The morning after my introduction to Adi Da, I cruised on over to the English website of Aleph to see about signing up for some yoga classes.
Aleph is the perky, Judaic moniker picked out by Fumihiro Joyu to distance his sect from its previous incarnation, Aum Supreme Truth, and their assorted legal slipups in the mid-90s (creating an arsenal of chemical and biological weaponry, murdering critics and former cult members, and attempting to overthrow the Japanese government by means of coordinated sarin attacks on the Tokyo subway being among the most major of their oopsies). While squinty beardo Shoko Asahara is still guru in many longtime members’ hearts, as of 2003 his particular brand of LSD- and mayhem-fueled apocalypticism has been junked in favor of a bubblier and far less deathy doctrine, emphasizing the karmic benefits of daily meditation and giving people presents. They even adopted a cute widdle dove as their new emblem. Between the cartoony nowadays good vibes and the corpse-ridden legacy of destruction, who in their right mind wouldn’t want to join up?
There used to be a branch based out of New York, but after September 11, the U.S. State Department decided to declare them a terrorist organization and freeze all their assets, just in case. I figured even if they didn’t have an official clubhouse or anything, there still had to be a few old Aumites/Alephians kicking around who’d be willing to show a new initiate the ropes, so I shot an email saying as much to the head of their PR department and put on my waiting cap.
After a few days of impatient silence, I decided to refresh PR’s memory of my interest in learning about the Dharma, and after a few more days of near-unbearable anticipation (imagine really having to pee, but the spiritual equivalent), I broke down and emailed every address I could find on the site or plausibly invent. One of them had to be up for having me aboard, even if it was only the distant, insular Shikoku branch (I wasn’t about to be picky).
Over the next week, I occupied myself with my other cults and tried to put visions of toiling sleeplessly at the cult’s scenic Mt. Fuji compound out of my head—they had to get back to me at some point, if only as a matter of proper netiquette. This is Japan after all.
In the meantime, however, I figured it’d be a good idea to practice what few monkly rites I knew of, so that when Aleph finally came a-callin’ I could just dive right in. I pushed the couch and the TV to opposite sides of my living room and set up a little meditation space in front of a table with some flowers and incense (I tried to hunt down some made from bilva leaves in honor of Aum’s central Tibetan deity Lord Shiva, but the best I could come up with on short notice was Sublime, as in that dead fat guy’s band). I found a nice full-page picture in a magazine of Asahara sitting in resplendent purple yoga robes to tape above my makeshift altar, then tore it down and got ready for some serenity.
For my first foray into meditation I decided to bypass the beginner’s option recommended by the Aleph website, “This Body Is Impure” (a little obvious, right?), and pour myself straight into “The Suffering When Senses Become Weak.”
The instructions for this guy are pretty straightforward: “Imagine that you have lost your eyesight and have suddenly become unable to see beautiful scenarios, the faces of the people you love; you cannot read newspapers or your favorite comics or watch TV. A strong desire arises within you that you want to see these things badly. Continue to meditate until you feel an unbearable pain.”
Swaddling myself in a bedsheet, I shut my eyes and gave it a go. As far as I can tell I never quite hit “unbearable pain,” but after what felt like a good hour or two, I started to feel a little sad at all the great things I was missing out on vision-wise. That suddenly gave way to a sensation that felt like a really intense caffeine jag as my mind started drifting to how awesome the rest of my senses were going to be now that I was blind. I figured this must be the whole point of the exercise and triumphantly opened my eyes only to find I’d been out a whopping 18 minutes. Not only that, but when I checked back at the site, I discovered that the actual purpose of the meditation was to make me realize “what has given me pleasure has now become the cause of my suffering,” and that I should “detach myself from the attachment of my senses” to avoid this pain. I was fucking way off.
I sent out another round of emails, this time grounding my interest more specifically in the desire to “awaken dormant abilities in my mind and psyche.” When Aum first started back in the 80s, its whole focus was on pulling in young otaku with the promise of levitation and psychic powers, and accordingly they advertised in the back of UFO zines (the whole apocalyptic Buddhism slant only came after Shoko’s first brush with the Book of Revelation. Nice one, Christianity). Since earnest enthusiasm wasn’t winning me any points with these Japs, I decided an open appeal to nostalgia might be in order. There’s currently a slow-boiling schism in the group between old-school devotees of Asahara and Joyu’s legitimacy-oriented faction (though critics say this fracture is just a facade engineered to let them have their cake and gas it too). If I couldn’t plead my way into the sect proper, maybe a splinter group would take me on.
As another week passed with no word from the East, I started to feel the first pangs of disenchantment with Aleph. Sure, it was fun fantasizing about stumbling upon some tiny Manhattan enclave and being locked in a sensor-equipped meditation chamber until I could reduce my brain waves and breathing patterns to those of the Grandmaster (or simply the enlightened ideal should I end up in Joyu’s party), but it was becoming clearer and clearer that in reality these guys’ ship had long since sailed. They may still freak out the squares in Japan, but is that really saying much in a culture that still considers rockabilly the height of rebellion?
I was already finding myself too occupied on a nightly basis with Adidam, the Moonies, and this other cult I joined but am not at liberty to chat about on a nightly basis to keep on Aleph’s ass, and on top of that I couldn’t even get my hands on a copy of any of Master Shoko’s teachings without some sort of special permit from the New York Public Library. Shit, I couldn’t even eBay a fucking CD-R of his astral music to put on during meditation.
Finally I decided to stop pussyfooting around with Aleph and dive straight into classic Aum as best I knew how. While I was unable to pull off such hallowed rites as being beaten karmaless with bamboo rods and drinking Shoko’s dirty bathwater due to lack of fellow enthusiasts and supply, respectively, I could partake in thermotherapy, which simply involves submersing yourself in scalding hot water for a couple of hours.
Monitoring its temp with a meat thermometer, I added kettle after kettle of boiling water to my bath until it hit a toasty 200°. After a couple of false starts, in which I hesitantly lowered a toe just into the surface of the steaming water, I determined there was no such thing as spiritual gain without a leap of faith and, sitting on the rim, stuck both legs in at the same time.
Holy shit was this the worst idea ever. There was about half a second of vague discomfort where you almost have a chance to go, “Wow, this isn’t bad at all,” before the pain hits in full, then interestingly enough, about half a second of reprieve once you pull them out where you just manage to think, “Whew, well at least I got out of there in time,” before the wrenching aftersting kicks in. I wrapped my cherry-red calves in damp towels for the night and by the morning they’d managed to get back down to a healthy, swollen shade of pink. It was really beginning to hit home that not only was Aum/Aleph not going to bend over backward to get me involved but I might not be cut out for it in the first place.
I had one last option: Using David Kaplan’s The Cult at the End of the World as my guide, I managed to track down the address for Aum’s old NY digs. Hoping that who or whatever resided there now might at least have a forwarding address or somebody’s number, I tried giving the building a call but kept getting a busy signal. Since that would seem to indicate that there’s still a phone line intact, I decided to stake it out on foot. Ditching out on Moonie church (resulting in several increasingly urgent voice mails from Dana) I walked up to 48th Street and Fifth Avenue but found only a really crappy-looking psychic named Chloe with a particleboard sign. I poked my head in her door and said, “Hi, I’m looking for Aleph.” “Alf?” she said with one of those tweaky, what-are-you-talking-about? faces. “No, I’m sorry A-leph, like the yoga group? Used to be Aum?” “What? Do you want a reading?”
That was it for me. Fuck you Aleph, I never wanted to be in your stupid cult anyway.
THOMAS MORTON
I JOINED THREE CULTS | 1 | 2 | 3 |
