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.