It is not true that there is nothing new under the sun. To be sure, the oldest human emotions continue to haunt us. But they do so in new settings with new technology, and that changes everything.
On March 20, 1995, Aum Shinrikyō, a fanatical Japanese religious cult, released sarin, a deadly nerve gas, on five subway trains during Tokyo’s early-morning rush hour. A male cult member boarded each of the trains carrying two or three small plastic bags covered with newspaper and, at an agreed-upon time, removed the newspaper and punctured the bags with a sharpened umbrella tip. On the trains, in the stations where they stopped, and at the station exits, people coughed, choked, experienced convulsions, and collapsed. Eleven were killed and up to five thousand injured. Had Aum succeeded in producing a purer form of the gas, the deaths could have been in the thousands or hundreds of thousands. For sarin, produced originally by the Nazis, is among the most lethal of chemical weapons. Those releasing it on the trains understood themselves to be acting on behalf of their guru and his vast plan for human salvation.
Aum and its leader, Shōkō Asahara, were possessed by visions of the end of the world that are probably as old as death itself. Asahara also held in common with many present-day Christian prophets of biblical world-ending events a belief that Armageddon would be connected to those most secular of “end-time” agents, nuclear warheads or chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction.
But his cult went a step further. It undertook serious efforts to acquire and produce these weapons as part of a self-assigned project of making Armageddon happen. For the first time in history, end-time religious fanaticism allied itself with weapons capable of destroying the world and a group embarked on the mad project of doing just that. Fortunately, much went wrong. After all, it is not so easy to destroy the world. But we have a lot to learn from the attempt.
The impulses that drove Asahara and Aum are by no means unique to him and his group. Rather, Aum was part of a loosely connected, still-developing global subculture of apocalyptic violence—of violence conceived in sweeping terms as a purification and renewal of humankind through the total or near-total destruction of the planet. One can observe these inclinations in varied groups on every continent. Their specific transformative projects may be conceived as religious or political, the violence to be employed either externally directed or suicidal or both at once. One can find certain psychological parallels to Aum Shinrikyō in, for instance, the Jewish fundamentalists who encouraged the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, in Palestinian Hamas suicide bombers, and in Hindu and Muslim fundamentalists who act violently on behalf of claims to ancient sacred places on the Indian subcontinent. But my exploration of Aum led me particularly to the apocalyptic inclinations of American groups like the Charles Manson Family, Heaven’s Gate, and Peoples Temple, as well as the Oklahoma City bombers, Aryan supremacists, and paramilitary survivalists on the radical right. Just as we now take for granted the interconnectedness of the global economic system, so must we learn to do the same for the growing global system of apocalyptic violence. Outbreaks anywhere reverberate everywhere.
Increasingly widespread among ordinary people is the feeling of things going so wrong that only extreme measures can restore virtue and righteousness to society. When the world comes to be experienced as both hateful and dead or dying, a visionary guru can seize on such feelings while promising to replace them with equally absolute love and life-power. Nor are any of us completely free of those inner struggles. The sentiments that created Aum Shinrikyō are part of the spiritual and psychological ambience each of us inhabits day by day.
Apocalyptic violence has been building worldwide over the last half of the twentieth century. Having studied some of the most destructive events of this era, I found much of what Aum did familiar, echoing the totalistic belief systems and end-of-the-world aspirations I had encountered in other versions of the fundamentalist self. I came to see these, in turn, as uneasy reactions to the openness and potential confusions of the “protean” self that history has bequeathed us. I had been concerned with these matters since the mid-1950s, when I first studied “thought reform” (or “brainwashing”) in Communist China and then among American cultic religious groups. I came to recognize the power of a totalized environment for mobilizing individual passions in the creation of fierce, often deeply satisfying expressions of collective energy.
Aum’s obsession with nuclear weapons and with the atomic destruction of Hiroshima in particular connected with interview work I had done in that city in the early 1960s on the psychological effects of the atomic bomb and on the psychology of the survivor. In subsequent work I had explored the dangers of “nuclearism,” the embrace and even deification of nuclear weaponry so that potential agents of mass destruction become a source of security, life-power, and even at times salvation. My work in the early 1970s with Vietnam veterans who told of destroying a village—indeed, much of a country—in order to save it had reverberations in Aum, where the ambition was considerably greater: destroying a world in order to save it. There were striking parallels in Aum to behavior I encountered in the 1970s and 1980s while studying the Nazis’ utilization not only of professional killers but also of killing professionals—in this case, doctors. In Aum, too, doctors were central to the cult’s reversal of healing and killing. They participated in individual murders and had an important role, together with other scientists, in producing and releasing deadly chemical and biological weapons.
Aum is now viewed throughout the world as the primary example of the extraordinary dangers posed by private terrorist groups arming themselves with versions of “the poor man’s atomic bomb.” For Aum was a small antigovernment group claiming ten thousand followers in Japan, about fourteen hundred of whom were renunciants, or monks, at thirty facilities across the country; thirty thousand in Russia (a figure that has been disputed); and a handful in West Germany, Sri Lanka, and the United States. Yet this relatively tiny organization managed to manufacture, stockpile, and release deadly sarin gas first in the city of Matsumoto, northwest of Tokyo, and then in Tokyo itself. It also prepared equally deadly anthrax bacillus and botulinus toxin, releasing them several times in Tokyo and nearby areas (including in the vicinity of two American military bases), largely unsuccessfully but with effects not yet fully known. Between 1990 and 1995 the cult staged at least fourteen chemical and biological attacks of varying dimensions. Aum also made inquiries, particularly in Russia, into acquiring or producing nuclear weapons. It was the grandiose plan of Shōkō Asahara to employ this weaponry to initiate World War III, a global holocaust of unprecedented proportions that would in turn trigger a hoped-for Armageddon. In his fantasies he saw the United States as a major military participant in this apocalyptic project.
But plans and fantasies, however earnest and elaborate, are not the same as action. A simple but terrible question therefore haunts this study: How did Aum Shinrikyō come to cross the crucial threshold from merely anticipating Armageddon to taking active steps to bring it about?
My way of going about answering this question was, as always, to talk to people—to interview those involved. I have been doing that for decades in applying a psychological perspective to historical problems. Here, during five trips to Japan between 1995 and 1997, I was able to conduct intensive interviews with ten former members of Aum, eight men and two women, averaging more than five hours with each person. Since the guru himself and most of his leading disciples were in prison and inaccessible, the people I interviewed tended to be at either the lower or the mid echelons of a very hierarchical organization. Only a privileged inner circle of Asahara’s highest-ranking followers were told of the more violent aspects of the guru’s visionary plans, and even then often incompletely. Most of those I interviewed had little or no knowledge of the various facets of Aum violence. But while part of Aum they had to do considerable psychological work to fend off that knowledge in the face of the evidence around them.
I was also able to have discussions, though less structured, with two additional former members and one present member as well as with many close observers of Aum. I spent several particularly valuable days with one of the people most intensely involved in helping former Aum members extricate themselves psychologically from the cult and find alternative forms of spiritual expression. Because my Japanese is limited, I required interpreters for all these exchanges. I was extremely fortunate to have the close collaboration of an eminent scholar of Japanese religion, Manabu Watanabe, in this project. He interpreted for me in many of these interviews and meetings and consulted on various issues having to do with present and past patterns in Japanese religion, history, and psychology. Almost all the interviews were tape-recorded and then transcribed and retranslated by young bilingual scholars, providing a further opportunity to explore nuanced meanings.
