In the cult, the guru becomes a crucible for life-power. That life-power is experienced as a surge of vitality, or what was constantly spoken of in Aum as “energy.” One’s previously deadened life now has vigor and purpose, even if the vigor and purpose are borrowed from the guru. That life-power becomes bound up with larger spiritual forces, that is, with a fierce sense of death-defying immortality. This aspect was the most compelling feature of Asahara’s hold on his disciples. The charisma that a guru like him is always said to possess is usually described with phrases like “magnetic attractiveness” or a “naked capacity of mustering assent.” But at the heart of charisma is the leader’s ability to instill and sustain feelings of vitality and immortality, feelings that reach into the core of each disciple’s often wounded, always questing self, while propelling that self beyond itself. Such feelings can be as fragile as they are psychologically explosive.
In this book Asahara, the guru, will be everywhere, most of all inhabiting, even in the wake of Aum’s violence, the minds of the disciples I interviewed. At the same time he will be nowhere, his guruism a phantom force, wavering between hyperreality and nothingness.
