Underground (47 page)

My mother often told me: “Study! If you study you’ll get into a good school and find a good job.” The usual things parents say. To tell the truth, I just wasn’t that concerned with school. I couldn’t see the point. My dreams continued. I had all sorts of experiences, and passed through different worlds. It was fun for a time, but it never lasted. It always ended up falling apart. I experienced wars, where lots of people were killed. I felt how fearful death is, and a deep sadness that those around me had died. I realized that this world is impermanent, nothing lasts forever, and suffering is the result of this impermanence.

MURAKAMI:
In other words you experienced “another life,” and you arrived at this conclusion after these emotionally charged experiences in a parallel world?

That’s right. I’d never experienced the actual death of anybody close to me, but when I saw people on TV who were sick and dying I realized, “Oh, the real world is impermanent, as well. The same
kind of suffering is here, too.” That’s how my dreams and the real world were connected.

I went to a public high school in Kanagawa. Everyone talked about boys, love, fashion, where the best karaoke boxes were, and so on. I couldn’t see any value in this, so I was always left out.

I spent most of my time alone, reading. I wrote things too. Since my dreams were narratives, I felt as if I only had to write them down and they’d become a book. Don’t some writers do that—get an idea from their dreams and write their fiction based on it?

I didn’t really want a boyfriend. When girls around me found boyfriends, I never felt envious. I couldn’t see the point.

When I was 16 my brother lent me some Aum books, saying they were pretty good. I think the first ones were
Beyond Life and Death, Initiation
, and
Mahayana Sutra
. When I read them I thought, “This is exactly what I’ve been looking for!” I couldn’t wait to join.

The books explained how the path to true happiness lay in being liberated. Once liberated, you will gain eternal happiness. For instance, even if in my life I feel happy, it won’t last—but how wonderful it would be if happiness could last forever. Not just for me, but for everybody. In that sense I was quite taken with the word “liberation.”

MURAKAMI:
What exactly do you mean by the word “happiness”?

For instance, the happy feelings you have when you’re chatting about all kinds of things with your friends or talking with your family. For me, conversation is very important.

If you ask what liberation, or enlightenment, means to me, I’d have to say that first there is suffering, and liberation is simply the end of suffering. When you reach liberation you are freed from the sufferings of this impermanent world. The books described some practical ascetic training you could do to help you reach liberation, so before I joined Aum I tried this for myself. I’d read the books at home and do
asana
[yoga] and breathing exercises every day.

My two brothers were attracted to Aum and said they wanted to join. The three of us had similar ways of thinking. My oldest brother experienced almost the same sortsof dreams, though his weren’t as intense.

So the three of us set off for the Setagaya dojo and asked the person
at the reception desk for membership applications. We planned from the start to join so we started to fill in our names and addresses, but they said they’d like to talk to us first and led us inside, where we talked with the Master of the dojo. When he asked our motives for joining, all of us said, “Enlightenment and liberation,” which really surprised him. Apparently most people say they want to join to improve their situation in the world or gain supernatural powers and stuff like that.

The Master talked with us about many things, but what I felt most was a great—how shall I put it?—sense of calm, as if the air itself exuded peace. All three of us joined that day. The entrance fee, which included six months of fees, came to 30,000 yen each. I didn’t have enough with me, so I borrowed some from my brothers.

MURAKAMI:
Didn’t your parents have something to say about all three of you joining Aum Shinrikyo at once?

They did. At that time there wasn’t a big stir about Aum, so we just told them it was like a yoga study center. There were some problems later, though, when there were all sorts of rumors about Aum.

After joining we spent time folding fliers about Aum, sticking them in mailboxes, or handing them out on the street. It was a lot of fun. I always felt a sense of achievement afterward. I don’t know why, but I felt more cheerful. These service activities built up merit. The more merit you accumulated, the stronger the energy you’d have to rise up to a higher level. In Aum we were always told that.

I made some friends, too. One of my friends from junior high joined and we distributed fliers together. I didn’t go out of my way to make her join, I just told her about the group.

I continued my ascetic practice after joining, and soon I experienced what they call
dhartri siddhi
. That’s the stage before being able to levitate, when your body starts to bounce up and down in the air. It suddenly happened at home when I was practicing breathing exercises. After that I was pretty much able to do it at will. At first, you don’t even realize you’re bouncing up and down in the air, but after a while you’re able to control it to a certain degree.

In the beginning it’s a real problem. You jump up!
[laughs]
You don’t know what’s going on. My family was a bit taken aback watching
me. I was told that I’d reached this stage fairly quickly. I think that since I was small I’ve been pretty advanced, spiritually.

For a while after joining I continued going to high school as usual while I participated in Aum activities, but as time went on I found my school life pointless—actually, I hated it. What I was doing was the exact opposite of everyone else. To give you an example, my classmates would speak ill of the teachers, but Aum taught us never to say anything bad about others. I felt a strong contradiction there. All high school students can seem to talk about is how to have a good time, but Aum puts into practice the notion that “One should not pursue pleasure.” It’s the exact opposite.

In order to attain liberation, it’s quicker to renounce the world and pursue your practice full-time rather than remaining at home. So I’d had the idea for a long time that I should become a renunciate.

MURAKAMI:
Renunciation means abandoning all attachments; were there any attachments you found particularly difficult to discard?

I did feel a lot of confusion and conflict. Up until then I lived with my family, but now I wouldn’t be able to see them. That was the hardest thing for me. And also food—after you become a renunciate you can only eat certain specified things.

My oldest brother had already left college to become a renunciate. My parents tried to persuade him to wait until he’d graduated, but he was adamant. My second brother stayed at home, with no apparent desire to become a renunciate.