Several of the former Aum members I spoke to were introduced to me by scholars and journalists they had been in touch with. Having found some value in the interviews, these former members introduced me to friends who had also been part of Aum. Much of their motivation had to do with their need to understand more about what had happened to them in the cult, how they had become so profoundly involved with a group they and others came to see as criminal, and how they could extricate themselves from their tie to a guru who still had a considerable psychological hold on them. I felt a certain sympathy for their efforts, while remaining aware, as were most of them, of their moral complicity in Aum. To protect their anonymity, I have used pseudonyms consisting only of family names for those I interviewed. In addition, I have altered certain identifying details that do not affect the substance of our exchanges.
I supplemented my interviews with efforts to learn all I could about historical and cultural influences on Aum—from writings by and discussions with scholars concerned with Japanese religion and society, Japanese journalists who had covered or followed the story of the cult, and Europeans and Americans familiar with Japan’s religious climate. I utilized the Japanese and American Internets for early reports on Aum and details of the ongoing trials of its leaders, especially that of its guru. And I drew upon my past work on Japan, including studies of its youth and of prominent figures of the modern era.
I focused on the inner life of Aum members and above all on the extraordinary ramifications of the guru-disciple relationship. Most of Aum’s wildly destructive visions came from its guru, but he in turn was completely dependent upon his disciples to sustain those visions and act upon them—indeed, for his own psychological function. One can understand little about Aum without probing the extremity of what can be called its guruism, and that guruism helps us to grasp certain essential aspects of the leader-follower interaction in much of the extreme behavior taking place elsewhere. Included in Aum’s guruism was a bizarre embrace of science to “prove” Aum’s religious truths and to provide Asahara with the kinds of ultimate weapons that might bring such “truths” to fruition.
No truth was more central to Aum than the principle that world salvation could be achieved only by bringing about the deaths of just about everyone on this earth. Disciples described their embrace of this vision and their understanding of its evolution from Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian doctrine, but they always assumed that the world-ending violence would be initiated by others, not by the cult itself. Yet Asahara’s idiosyncratic version of these traditions came to focus on the Buddhist concept of poa, which, in his distorted use, meant killing for the sake of your victims: that is, to provide them with a favorable rebirth. One can speak, then, of a weapons-hungry cult with a doctrine of altruistic murder—murder ostensibly intended to enhance a victim’s immortality. The doctrine sanctified not only violence against the world at large but the killing of numerous individuals who ran afoul of the guru’s aspirations.
At the heart of Aum’s violence—and its violent world-ending fantasies—was the interaction of a megalomanic guru with ultimate weapons of annihilation. Such weapons were profoundly attractive precisely because they enabled him to feel that he alone had the power to destroy the world. The existence of the weapons, then, effaces age-old distinctions between world-destroying fantasy (whether of paranoid schizophrenics, religious visionaries, or even ordinary people in their dreams) and the capability of actualizing that fantasy. That blurring of categories was noted by a thoughtful psychoanalyst, Edward Glover, within months of the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He spoke of the atomic bomb as “less a weapon of war than a weapon of extermination [and therefore] well adapted to the more bloodthirsty fantasies with which man is secretly preoccupied during phases of acute frustration.” He concluded, “The capacity so painfully acquired by normal men to distinguish between sleep, delusion, hallucination and the objective reality of waking life has for the first time in human history been seriously weakened.”
In sustaining his ties to ultimate weapons, Asahara brought to bear highly varied, seemingly contradictory personal characteristics: a genuine religious talent, a form of paranoia that enabled him to function at a rather high intellectual level, a con-man style that involved continuous falsification (both conscious lying and self-deception), a grandiosity of moral claim that justified unlimited mass murder, and a tendency, when control over his environment was threatened, to succumb to paranoid psychosis. His obsession with weapons of mass destruction aside, Asahara was hardly unique. All megalomanic gurus are likely to be some such psychological composite—hence the confusion of observers who focus on just one or two of these characteristics. Certainly, all of them operated in Aum as the guru and his closest disciples, struggling with internal and external crises, managed to generate a powerful momentum toward mass killing and eventually crossed a threshold that allowed for no turning back.
Aum is a Japanese phenomenon but a more general one as well. To begin to explain its emergence we must look at various psychological and historical currents in contemporary and modern Japan, which are replete with violence, national guruism, and apocalyptic temptation. But we are, of course, only dealing with a Japanese expression of our universal psychological repertoire, with feelings now being experienced everywhere, perhaps most strongly in the United States. We all have to face Aum’s significance for the human future and to ponder the question of how to deal with, and what alternatives there might be to, its vision of apocalyptic violence.
For Aum is about death in the nuclear age, about a distorted passion for survival, and about an ever more desperate quest for immortality. It is also about despising the world so much that one feels impelled to destroy it. In these ways, Aum encompassed the most destructive forces of the century just passing.
One can look at the guru of a fanatical new religion or cult* as either everything or nothing. The everything would acknowledge the guru’s creation of his group and its belief system, as well as his sustained control over it—in which case the bizarre behavior of Aum Shinrikyō could be understood as little more than a reflection of Shōkō Asahara’s own bizarre ideas and emotions. The nothing would suggest that the guru is simply a creation of the hungers of his disciples, that he has no existence apart from his disciples, that any culture can produce psychological types like him, that without disciples, there is no guru. Both views have elements of truth, but the deeper truth lies in combining them, in seizing upon the paradox.
Gurus and disciples are inevitably products of a particular historical moment. They represent a specific time and place, even as they draw upon ancient psychological and theological themes. As our contemporaries, they are, like the rest of us, psychologically unmoored, adrift from and often confused about older value systems and traditions. That unmoored state has great importance. Here I would stress only that a guru’s complete structural and psychological separateness from a traditional cultural institution—in Asahara’s case an established religion—permits him to improvise wildly in both his theology and his personal behavior, to become a “floating guru.” Disciples in turn are open to any strange direction he may lead them and contribute their own unmoored fantasies without the restraining force that a religious or institutional hierarchy might provide.
The guru narrative is always elusive. The guru appears to us full-blown, catches our attention because of what he, with disciples, has done—all the more so when that is associated with any kind of violence, no less mass murder. We then look back on the guru’s life history to try to understand his part in this culminating act. But while we should learn all we can about him, we are mistaken if we believe that his childhood—or his past in general—will provide a full explanation of that act.
No adult is a mere product of childhood. There is always a forward momentum to the self that does not follow simple cause and effect. Each self becomes a constellation or a collage that is ever in motion, a “self-system” or “self-process.” There are, of course, powerful early influences on that self, but outcomes depend upon evolving combinations of experience and motivation that are never entirely predictable. This is especially clear with exceptional people: one would be hard put to explain the extraordinary actions of either a Picasso or a Hitler on the basis of childhood experience alone. With anyone, we can at best connect that childhood to later inclinations, attitudes, or passions, finding certain continuities of talent, destructiveness, or both. But precisely the quality that claims our interest here—what we usually call charisma—tends to leap out of the life narrative and create a special realm of its own.
The British psychoanalyst Anthony Storr offers a useful description of a guru type: a spiritual teacher whose insight is based on personal revelation, often taking the form of a vision understood to come directly from a deity. The revelation, which has transformed his life, generally follows upon a period of distress or illness in his thirties or forties. There is suddenly a sense of certainty, of having found “the truth,” creating a general aura around him that “he knows.” The emerging guru can then promise, as Asahara did, “new ways of self-development, new paths to salvation, always generalizing from [his] own experience.”
