Jailed Aum Guru's Death Dodge

File under: Gurus Doin' Time and Wackadoo Gurus

It looks like that diaper wearin', subway gassin' death row guru, Shoko Asahara, is still trying to pull a "The Chin" in an attempt to escape his sentence. Relatives and his lawyer claim he's completely lost the plot and have petitioned to have him moved from the prison where he's being held to a hospital.

Incarcerated for about a decade, Asahara seemed to begin to lose his mind about a year after his death sentence was handed down. He has "mumbled unintelligibly and made unexplained gestures" in court, and his lawyer claims "it is impossible to communicate with him."

Is this a desperate attempt at self-preservation, or the result of a psychotic grandiosity? Asahara should be able to face death with alomb, were he actually a jnani. But like all of the wackadoo gurus, it's really always and only about him and his majesty as an enlightened being. He pushed it further than most, going as far as to attempt to incite an apocalypse in Japan. That's got him in the realm of the extreme among the wackadoos, but it's pretty much all coming from the same place in all of them: me, me, me.

For his deluded devotees, it's him, him, him, so we imagine they are pretty excited that their supreme leader may get somewhat sprung by acting like it. Asahara won't be off the hook, but he'll be extending his time alive, and therefore expanding the possibilities for its eventual resolution. And who knows what his crazy devotees will come up with in the meantime. We see diaper clad warriors overpowering security and making off with a suddenly very alert Asahara, to be secreted away á la Osama Bin Ladin somewhere in Russia. Another terrorist guru on the loose in a world with too many.