My parents cried when I became a renunciate. They tried their hardest to hold me back. But I was sure that if I stayed I wouldn’t be able to be any kind of positive force in their lives. What I sought was not ordinary “love,” but love in a much broader sense. If I really could change myself, then that would be a positive influence for my parents. Naturally, it was hard to say goodbye, but I took the plunge and renounced the world.

After taking vows I was sent for training to the Seiryu-Shoja in Yamanashi Prefecture, then to the Setagaya dojo in Tokyo, where I was assigned to branch activities. I took care of lay followers, those who still lived at home. I was also involved in printing handbills and taking them to followers’ homes, after which they would distribute them. I did feel a bit lonely in this new life, but I didn’t regret my
decision. I made some new friends in Aum. A lot of girls the same age as me became renunciates and we had a good time together at the Setagaya dojo. We had lots of things in common. After all, they’d also joined Aum because the world outside seemed without value. I was at the Setagaya dojo for a year, then was transferred to the Mt. Fuji headquarters, where I did office work. I was there a year and a half, then went to Satyam No. 6 at Kamikuishiki-mura, where I prepared “offerings.” This involved cooking food that was then offered to the gods. After it had been offered up, the
samana
[renunciates] ate it in a service.

MURAKAMI:
Meals, in other words. What sorts of food did you eat?

Bread, cookies, things like that—hamburger-type food at one point, rice,
kombu
, deep-fried dishes. The menu changed a little over time; at one point we cooked ramen noodles. As a rule, it was vegetarian. Soybean burgers.

The number of people preparing the food also changed over time. At the end there were just three of us, all women, all specially selected to work there because these were considered holy offerings.

MURAKAMI:
So they decided you had the qualifications to do that kind of work?

Yes, I suppose so. It was really physically demanding work. We cooked from morning to night, and sometimes got so exhausted we collapsed. During one period when the number of
samana
was particularly high we had to cook even more. It was just work, work, work without a break.

So, for a hundred
samana
you’d make a hundred portions and offer these in front of the altar. We didn’t just cook them, but had to carry them to the room where the altar was, and line them up neatly, then later distribute them to the
samana
.

Our superiors decided the menu. I think they based it on the average nutritional requirements for Japanese today. How did it taste? We sometimes served people from the outside, and they all said it was a bit plain. If it tastes too good there’s the danger of attachments increasing, but this wasn’t like a strict rule or anything. Meals that don’t stimulate the taste buds would be a good description. Our goal was to provide the nutrition people needed in their activities, not to make anything especially delicious.

We didn’t really have any special training to be cooks or anything. The Founder
[Asahara]
often reminded us to “Put your heart into your work.” After we finished the meals we had to wash the machines, and he told us to “Clean them as if you are polishing your own hearts.” I tried to put my heart and soul into the work. Before I took vows, when I still lived at home, I wasn’t much interested in cooking, but the four years I was at Kamikuishiki, I cooked every day in Satyam No. 6.

MURAKAMI:
Wasn’t Shoko Asahara living at Satyam No. 6?

Yes. He had several homes, but that was his main residence, though he lived apart from us. Occasionally I saw him. Sometimes he ate the meals we prepared, but that was pretty rare. Someone else prepared his meals.

Along with working, I continued my ascetic practice, and I found myself growing in knowledge. I could clearly understand the state of my attachments, my energy level. And I could adjust my practice to correspond to these discoveries. It took me four years to reach liberation.

MURAKAMI:
When you say you reached liberation, was this something the Master decided—like he said, “Okay, you’ve reached it.”

Yes, in the final analysis that’s what happened. There were many conditions you had to fulfill to reach liberation, then the Master would finally determine whether you’d attained it. As a rule, most people attained liberation when they were in the midst of intense, concentrated training. There was a kind of extreme practice whose purpose was reaching liberation. When you were doing this lots of mystical experiences would occur, and when enough of these took place, plus a little something extra, and your mind became clear—that’s when you reached liberation.

Only then were you given a holy name.

MURAKAMI:
In your case, ever since you were small you experienced dreams and astral projection and the like, but what happened to these after you became a renunciate and entered Aum?

My spirituality rose even more, and I experienced even more unusual things. And I was able to control them much better. And I could remember my past lives, and was able to see what worlds the people around me would be reborn in next. It came to me in a flash: “This is my past life!”

To tell the truth, in my previous life I was a man. When I remembered things that happened when I was little, pieces of the puzzle fit together. When I was little I was always mistaken for a boy, and I thought it was strange, but if I were a boy in my previous life it made sense.

MURAKAMI:
Apart from your gender, how about other things? For example, a crime you committed in a previous life that’s affecting you now?

In my case my experiences when I was little were pleasant, but there were also painful ones. I believe these were because of evil things I had to atone for.

MURAKAMI
:
I don’t mean to be overly critical here, but aren’t most people like that to some degree? Apart from spirituality or rebirth or anything, most people have something unpleasant happen to them
.

I suppose so. Hmm. But I think having those kinds of experiences when you’re still little—when it’s too early for your environment to be a major factor—there’s got to be something from a previous existence that’s having an effect.

MURAKAMI:
Even when you have no experience of reality you can still have unhappy experiences, right? You’re hungry but no one feeds you, you want your mother to hold you, but she won’t. Nothing to do with previous lives or anything. There are differences depending on the age you’re at, but I think it’s a question of the “pain” people experience as they struggle to come to terms with reality

But it’s only in certain circumstances that you become aware of it.

When the gas attack occurred I was, as always, preparing offerings at Satyam No. 6. I heard about it from other Aum members. “Something’s happened,” they told me, “and apparently they’re blaming Aum.” I couldn’t believe Aum was involved.