But the guru, in turn, needs disciples not only to become and remain a guru but to hold himself together psychologically. For the guru self often teeters on the edge of fragmentation, paranoia, and overall psychological breakdown. We will observe a particularly bizarre and violent version of this in Asahara, and in the manner in which he disintegrated when his closest disciples turned against him. Disciples are crucial to all dimensions of a guru’s psychological struggles in ways that are seldom fully grasped.
What has also been insufficiently recognized is the life-death dimension that pervades the guru-disciple tie, a dimension I have stressed throughout my work. Moving away from the classical Freudian model of instinct, mostly sexual, and defense, mostly repression, I emphasize our struggles with the continuity of life and our ways of symbolizing life and death. At an immediate level these include experiences of vitality as opposed to numbing and inner deadness. But I also include an ultimate level of universal need for human connectedness, for a sense of being part of a great chain of being that long preceded, and will continue endlessly after, one’s own limited life span. This sense of immortality encompasses feelings of living on in our children and their children, in our influences on other human beings, in our “works,” in a particular set of spiritual or religious beliefs, in what we perceive as eternal nature, or in the oneness of transcendent experiences.
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.
One-Eyed Child
Shōkō Asahara’s childhood brings to mind Erasmus’s aphorism “In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king.” But this particular one-eyed child was apparently an odd and uneasy king. Born in 1955 into the impoverished family of a tatami craftsman in a provincial area of Kyūshū, the southernmost of Japan’s main islands, he was the sixth of seven children and the fourth of five boys. Chizuo Matsumoto (Asahara’s birth name), afflicted with congenital glaucoma, was without sight in one eye and had severely impaired vision in the other. Because he did have some vision he was eligible to attend an ordinary school, but his parents chose to send him to a special school for the blind. It had the advantage of providing free tuition and board, and a completely sightless older brother was already enrolled there.
Having some vision while his fellow students had none, and being bigger and stronger than most of them, he could be a dominating, manipulative, bullying, and sometimes violent figure in the school, where he would remain until he was twenty years old. He would, for instance, force his roommates to strike one another in a contest he called “pro wrestling,” and when he found their efforts unsatisfactory he would himself demonstrate how it should be done. He could be rebellious to the point of threatening teachers but, if challenged, would back down and deny any provocation. He always had a few completely blind followers toward whom he could at times exhibit great kindness, and his teachers observed that he was also capable of tenderness toward his older brother and a younger brother who later became a student at the school. But he was generally coercive, gave evidence of resentment over having been forced to attend this special school, and was prone to quick changes in attitude and demands.
In his early ventures into proto-guruism, this one-eyed “king” did not command wide allegiance. He unsuccessfully ran for class head on several occasions, and each failure left him dejected. Once, after being voted down by fellow students despite an attempt to bribe them with sweets, he accused a teacher of influencing the election by saying bad things about him, but the teacher pointed out to him that the other students were simply afraid of him.
While his actual background was humble enough, there were rumors of a further taint—that his family came from the outcast group known by the euphemism burakumin (literally “village people”) or that they were Korean, also a victimized group in Japan. These rumors, though false, suggest something of others’ attitudes toward him. Yet later he would sometimes himself imply that he was burakumin, in order to identify himself with a despised and victimized group and so to claim extraordinary triumph over adversity.
Most accounts of Asahara’s early years emphasize his preoccupation with money. He would charge other students for favors his partial sight allowed him to accomplish and insist upon being treated by them when he took them to food shops or restaurants. He is said to have accumulated a considerable sum of money this way by the time of his graduation. But whatever the complexities of his school life, he apparently obtained rather good grades as a student and achieved a black-belt ranking in judo.
One aspect of Asahara’s childhood is not frequently mentioned. He was attracted to drama of all kinds. From an early age, he loved to watch melodramas on television; later he acted in various school plays and as a high school senior wrote a play of his own about Prince Genji, a great romantic figure, taking the exalted leading role for himself. His stated ambition was to become prime minister of Japan. (One teacher remembered him avidly absorbing a biography of Kakuei Tanaka, the new prime minister in 1972.) He even reportedly said in those years that he wished to be “the head of a robot kingdom” (although in the context of the popular science-fiction culture of his adolescence, this fantasy might not have been as strange as it may now sound). His teachers generally came to think of him as someone who wished to “extend his own image into someone strong or heroic.” A former classmate made the interesting observation that as the school for the blind was a closed society, so in Aum Asahara would try “to create the same kind of closed society in which he could be the head.”
None of this can account for what he did later. Moreover, retrospective reconstructions always run the risk of evoking the past selectively in the light of subsequent behavior, particularly when that behavior is extreme. But every guru begins somewhere. Asahara’s childhood undoubtedly contributed to his sense of alienation, of otherness, to his generalized hatred of the world, to his tendency toward paranoia, to what was to become a habit of violence, to his cultivation of the art of performance, and to his aspirations toward the heroic and transcendent. Overall, he developed in childhood an inclination toward controlling and manipulating other people, and perhaps the beginnings of an identity as a “blind seer.”
The narrative of the guru—of the religious founder in general—can be seen as a version of the myth of the hero. That myth involves a mysterious birth and early childhood, a call to greatness, and a series of ordeals and trials culminating in heroic achievement. I believe that this culmination lies not, as Freud claimed, in the resolution of the Oedipus complex and symbolic reconciliation with the father but rather in the hero’s achievement of special knowledge of, or mastery over, death, which can in turn enhance the life of his people. In the case of the religious hero—the guru—the ordeals faced must be moral and spiritual; the crux of the guru biography, therefore, is the overcoming of moral failure by means of spiritual rebirth.
Asahara entered readily into that myth by means of conscious manipulation as well as unconscious inclination. After graduating from a special extension course at the high school for the blind in 1975, he moved to the Kyūshū city of Kumamoto, where he became, at the age of twenty, an acupuncturist and masseur (the latter a traditional occupation for the blind in Japan). But in 1976 he was convicted by a Kyūshū court of causing bodily injury to another person (one report suggests that he misused the judo he had studied) and was fined 15,000 yen ($150). In 1977 he moved to Tokyo, largely because of that incident. He was said to have at times expressed an ambition to enter either the law or the medical school of Tokyo University, Japan’s most elite educational institution. According to the narrative of his life (largely supplied by him), an important reason for his move was to attend a preparatory, or “cram,” school in order to take that university’s extremely difficult entrance examinations, which he then failed. Since there are no clear records connecting him with either the examinations or a cram school, it is possible, as some observers have speculated, that Asahara invented that sequence of events as part of his mythic tale.
In any case, in Tokyo he resumed his work as an acupuncturist and masseur, while at the same time immersing himself in the revolutionary writings of Mao Zedong. In 1978, he met, impregnated, and married Tomoko Ishii, who gave birth to a daughter and would eventually bear their five other children. That same year, with the financial support of his wife’s family, he opened a Chinese herbal-medicine pharmacy, which made a great deal of money. But in 1982, at the age of twenty-seven, he was arrested for selling fake Chinese medicines, convicted, fined 200,000 yen (about $2,000), and given a brief jail sentence. He went into bankruptcy, experienced a profound sense of humiliation, and plunged more deeply into studies he had already begun of various forms of traditional fortune-telling, Taoist medicine, and related expressions of divination and mysticism.
This pre-Aum experience suggests that Asahara (then still going by the name of Matsumoto) wavered between fantasies of mainstream power (entering Tokyo law school or becoming prime minister) and radical rebelliousness (lawbreaking and a fascination with Mao). He did the same in his preoccupation with healing: the vision of Tokyo University medical college giving way to fringe expressions of spiritual healing that relied on con-man tactics. His trajectory went from grandiose plans to conquer society from within to embittered failure to idiosyncratic healing enterprises.
