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?