“For my own self-peace, I needed to—and I wrote this in the book—not recreate myself, but rediscover what I am underneath all my programming. Not to become something else, but to understand what I am underneath it all. That happened for a period … Then a few years after being a monk and studying the Gita, I recognized, you don’t give up what you’re good at, you use what you’re good at in a spiritual way.”
Hardcore punk vocalist-turned-monk Raghunath (Ray) Cappo reached a major crossroads in his early 20s. His longing for internal peace and the deepening of his connection to the divine outweighed the musical success he and his bandmates achieved with powerhouse NYHC group Youth of Today.
Within his latest book, From Punk To Monk: A Memoir, Cappo details his upbringing, musical journey, travels throughout India, and other life experiences that all contributed to the shaping of his ongoing spiritual transformation and detachment to the material world.
Intrinsically drawn to alternative ways of thinking, Cappo centered his persona as a youth around being a punk rocker. His quest for spirituality began to take shape within the seemingly unlikely bustling and lawless streets of the Lower East Side in Manhattan back in the ’80s. It was there the Connecticut native discovered his tribe at the time, within the city’s flourishing group of punks, outcasts, and misfits. Crediting Harley Flanagan of the Cro-Mags as his “first unofficial guru,” Cappo developed a spiritual appetite and began seeking out higher wisdom.
“Chaos. That was a part of that punk scene,” states Cappo. “First of all, there was some type of unity amongst the bunch of disenfranchised youth who were looking for some type of alternative. The whole Lower East Side of Manhattan was an oasis for freakdom. We were freaks; the hardcore scene was a bunch of freaks, but you walked lightly, and you treated each other with a little bit of respect. That was called having some street smarts and that was how to move in a city where it was lawless. You had to be self-governing, and you learned not to judge people. You learned to be a little bit more broad-minded, so it taught me a lot … I think that it was a beautiful place to foster spirituality or any type of alternative thinking, truthfully.”
Cappo’s lyric writing— long before the days of moving into an Ashram—were all inspired by the texts he was seeking out on spirituality and self-growth. “That’s what I’d turn to when I would write lyrics. I would seek out this plethora of these weird books you just couldn’t get anywhere at the time, because they were all on metaphysics and astral projections. The Tibetan Book Of The Dead and Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and all this stuff that was for searchers back in the ’80s. You know, Be Here Now. Those became my inspiration for writing lyrics.”
Within his book, Cappo provides rich context linking those days of musical inspiration, development, and expression, straight edge ways of living, and spiritual discovery, to his travels to India, where he lived as a monk in the sacred city of Vrindavan and traveled across the country.
Reflecting on the process of putting his book together, he acknowledges it as “a fun experiment.” He continues, “It was also a spiritual experiment. If you’re a spiritual person, and you look at the pain you went through, the loss you went through, the betrayal you went through, or the success you went through, you realize there was some sort of divine play in it the whole time. And sometimes you were understanding it as divine play, and then sometimes you were rejecting the good advice or you were fighting against the flow of things. In retrospect, here at 58 years old, looking back at my life, I can acknowledge there were certain messengers sent to me that I just wasn’t ready to hear from, and then there were other times that I fully embraced it as well.”
Cappo’s original intention with this project was to take the esoteric philosophy of Vedic teachings and make them very palatable and understandable. “That’s sort of been my work for the last 20 years,” he shares. “Actually, maybe longer than that, because I guess I did that in the Shelter days as well. That’s my passion. It was my idea to work on self-help books using these principles of Vedic culture, but when I pitched my ideas to the publisher, they wanted to hear more about my personal story first.” Inevitably, Cappo’s unique experiences in music and stories of spiritual development transformed the text into more of a memoir.
“This book is written in such a way that you don’t have to know about hardcore or punk to appreciate a person on their spiritual journey because, let’s face it, as different as we all are, we’re very similar in a lot of ways,” explains Cappo. “We all are attached to things that hurt us. We all fall in love. We all get our hearts broken. We all get betrayed. We all get accolades or wealth, and then we lose it. Or we realize that wealth or that beauty or that fame isn’t as valuable as we thought it would be. And, so, as different as we are, we’re very, very similar. It just might be in a different outfit we’re wearing—different personas. We’re all left to sail the same course through the material world, learning lessons of detachment, dealing with haters, dealing with sycophants, dealing with heartbreak, betrayal, loss of loved ones, birth, death, and all those things. I wrote this for everybody.”
Cappo’s hope for readers is that they’ll be able to see themselves in his story and identify their own “demons and dragons” they have to slay. He concludes, “The best way to influence a person to do better is, you work on and inspire yourself … You don’t shame people to change; you don’t hate them to change. You inspire by loving a person.”
From Punk to Monk: A Memoir is out today from Mandala Publishing and Simon & Schuster. For more information on Cappo, you can follow him on Instagram.
Photo courtesy of Ray Cappo