He would later place all of his experience within a guru myth. He described himself as having been “mentally unstable” and full of “doubts about my life.” In connection with such doubts, he described “a conflict between self-confidence and an inferiority complex.” Then came his heroic spiritual quest: “One day I stopped fooling myself altogether and thought: ‘What am I living for? Is there anything absolute, does true happiness really exist in this world? If so, can I get it?’ I did not realize at this point that what my soul was looking for was enlightenment. But I couldn’t sit still. Urged by such restlessness, I started a blind search. It was an intense feeling; it was a faith.”
Many people in such situations, he further explained, would simply change jobs or “just disappear.” In him, however, there “awoke … the desire to seek after the ultimate, the unchanging, and I began groping for an answer.” His spiritual journey, he tells us, meant “discarding everything … everything that I had” and required “great courage and faith, and great resolution.” The emerging guru had found a way to heal himself and could embark on “a long and arduous eight years of practice” on the road to enlightenment.
In 1981, at age twenty-six, during his troubled Tokyo days, he joined Agonshū, one of the most successful of Japan’s “new religions.” (The term refers to religious sects that have arisen since the late nineteenth century, often beginning with the vision of an ordinary person who becomes the sect’s founder and borrowing eclectically from various religious traditions.) Although he was later to disparage Agonshū and even claim that it had been spiritually harmful to him during his three years of membership, there is every evidence that he derived from it many of his subsequent religious principles. Indeed, he found there a powerful guru model, sixty-year-old Seiyū Kiriyama, a highly charismatic figure. Kiriyama claimed, as the British scholar Ian Reader tells us, “miraculous and extraordinary happenings, visitations, and other occurrences that create[d] a sense of dramatic vigor and expectation around the religion and its leader, endow[ed] them with a legitimacy and suggest[ed] that they possess[ed] a special, chosen nature.” In those three years Asahara was in effect apprenticing for joining the ranks of the “dynamic, charismatically powerful … religious figures” who, Reader says, “have frequently, by their very natures, upset or challenged [Japanese] social harmony and norms.”
From Kiriyama and Agonshū, Asahara also drew upon a variety of ideas and practices that would become important in Aum: expressions of esoteric Buddhism, mystical forms of yoga, and forms of self-purification aimed at freeing oneself from bad karma. He was also much influenced by Agonshū’s use of American New Age elements from the human-potential movement, individual psychology, and applied neurology. It was here as well that he first encountered the writings of Nostradamus, the sixteenth-century French astrologer and physician who predicted the end of the world with the coming of the year 2000. Asahara, who was to radically alter, supplement, and totalize these influences, soon became a fledgling guru, acquiring a few disciples by the time he left Agonshū.
The emerging guru may have a number of visions, but one in particular usually serves as a crucial illumination and a sacred mandate for a special spiritual mission. This should not be seen as simply a matter of calculation or fakery: intense personal conviction is essential to the guru’s success. But that conviction can be helped considerably by grandiose ambitions and manipulative inclinations, which themselves can be enhanced by impressive demonstrations of superhuman powers. Prior to his main vision, Asahara claimed to have experienced during his early period in Agonshū an “awakening of Kundalinī”—a concept of mystical yoga in which one gains access to the cosmic energy that ordinarily lies “sleeping” at the base of the spine. An accomplished practitioner, he opened a yoga school in Tokyo at about this time and was to gain many early converts through the skills he demonstrated.
In 1984 Asahara founded Aum Shinsen no Kai. Aum (often rendered in English as Om or Ohm), a Sanskrit word that represents the most primal powers of creation and destruction in the universe, is often chanted in Buddhism as part of a mantra or personal incantation. Shinsen no Kai means “circle of divine hermits” or “wizards” and has a strong suggestion of esoteric supernatural power. Asahara also created a commercial enterprise, the Aum Corporation. It was to have the important function of publishing his books.
In 1985 Asahara became famous when a photograph of him “levitating” appeared in a popular occult magazine, Twilight Zone, identifying him as the “Aum Society representative.” The ability to levitate is considered to reflect extraordinarily high spiritual attainment. In his case it was apparently simulated by means of an upward leap from the lotus position along with a bit of trick photography. The placing of the picture in such a visible outlet was an early example of Asahara’s strong sense of the importance of the media.
That same year, at the age of thirty, Asahara experienced his central, self-defining vision. While he was wandering as a “homeless monk” near the ocean in northern Japan, a deity appeared before him and ordained him as Abiraketsu no Mikoto, “the god of light who leads the armies of the gods” in an ultimate war to destroy darkness and bring about the kingdom of Shambhala—in Tibetan and other Buddhist traditions, a utopian society of spiritually realized people. The vision was announced to the world in a Japanese New Age magazine in the form of an interview with Asahara.
In the original report of the vision, the god who manifested himself was nameless, but in later versions of it Asahara identified the god as Shiva, the Hindu deity who by then had become his ultimate spiritual authority (or his guru, as he sometimes put it). It was somewhat odd for Asahara to invoke a Hindu god in the creation of an essentially Buddhist group, even if the esoteric Buddhism he drew upon stayed close to its Hindu roots. His choice of Shiva (as opposed to Vishnu or Brahma, the other great Hindu gods) probably had two important determinants. First, Shiva is specifically identified as the god of yoga. Second, while all Hindu gods have destructive as well as beneficent tendencies, Shiva is specifically associated with salvation through world destruction. Asahara was later to claim that Aum Shinrikyō emerged directly from this vision, but he was rewriting history a bit since he had formed Aum Shinsen no Kai the previous year. In 1987, two years after his vision, he renamed the group Aum Shinrikyō, the Shinrikyō meaning “teaching of the supreme truth.” Very likely the change reflected his desire for a name that was less obscure, more accessible, and more absolute.
The context in which Asahara placed the vision set the tone for what could be called Aum’s New Age Buddhism. Aum did not employ traditional Japanese Buddhist terms, which originated in China and are expressed in Chinese characters, but instead used early Buddhist terms from Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Pali and expressed them in katakana, a Japanese phonetic system employed for retained foreign words. These terms were combined with American New Age ones like empowerment (rendered in katakana as empawahmento). This application of a New Age sensibility to ancient Buddhist and Hindu mysticism was to have great appeal for many young people.
In 1986 Asahara claimed another transcendent religious experience, a “final enlightenment,” achieved while meditating in the Himalayas—perhaps the world’s ideal place for such visions. A New Delhi holy man whom Asahara sometimes referred to as his master and a “great saint” later told a Japanese reporter that he referred a supplicant Asahara to monks in the Himalayas and was “surprised” when he reappeared four or five days later with a claim to enlightenment, as the master had always assumed that such spiritual achievement required a lifetime. Yet Asahara seems to have been convinced, in at least a part of his mind, that he had indeed become enlightened and that his spiritual achievement entitled—even required—him to be a great guru or perhaps a deity.
Asahara would soon combine such spiritual grandiosity and his organizational and financial skills with endless self-promotion. He would make a point of meeting with prominent Buddhist figures in various parts of the world—most notably the Dalai Lama in India—and of having photographs taken with them, which would then be displayed in Aum publications together with his hosts’ lavish expressions of praise for him and his spiritual quest. Here the emerging guru undoubtedly took liberties in converting spiritual hospitality into self-advertisement.
