ABSTRACT
Here I am, in ‘The Field’ again, trying to make sense of what’s going on. Despite being in my native country, I feel nearly as overwhelmed as when I first arrived in India in 1990. Walking around at the opulent Palmer House Hotel in Chicago, peering into meeting rooms and watching the people rushing in all directions, it’s hard to take it all in. The thick program for the second Parliament of the World’s Religions-100 years after the first-is \astonishing in its breadth. In addition to lectures and films, there are well over fifty exhibitors offering courses, books, spiritual vacations, or simply lifestyle changes for the amassed participants. At the opening ceremonies a few days ago, the theme of unity and the fact that the Earth is ‘the global home of one family,’ as Swami Chidananda of the Divine Life Society in Rishikesh had put it in his address of the previous day, was everybody’s mantra. Needing to get away from all of the talk, I wander off to a yoga demonstration by a man wearing the latest fashions in Patagonia outdoor wear and Teva sandals. Austrian by birth, he had grown up in England, Germany, and America, spent three years in India, of which a substantial part included Rishikesh as a home base, and then had come back to America to start a yoga school in Chicago; by the look of his clothes it was doing rather well.
