll click," Mata says. "It's beginning now. Darkness has been won over in the higher planes, but it has to work itself out down here. Hierarchy will win this struggle although there may be a difficult time ahead."

Mata explains that she is in constant telepathic communication with the Masters. "But you have to be careful when someone says they are psychically attuned to messages because they can still get things wrong. One woman said Buddha and Jesus were the same person. Well, I happen to know they weren't. Krishna and Jesus were the same, but Buddha was another great soul."

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The Maitreya Foundation did not conceive the idea of the Hierarchy. The Theophical Society, founded in 1875 as one of the first groups to look to the East for spiritual wisdom, also understands things this way. Located down the block from some Boston University dorms and the Ramakrishna Vedanat Society, which entered the U.S. at the time of the 1893 World Parliament of Religion in Chicago, the Theosophical Society has a broader age range than most similar groups and encourages members to remain in their own religion. The society's three objectives, displayed for all on a poster hung in the Quest bookstore downstairs, are to "form a nucleus of the universal brotherhood of humanity... to encourage the study of comparative religions, philosophy and science, and to investigate the unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in man."

Helen Petrovna Blavatsky, Russian psychic, was the force behind Theosophy's establishment. "For years and years the ancient wisdom was preserved in the mystery schools, mainly through esoteric teachings and Eastern wisdom," Aloyse Hume, a member of the Boston group since the late 1960s, explains. "Blavatsky in her travels spent seven years in a Tibetan monetary and she was asked to go out and head up this experiment and make available this information." Evidently satisfied with the early progress of the "experiment," the Hierarchy continued to transmit the ancient wisdom, according to Theosophy.

The current explosion of interest in the East pleases the society, but at the same time "many groups today take only a partial view of things while we see ourselves as offering an integrated whole," Catherine Holden, president of the Boston chapter, says. "Some people call us conservative, but we stand for balance and moderation in the use of esoteric knowledge. We teach meditation, but we don't play around with kundalini fire and things like that."

Besides the bookstore and a lay healing group, the society offers numerous classes. One week's schedule included parapsychology, Swedish massage, meditation, the seven bodies, esoteric astrology and vibrant earth. One hundred dues-paying members help sustain the Boston group, and there are lodges in 52 nations and two-thirds of the American states, with the international headquarters in south India.

There are hundreds more such groups, some tiny and short-lived, others worldwide networks with generations of growth behind them. Down on the South Shore, members of the Nichiren Shoshu Academy, an offshoot of a 13th century Japanese Buddhist sect, pursue enlightenment by frequent chanting of Nam Myoho Renge Kyo. In Allston, Members of the Cambridge Zen Center (a perfect koan: why is the Cambridge Center in Allston?) meet for chanting of the Heart Sutra, talks on the way of Buddha, and "just sitting." The Bahais, a group formed in Persia and brought to the U.S. in 1900, and the Sufis, who come out of the mystical Islamic tradition, try in their own ways to seek "the universal principles" behind all religions and bring on the "New Era" of world spirituality. Several Tibetan Buddhist groups ply their trade, the biggest being the Boylston Street Dharmadatu, connected to Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the founder of the Naropa Institute in Boulder. The Hare Krishnas have a communal house on Commonwealth Ave., and members of Unification Church and Divine Light Mission also have local ashrams. Scientology operates a mission and consults for a school in Cambridge. Transcendental Meditation has a large house on Concord Ave. where they teach classes and promote Maharishi International University, "fully accredited education for the Age of Enlightenment." (TM spokesmen asked not to be included in an article on spiritual, religious or healing groups because "we are a science of consciousness, unlike the others.") A quick scan of the phone book also turns up such groups as Eckankar, the I AM Sanctuary, the Integral Yoga Institute and the Church of Cosmic Consciousness. The Sirius commune in Amherst, an offshoot of the Findhorn Community in Scotland that prospered supposedly because of divine guidance, is organizing most of the New England communities into a "network of light."

The incredible diversity of spiritual practices and new understandings in Boston, and across the U.S. and Western Europe, do not make it any easier to settle the perennial questions of humankind, but they do show that the old answers are losing their influence over millions of people, and that many are asking the questions with more insistence than ever. In such an atmosphere, reality is still up for negotiation. If you listen closely, in the background you can hear the sound of one hand clapping