“Guru” is not a title that is used in much Japanese religious practice. It is a Sanskrit word meaning “heavy,” suggesting a person of special weight. The guru’s authority is such that he is sometimes described as “Father-Mother.” In the original Hindu tradition he is more important to the Brahman (a member of the Hindu priestly cast) than the Brahman’s actual parents because the latter merely “bring him into existence” while “the birth of a Brahman to a Veda (sacred knowledge) lasts forever.” The Tibetan Book of the Dead describes three kinds of gurus: ordinary religious teachers who are part of the “human line”; more extraordinary human beings possessed of special spiritual powers; and “superhuman” beings of the “heavenly (or ‘divine’) line.” Asahara was to claim to be all three.
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In 1981, at age twenty-six, during his troubled Tokyo days, he joined Agonsh�・, one of the most successful of Japan’s “new religions.” (The term refers to religious sects that have arisen since the late nineteenth century, often beginning with the vision of an ordinary person who becomes the sect’s founder and borrowing eclectically from various religious traditions.) Although he was later to disparage Agonsh�・ and even claim that it had been spiritually harmful to him during his three years of membership, there is every evidence that he derived from it many of his subsequent religious principles. Indeed, he found there a powerful guru model, sixty-year-old Seiy�・ Kiriyama, a highly charismatic figure. Kiriyama claimed, as the British scholar Ian Reader tells us, “miraculous and extraordinary happenings, visitations, and other occurrences that create[d] a sense of dramatic vigor and expectation around the religion and its leader, endow[ed] them with a legitimacy and suggest[ed] that they possess[ed] a special, chosen nature.” In those three years Asahara was in effect apprenticing for joining the ranks of the “dynamic, charismatically powerful … religious figures” who, Reader says, “have frequently, by their very natures, upset or challenged [Japanese] social harmony and norms.”
SHAINBERG: What did Aum hope to achieve by its horrific acts?
LIFTON: Aum represents a new human danger: it was an apocalyptic cult with both a fascination for and the capability to acquire ultimate weapons, in particular what they called the “ABCs of weapons”—atomic, biological, and chemical. They had stockpiled chemical and biological weapons and had sought to acquire nuclear ones. The attack on the subway was actually an improvised response to news that a police raid was on the way. In fact, their planned release of sarin gas was scheduled for some months later, in November. Asahara had originally wanted to make seventy tons of sarin. They had bought a helicopter and sent one of their members to America to learn how to fly it so they could dispense the gas from the skies over Tokyo. That could have killed people in the hundreds of thousands, even millions. That was to be their means of setting off World War III. And thereby initiating Armageddon and the end of the world. That was their modest ambition.
SHAINBERG: How many members did it have at its peak?
LIFTON: It’s usually thought that there were 10,000 people in Japan and 30,000 in Russia—it’s a strange statistic. But of those 10,000, fewer than 3,000 were shukke, monks or full-time devotees who lived in isolated communities.
SHAINBERG: Did they have a following in this country?
LIFTON: Just a sprinkling. They had a little office here, and Asahara came here a couple of times, but he was quoted as saying that Americans were almost impossible to convert because their bad karma was fifteen to twenty times heavier than that of the Japanese. But I do think it’s important to recognize that Aum was part of a worldwide end-of-the-world impulse. It’s not just the Japanese. Everywhere, on every continent, there are religious or political groups that embrace the idea of the end of the world. Where Aum was different was that, rather than simply anticipating the end of the world, they actively sought to bring it about.
SHAINBERG: Instead of waiting passively, the guru took action to make his predictions come true?
LIFTON: It was mainly Asahara’s idea, but it was embraced by his followers. The end of the world was an integral part of their concept of salvation. That’s why Aum has to be seen, as uncomfortable as this is for many of us, as a religious problem.
SHAINBERG: But why did they want to destroy the world? How did that connect with their religious vision?
LIFTON: Aum sought to cleanse the world of all its defilement by destroying it. Only then could a pure, new people and spiritual level be attained in the world. The apocalyptic message itself stemmed from a vision Asahara described in which the god Shiva appeared and commanded him to lead an army of the gods in a struggle of light against darkness. Of course, Shiva is a Hindu deity, but then, Aum was eclectic. As you know, there’s a lot of Hinduism in Tibetan Buddhism, and Aum’s overall focus was on intense forms of Tibetan Buddhist practice. When Asahara began to train his followers, it was with a set of practices that were largely taken from the Tibetan tradition.
LIFTON: There were various kinds of meditation, including so-called standing worship-moving from a standing position to abject prostration and doing it 1,000, 10,000, 100,000 times-he took this from the preliminary practices of the Nyingma school. But I think the most significant idea he took from Tibetan Buddhism was phowa [a practice whereby a dying person’s consciousness is liberated from the body through the top of the head]. Phowa is to be learned from a guru and to be applied when one is in the process of dying, for the sake of enhancing one’s own spiritual movement toward Buddhahood. There’s uncertainty about the extent to which in actual tantric practice it might have been extended toward the performing of some violent act. But the way that it was interpreted by Asahara emphasized that in Tibetan Buddhism there are some very rough demands. If your guru says you must kill others, you must kill them. Because that means that their time to die has come, so it’s the right thing to do.
SHAINBERG: In other words, it’s an act of compassion.
LIFTON: Yes. The capacity to insist that everyone in the world must be killed, to purify the world, comes from a world-hating vision of religion. The world is defiled and hopeless in its bad karma. It’s an act of compassion to kill such people—that is, ordinary people like you and me—because it enhances their immortality, or their subsequent reincarnation, or their journey to the Pure Land, however you want to put it. Not everybody in Aum believed this in such stark terms, but Asahara pressed this point of view, and as he became more unstable, he pressed it more.
SHAINBERG: How did he get to Buddhism in the first place?
LIFTON: He read extensively 111 Tibetan and tantric Buddhism. And in the early eighties, he was a member of Agon-shu, one of the so-called Japanese New Religions. Thousands of these have been founded in Japan since the nineteenth century, and a whole run of them following World War II. Certain of his ideas about the persona of the guru and the heritage of Tibetan Buddhism can be traced back to Agon-shu. After leaving Agonshu, he went to the Himalayas, where in 1986, he claimed to have achieved final enlightenment.
SHAINBERG: Has he discussed what he meant by final enlightenment?
LIFTON: Not really; he just declared it. One of the problems with final enlightenment is that it’s such a subjective claim. Because he didn’t belong to any reputable religious institution, he wasn’t responsible to anybody or anything. You know, you can say, as many young Japanese do, that Buddhism in Japan lacks life. It seems deadened to them. But if you’re a Japanese Buddhist and you belong to an institution, there are limits to what you can do. That’s not so when you form your own religious organization that has no ties or requirements involving anybody else.
SHAINBERG: Do we know who he studied with in the Himalayas or what his experience there was? Was he just wandering there?
LIFTON: He visited a few people there. He didn’t really study with anybody. He just checked in and discussed his religious life, as he did with the Dalai Lama.
LIFTON: The Dalai Lama received him courteously, probably even warmly. And probably said things to him that he wishes he didn’t say. Asahara had pictures taken, and then quoted the Dalai Lama as saying, “What I’ve done for Buddhism in Tibet, you will do for Buddhism in Japan.” The Dalai Lama was asked about it later on and denied having said these things and said he just received him in a hospitable way. Asahara also visited religious leaders in Sri Lanka and other places, had his picture taken with them, and claimed they received him as a great spiritual master. But the Japanese press followed up his visits and interviewed a number of the people he’d described as having acclaimed him. One of them said, “We had a meeting and then he came back to me a week or two later and said he had achieved final enlightenment. I thought that was rather surprising because it usually takes close to a lifetime to achieve enlightenment.” But the act was convincing to his followers. And, in some way, it was convincing to himself. There’s a strange psychology with some people that enables them to believe in their own version of events and simultaneously maintain a whole manipulative, con man side. The combination can be persuasive.
