Taking shelter

 

“From Punk to Monk. A Memoir” is a recent book by Ray Cappo alias Raghunath Das (although the book cover gives his name as “Ray Raghunath Cappo”). He co-hosts the podcast Wisdom of the Sages, also available on YouTube, and teaches yoga classes at Supersoul Farm somewhere in New York State. Both the pod and the yoga farm are associated with ISKCON or the Hare Krishna movement. The book is very well-written and quite interesting, although sometimes hard to believe. The well-known musician Moby has contributed a short introduction.

Cappo grew up in Connecticut in a regular middle class family, but started hanging out with hardcore punks in dangerous neighborhoods in New York City already as a teenager. The nicest comment I can think of, is that this milieu was very…colorful. A less charitable comment is that we´re dealing with the Lumpenproletariat. It was a bewildering subculture of punk rockers, skinheads, anarchists, squatters, and spiritual seekers. Some individuals were virtually all of the above. Imagine teenage gangs spewing Vedic wisdom á la Hare Krishna one moment, and roughing up rival gangs with baseball bats the next! At some point during his wild peregrinations through the Lower East Side and Brooklyn, Cappo formed a hardcore punk band called Youth of Today, propagating the lifestyle known as “Straight Edge”. I didn´t know this particular subculture existed already during the 1970´s and 1980´s. I always assumed it was a typical late 1990´s thing, when the animal rights movement *really* went out on a limb. Straight Edge opposes drugs, alcohol, sexual hedonism and (often) promotes veganism and animal rights.

Gradually, Cappo became more and more drawn towards spirituality. First, an eclectic mix of essentially everything. I wonder who the psychedelic guru with the huge sword pretending to be an angel could have been! Later, he became a supporter of the ISKCON and founded a specifically Krishnaite punk band, known as Shelter. Just the other day, Shelter reunited for a tour promoting Raghunath´s book. While half of “From Punk to Monk” deals with the American punk scene, the other half describes the author´s experiences as a Hare Krishna devotee, both in India and the US. In a certain sense, this section is even wilder. Large portions of India were still poor and chaotic during the 1980´s. The description of the ISKCON ashram at Vrindavan and the author´s attempts to live the life of a Hindu monk was particularly interesting. Raghunath also mentions his encounters with Kali worshippers, Tantric yogis, and palmists (the latter correctly predicted a car crash suffered by Shelter a few years later). It should be noted that “From Punk to Monk” doesn´t contain a detailed description of Gaudiya Vaishnavism, the Hindu religious tradition followed by ISKCON. In that sense, it´s a book for neophytes. In other ways, however, it´s daringly extreme…

In some relative sense, Wisdom of the Sages are more moderate than the old style cultic version of the ISKCON that became notorious during the 1970´s, but they don´t reject the hardcore approaches, simply arguing that they aren´t for everyone. Other religious paths aren´t flatly rejected either, but there is an inevitable sectarian tendency to see them as somehow lower than Vaishnavism. And compared to New Age or Neo-Paganism, the message of Raghunath and his team is still rather “hardcore”. The material world is a dangerous place, we can die at any moment, strict discipline in both matters earthly and spiritual is necessary (Shelter tried to follow the ISKCON house rules even on tour), don´t judge lest you be judged, political action is mostly meaningless, and so on. True happiness seems to be ecstatic kirtan or eating vegetarian food.

Several different groups of readers might find “From Punk to Monk” useful: people interested in punk rock and derivatives, scholars studying the transformations of New Religious Movements, India aficionados, and of course spiritual seekers in general. But of course, it´s main message is spiritual and moral. We are supposed to learn certain lessons from Ray Cappo´s journey from a hyperactive teenager to a Hare Krishna devotee, and also from the various phases of his Krishnaite journey.

If this humble reviewer has learned the lesson, I leave to the reader to decide.