SHAINBERG: Any can man becomes more effective the more he believes in himself Was anything in his belief justified?
LIFTON: He demonstrated a rather unusual talent for yoga from early on. A lot of people came to him initially for yoga instruction, many of them professionals or young university graduates who wanted something spiritual in their lives. This talent for yoga was a very important basis for what came later. It became inseparable from the Buddhist practices or Buddhistlike practices that he taught And he had a certain superficial brilliance in articulating various Buddhist, Hindu, and Christian concepts. Asahara was an extraordinarily effective religious teacher as well as a murderer.
SHAINBERG: How did he get from religion to murder?
LIFTON: One account of his direction, which is the usual one, is that Aum Shinrikyo, like Agon-shu, could initially be seen as a typical example of a New Religion. It held a lot of interest for spiritual seekers and got a lot of positive response. It was only later, once people began to resist Aum in various ways—parents’ groups claiming that it was brainwashing their children and so on—that it came into conflict with mainstream society; then Asahara went bad and broke down, and caused a lot of trouble.
LIFTON: I think a truer version of the sequence is that he was visionary and megalomaniacal from the beginning. He was an extreme paranoid, and paranoids are notorious for functioning at a high level of intellectual capacity. Especially if they can continue to control their immediate environment, which is their whole world. When that control is threatened, for one reason or another, they tend to break down. And that’s what happened with Asahara when his cult came under siege. Details started to leak into the press in the late eighties about Aum’s illegal acquisition of land and the finances of its members and other crimes. The most notorious case was the murder of a lawyer named Sakamoto who was taking the lead in exposing Aum’s illegal behavior. He was killed in 1989 along with his wife and baby. And there were lots of other murders that took place between ’89 and ’95. In fact, it’s not quite known how many people they killed. It could be up to a hundred. Many people are missing from within Aum. Now, it’s true that most of the ordinary members did not know about the weapons or the plans for violence. But they too had to ward off evidence that something was wrong—although just when the change occurred in Asahara is not easy to say. Because it was not a complete change: the potential was always there. There was always the dimension of the con man in him as well as the effective religious teacher.
SHAINBERG: Have you heard descriptions of him as a teacher?
LIFTON: Yes. His disciples describe him as extraordinarily dignified and composed. One man I interviewed described how struck he was by the contrast between the dignity that never left him when he was a teacher in those early years and the way he has fallen apart in the courtroom.
LIFTON: Oh, absolutely, and he’s acting psychotic, bizarre, accusing the judge of sending waves of radiation to his brain. I think it’s possible that he had become psychotic even before the end of Aum. Months before he launched the actual attack he was talking about being attacked by sarin gas, suffering from acute fever, looking for spies within Aum. He always had an apocalyptic orientation; but he became more monolithic, more insistent on his prophecies of doom. And his project for realizing those prophecies.
SHAINBERG: Do you think there’s a relationship between the way that Asahara’s own fantasies seem to have bled over into the world outside, and the condition of a world in which media is making fantasies concrete for us all the time?
LIFTON: Asahara’s relationship with the media was a two-way street: if there were fantasies going out, there were also fantasies coming in. Aum, like certain other New Religions, was media-savvy; it took full advantage of Japan’s media saturation. Asahara was a frequent television guest. In one of the blurbs for his book, it says he was, in effect, your all-purpose genius—”He wrote music, he made films, he was a great religious figure and a prominent television personality.” So there is a way that the media could be seen as a conduit between Asahara’s imagination and outer reality. His ideas certainly found a fertile environment. Ever since World War II, the Japanese media have thrived on apocalyptic fantasy. They feature all kinds of stories about the earth being threatened, or the earth being blown up, or the earth being involved in an enormous confrontation with an evil planet; and usually there are Japanese saviors who struggle to sustain the earth or who come into a postapocalyptic world and offer services to the human remnant. And World War II is very much a factor in these stories. It may be no accident that a violent cult that wants to bring about Armageddon appears first in Japan, the only country that’s experienced the atomic bomb.
SHAINBERG: Did that kind of imagery get reproduced in the fantasies of Asahara and his followers?
LIFTON: There’s a vision that I’ve heard from several former members of Aum. It starts with a scene of absolute devastation. Big fires, cities crumbling, parts of them falling into the sea—Armageddon combined with a nuclear holocaust. Then, in some tiny corner, there’s a quiet spiritual area in which a small group of Aum practitioners are going through their meditative practices. World-ending images or fantasies have always been with us; they’re part of the human repertoire. Ordinary people have these fantasies in dreams all the time. But the weapons that could make this fantasy come to pass didn’t exist until recently. That’s what’s extraordinary.
SHAINBERG: So is the degree of credibility Aum members were encouraged to place in these fantasies.
LIFTON: The place was full of visions. I talked to many people who referred to intense mystical experiences. Enormous emphasis was placed on meditation and oxygen-depriving breathing exercises. And later, there were drugs, including LSD. People had frequent visionary experiences, many of which had to do with seeing bright lights—that seemed to be their mystical logo. From very early on, the word among people who had undergone training with Asahara was that it was extraordinarily intense, extraordinarily rewarding.
LIFTON: Almost to a person, they describe experiencing high energy. And that energy itself took on a kind of mystical feeling because it really meant life power, immortality power. And they miss it, despite everything that’s gone on in Aum. One former member I spoke with in Tokyo told me, “I’ve been going to the trial every day. I’m learning things that I hadn’t known about Aum. But it’s funny, I had such enormous energy when I was in Aum.” I asked him: “What about since then?” He told me: “Well, it’s gradually petering out.” And I’ve spoken with others who were more actively nostalgic for that energetic state that they had never known prior to or after Aum. But I should also make it clear that not all the teachings were on this rarefied level. He would also give sermons or little lectures about understandable, everyday lifestyle issues. “What’s the point of worrying about death? It’s karma, it’s a silly thing to worry about. What you want to do is look at your life. Is there some sort of vacuum in your life? Do you feel you live in a corrupt social situation?” And his analysis of Japanese society could be quite hard-hitting—that it’s lockstep authoritarianism in both educational and corporate structures. It made sense to people who were themselves antagonistic toward Japanese society and felt themselves to be excluded from it. They were often young people who were viewed as weak because they couldn’t stand up to the demands of the Japanese rat race. So Aum gave them a home and spoke to them on this nitty-gritty basis as well.
SHAINBERG: So you’re saying Aum offered its members a sense of community, it offered them a spiritual anchor, and on top of that it offered mastery of these special practices that were generating high energy?
LIFTON: Yes, but if you put it that way, it sounds pretty calm and matter-of-fact. What it offered was fierce intensity. Not simply a community, but a transcendent community of special people who alone had the highest spiritual aspirations-increasingly devoted to the teaching that everybody outside of Aum was defiled, hopelessly doomed by their bad karma. That’s why, when things started to go wrong, their commitment was so internalized that they couldn’t condemn the guru. They couldn’t separate themselves from him. Even now, it’s extremely hard. People I’ve talked to will say things like, “Asahara’s a criminal, he betrayed me as well as others.” But then in their next breath, they’ll tell me, “I must have had a tie to him in an earlier life. Maybe he was my guru back then.” He used the whole concept of karma in a highly manipulative way. Even in esoteric Buddhist or Tibetan teachings, as I understand it, karma may be the result of past lives, but you still always have an opportunity for redemption through good behavior. Karma doesn’t wipe out your potential for good, so to speak. But with Asahara, it did, unless you followed him. You were weighed down, you were dominated by your bad karma, that was his teaching.
LIFTON: Yes. When I studied “thought reform;’ or so-called brainwashing methods, in totalistic systems, I found that the key to controlling other human beings seemed to be in controlling their guilt and shame mechanisms. Well, controlling their karma goes one further than that-it includes guilt and shame because you can feel yourself to be bad or condemned on account of what you’ve done in past lives. But the guru also assumes control over your destiny, over what you are and what you can be in an absolute way.
LIFTON: And all of your next lives, that’s right. He’s knowledgeable about your past, he’s offering you a fascinating, transcendent present, and he’s asserting control over your future. And all future lives.
SHAINBERG: He has also lifted any sense of personal responsibility from you. He’s liberated you from all banal responsibility in this lifetime.
LIFTON: Yes. Your only responsibility is toward following his training so completely that you merge with the guru. It’s a total annihilation of self, but it’s also an assumption of his megalomania. Total self-surrender is rewarded by shared grandiosity. Several former members I interviewed still struggled with that grandiosity—it was palpable. Because they are these very special people who alone are in possession of the truth that is destined to be transmitted to the whole world following World War III and Armageddon. They are to be not just the leaders, but the arbiters of this new cosmic dimension. And in return for such a promise, they surrender. Annihilate their own self in the service of merging with the guru self. Many of them experienced visions that illustrate this belief.
LIFTON: One young man saw a pyramid-like structure that was made of human beings. At the top of it was Asahara sitting like a divinity. Like the Buddha. And he, the person who was having this vision, was drawn toward the top of this pyramid, toward the guru, by some inexorable force. He moved closer and closer until the two of them merged and he was no longer just himself, he was Asahara, and Asahara was no longer just Asahara, Asahara was also he. And then he asked Asahara—but of course it was also Asahara doing the askin—”ls this true emptiness?”; and the Asahara figure, but at the same time also he himself, answered: “Ah. So you experience it for the first time.”
SHAINBERG: This is all consistent with Zen or other Buddhist doctrines which aim toward a relinquishing of ego, losing separateness from the teacher and becoming one with him—but here it’s turned into megalomania. Can you say something about the scenario that transforms what is essentially a vision of total humility to one of egomania?
LIFTON: Well, the humility was never there for the guru, so, you see, there’s a terrible problem for the practitioner in discerning megalomania in his or her guru. The paradox of Asahara, I think, is how the leader of a religion could both genuinely convey and teach spiritual practices—mainly Buddhist in this case—and, at the same time, be corrupt from the beginning. One can’t dismiss either his deep corruption or his genuine religious achievement.
LIFTON: Yes, it’s hard for me even to say that because I don’t like to call it an achievement, but at least it was perceived by followers as such. It’s not always easy to tell a compassionate guru from a murderous one. Part of the problem is that states of exaltation have a certain consistency and appeal no matter what their source. Or, to put it another way: He who enables someone to achieve high states that are perceived as authentic has gained tremendous influence over him. That’s true whether it’s a great Zen master or somebody who turns out to be not only a fanatic but also a criminal, as was the case with Asahara. A genuine religious experience, in this sense, requires a kind of enhancement of the disciple’s vulnerability by opening his self up to formlessness. And Asahara seems to have had a powerful ability to induce visions of formlessness on the way to mystical experience through kundalini yoga or other methods. The danger lay in his ability to exploit this vulnerability.
SHAINBERG: What we call “formlessness” in Buddhist tradition means, among other things, the experience of total insecurity or groundlessness. Ideally, in a Buddhist framework, if the teacher and student trust each other and can work together-if the teacher is an authentic teacher-he can help the student tolerate this vulnerability and see, as we would say, the unity of form and formlessness. But if one persists in maintaining a distinction, then the experience of formlessness is only going to create a desperate need for form. Buddhist literature is full of statements to the effect that if the practice is explored in any kind of partial manner, it can turn to poison. In some ways, what you’ve described with Asahara is a horrible caricature of this point; but you can also see it as a metaphor for all institutional religion. At the source, it’s a vision of formlessness, but the vision evolves to impose a new form and subsequently to corrupt and abuse it.
LIFTON: Aum arrogated to itself the claim of all truth for all human beings. But it also radically separated itself from a life-affirming or human-centered morality by setting up a barrier between itself and ordinary people. In fact, there were two sets of barriers—two sets of absolute distinctions. On the one hand, there was the barrier between the Aum people and the ordinary people, who were hopelessly defiled. They were defiled in the first place because they had had no contact with Asahara. The second level of radical differentiation was the barrier between Aum members and Asahara himself. Even now, quite a few of them feel guilty and fearful over having “broken the pipeline”—that’s their phrase. One side of their mind still holds to the guru as the only source of truth and purity in the world. And that makes many of them wonder whether maybe history will prove him right—that all this was for a higher purpose that we ordinary human beings are incapable of grasping, but that he understands, in order to achieve a higher level of human evolution.
SHAINBERG: It’s quite extraordinary when you think of it corning out of Buddhism, which begins with a denial of precisely that kind of discrimination: the fundamental idea that all beings as they are have Buddha nature. There is no such thing as defilement in terms of a Buddhist vision-in any true Buddhist vision. But he appropriated the doctrine that essence is formless, and he turned it inside out.
LIFTON: All religions have the possibility for destructive behavior. You know, I spoke with a Buddhist priest who helped me a great deal in my research. He has been extraordinarily giving in his way of dealing with former Aum members. Nevertheless, when he talked about Aum, he would say: “This is not Buddhism. Buddhism is about other things; compassion is central to our theory and practice.” Well, that’s true; it’s not Buddhist compassion, certainly-but you can’t say it’s not Buddhism.
SHAINBERG: There’s an expression in Buddhism that Buddha and the devil are never more than a hairbreadth apart. That’s why it’s critical to examine the way that Aum Shinrikyo springs from Buddhist understandings.
LIFTON: That’s what so many of the former disciples are trying to do. And they have a very hard time. It’s partly that the whole experience has been so disrupting that their lives have been not only interrupted, but shattered; and, of course, there’s the reality of being made pariahs in Japanese society. But I also think that it’s very hard for them to extricate themselves from the Aum version in which they were immersed so deeply and come to another Buddhism. Many are simply casting about. But they do struggle with the tradition. They read the Buddhist scriptures, they look to Buddhist teachers, they do all kinds of things to rediscover a different Buddhism.
米国の著名な精神医学者、ロバート・ジェイ・リフトンへのインタビューです。リフトンは、広島の被爆者に対するインタビュー調査とその精神的側面に光をあてた『ヒロシマを生き抜く─精神史的考察』の著者として知られています。長年にわたり、戦争をはじめとする極限的な状況における人間の心理について批判的分析を行ってきた研究者です。近著、Witness To Extreme Century : A Memoir （『極限の世紀の証言者 〜回想録』） では、これまでの自身の活動を、研究者としての学問的行為であると同時に、「証言者」としての行為であったと振り返っています。「証言者」とは、体験を受け入れ、自身の言葉で語り直す人のことだとリフトンは言います。原爆投下とホロコースト、２０世紀に人類は最も過酷な歴史を体験しました。そうした歴史に「証言者」として向き合うことが、過酷な体験から意味を見出し、それを乗り越えるために必要であるとリフトンは考えています。今回のインタビューで、リフトンは自身が関心を寄せてきた様々な話題（気候変動、拷問、反戦活動、死刑制度、ジェノサイドなど）について語っています。
I sat down and had a most wonderful conversation with Robert Jay Lifton, M.D. on the occasion the publication of his memoir entitled, Witness to an Extreme Century.
Lifton talks about Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism and his work in Hong Kong in the 1950s exploring brainwashing in communist China. We then talk about his book, Death in Life, which describes the psychological effects of the nuclear bombs on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as his life work campaigning against nuclear bombs and ultimately nuclear energy. Then a discussion of his work with Nazi Doctors, the concept of "doubling" and the mot amazing levels of atrocity done in the name of "virtue." Then to his book, Destroying the World to Save it, about apocalyptic cults. The book focuses on Aum Shinrikyo, the cult of Shoko Asahara who ordered the manufacture and ultimate sarin gassing of thousands on the subways of Tokyo. We talk in depth about this cult and throughout this fascinating talk, the themes of how powerful situational influences can make essentially, intelligent, good people commit extreme and immoral acts.
Freedom of Mind: Helping Loved Ones Leave Controlling People, Cults, and Beliefs (English Edition) 1
Introduction
The world has changed since Releasing the Bonds: Empowering People to Think for Themselves was first published. Back in 1999, most Americans including myself could not have imagined the destruction and fear of 9/11, jihad, terrorism, the prevalence of religious extremism, or the many other phenomena that can make today seem like a frightening time to be alive. I have decided to do this updated and revised edition as an e-book and print on demand paperback and retitle it Freedom of Mind: Helping Loved Ones Leave Controlling People, Cults and Beliefs. I have made numerous substantial changes to more accurately reflect all that I have learned.
Freedom of Mind: Helping Loved Ones Leave Controlling People, Cults, and Beliefs (English Edition)
The phenomenon of destructive influence and cults of all types has not gone away. It has morphed and become much more sophisticated. Today’s twenty-year-olds know little or nothing about major cult stories of past decades: Charles Manson; Jim Jones’ People Temple Jonestown tragedy (they know the expression, “drink the kool-aid” though); David Koresh’s Branch Davidians in Waco; Heaven’s Gate mass death; Shoko Asahara’s Aum Shinrikyo’s sarin gassing in Japan; and Order of the Solar Temple mass deaths to name some major news stories. Mainstream media is doing less investigative reporting on destructive cults, avoiding their civic responsibility, in my opinion. Large cults have gone mainstream and become very sophisticated, hiring top law firms and lobbyists. The Internet is now the major recruitment arena. Unfortunately, sleep deprivation is rampant, making people especially vulnerable to undue social influence.
But events are happening that also make this an exciting and hopeful time. Former members of cults are putting up web sites, and are writing blogs and publishing books. Many have, like myself become mental health professionals, and have gone on to have very successful careers. As we learn more about human behavior, we enhance our ability to help people who’ve been recruited by controlling organizations and cults. Today we have knowledge, including neurobiology research that explains what just a few years ago would have been considered magical, occult, or satanic.
Like most of us, I knew nothing about any of these phenomena when I was recruited into the “One World Crusade,” a front group for the Unification Church, better known for decades as the Moonies. I was a 19-year-old junior at Queens College in New York in February of 1974. I was an appealing target for cult recruiters as I sat in the college cafeteria and mourned the loss of my girlfriend. I was idealistic and bright, the only son of a loving middle-class family and especially vulnerable at that moment to the smiles of three attractive women who flirted with me and invited me over for dinner.
Dinner led to longer meetings, and workshops. Within a few short weeks, I came to believe that Armageddon was at hand, World War III would start in 1977, and we Moonies were single-handedly responsible for defeating Satan and building the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.
I threw myself into the work of “saving the world,” logging 18 to 21 hours a day, seven days a week, fundraising, recruiting and indoctrinating new members, organizing public relations and political campaigns, and meeting regularly with Moon and his highest-ranking lieutenants. As an American, I had no real power, just position. The upper echelons of the hierarchy were composed exclusively of Koreans and Japanese, with the Koreans in the position of the master race. Moon had moved to the United States, and he needed American front men who were intelligent, passionate and dedicated. Over a matter of months, I went from founder of a recruiting front group, C.A.R.P.[1] at my former college, to the rank of Assistant Director of the Unification Church #10 at National Headquarters in Manhattan. I was highly praised by Moon himself, and proclaimed, “the model member.”
It took a miracle–disguised as an accident–to save my life. In 1976, after three days without sleep, I nodded off at the wheel of a fund-raising van and crashed into the back of an 18-wheeler. This near-fatal accident gave my family the opportunity to do a deprogramming. On the second day, I threatened my father with violence, at which point he broke down in tears and asked me what I would do if I were in his position? For a brief moment, I was able to see from his perspective, to feel his pain. I reluctantly agreed to meet with a team of former members for five days without contacting the cult or trying to escape.
As a devoted Moonie, I did my best to fight the deprogramming process. But the information gradually began to sink in. In the days that followed, I came to understand brainwashing as practiced by Mao Tse Tung in his Communist re-education centers. Robert Jay Lifton’s Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (Norton, 1961) helped me realize that the techniques we used in the Moonies were much like those used by the Chinese Communists to make their people obedient. Eventually, after five days, I came to the painful realization that not only had I been subjected to these techniques, I had used them on others. I was horrified that I could have turned my back on my family, friends, religion, my life goals to essentially become a tool of a demagogue who wants to take over the world.
After my deprogramming, I went on to complete a master’s degree in counseling psychology. From my unique position as a former cult member and counselor, I dedicated myself to helping others escape and recover from destructive situations. In 1979, following the mass suicide at Jonestown, Guyana, I founded EX-MOON Inc., a nonprofit educational organization made up of ex-members of Moon’s international organization. I published a newsletter, held media conferences, and established a clearinghouse for information about the Moon organization. I later served as the national coordinator of FOCUS, a support and information network of former members of destructive cult groups. I am now directing the Freedom of Mind Resource Center, Inc. (www.freedomofmind.com), a center dedicated to helping families and individuals, and to informing the public about destructive and deceptive influence practices.
In the early 1990s, I learned that the leaders of some cults were buying copies of my first book, Combatting Cult Mind Control: The #1 Best-selling Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults, so they could learn how to resist the exit-counseling process. For example, Kip McKean, who founded the International Churches of Christ, reportedly held up my book at a general assembly and told some 15,000 members that it would be sinful to meet with me or even read my book.[2] In this way, cult leaders impeded the efforts of many families–but also forced me to develop more effective ways of strategically and creatively interacting with those trapped in cults. A cult member’s friends and family are traumatized by the situation and, to mobilize them, I had to find ways to empower them, both as individuals and as a team. These revelations became the cornerstones of the method I call the Strategic Interactive Approach, or SIA.
This book is the culmination of 36 years of experience in helping people all over the world. It describes a practical approach to helping those affected by destructive cults. The Strategic Interactive Approach (SIA) improves upon exit counseling, and promotes a family-centered, non-coercive course of action. It provides friends and family of the cult member with a greater understanding of cult methods, and the effects of indoctrination. It offers new insight into cult-induced phobias, and effective tools for overcoming them.
The SIA is designed to help the cult member recognize that he has been under the influence of the group and eventually, to recognize the pervasiveness of the group’s control over his life. Once the former member has experienced such an awakening, my methods help him regain a sense of personal power, integrity, and direction. Most cult members I have worked with have experienced emotional, psychological and even spiritual rebirth. They were able to return to their families and were spared further injury or possibly even death.
