Keeping the Ego in Check w/Raghunath Cappo | Joe Rogan

So you were the first guy that I knew that was really into yoga back then. I knew Hixon, like when that documentary Choke came out. Yeah, that was a great documentary. That was a great documentary. It showed how much jujitsu and yoga together made Hixon this really incredible force. It was the yoga had affected his mind in this great way because he was able to meditate and he would do all these incredible yoga poses. He was so flexible. He had such dexterity of his arms and legs. A lot of people got excited about yoga because of Hixon. But you were the first guy that I knew that really went so deep into it you actually became an instructor. Because when I first knew you, I knew that you were in a band and that you did yoga then a little bit because everybody called you Yoga Ray. But it's like I felt like you were on this path and this yoga path I could tell. And then paying attention to you on social media and following you. It's like well he's really into this shit. I remember when you were moving to New York we had talked online and you were going out there to teach jujitsu or excuse me yoga. And I was like I don't even think he does jujitsu anymore. I think he's just all doing yoga now. And that's what happened right? You know I did music for most of my life with Youth of Today. Youth of Today was the band before I became a monk. And at the height of that career this was a New York City hardcore straight edge band. We didn't drink, we didn't smoke and we were all strict vegetarians. That's me in a more relaxed form. That's a good photo. So that's what I did. And the idea of the band, we were teenagers. We were all teenagers. Me and my buddy Paramananda who also later moved into an ashram. So we started this when we were 16, 17. And it was a cool scene making our own music and stuff like that. But when we got Youth of Today together it was about sort of a message of better living, positive mental attitude, these spiritual principles like karma and what goes around comes around and respect, dignity, controlling your senses and your mind. What led you to that? I don't know. Really? I don't know. Really? I've always been interested in, my idea of a good time was, this was like 80s in New York City was you could find these like Easty Westy bookstores that have books on yoga and metaphysics and reincarnation and just plop it down and read books all afternoon by swamis and sadhus and weirdos and palm readers and stuff like that. That's my idea of what a good time was. And I always felt like life is meant for our self edification. That's why we're here. We're here on a mission of growth. And when I read books by sages or mystics and things like that I was always like, I want to be like that. That's what I want to be. That's bigger than anything out there that I want to be. So truthfully the band, I never really want, I'm not a musician. I play a little bit of everything. I wrote all the songs, but I always looked at myself as more like a seeker and maybe a spokesperson. But then at a certain point in the success of that band, I started realizing, okay, now we're big and there's a lot of people who are following those sort of principles of controlling your senses. We don't drink, we don't smoke, we don't take drugs. We can care about what we eat. But that's not the goal. That's like a doorway to something bigger. And so for me, I had to step away from that. Even though it wasn't bad or anything, it wasn't what I wanted to become. And it was a certain point in my life. You know, you get to a certain end of a chapter in your life. And for me, at the time it was the height of the band's career as well. We started touring internationally and stuff like that. I realized there was no amount. And by the way, this was 80s in New York, which is a very cool time. Run DMC, Madonna, the Beastie Boys. You never knew what was about to blow up and you were with all these other people that they were your inspiration and they were your friends and stuff like that. So at that height and excitement, I just said, there is no amount of material success I want that's going to fill sort of like a God shaped hole in my heart. There's nothing out there that I want. And it was also a very precarious time in my life where, not precarious, but a time where my father went into a coma for three years. Oh, Jesus. I know. It's hard. It's so horrible to even think about it. What happened was he got some unknown lung infection. He was young, 64. Unknown lung infection. And there was some neglect in the hospital and his lung collapsed. And so comas are one of these places where you don't. Is he dead? Is he alive? And it's so confusing for a person that loves that person, how to even react. And I'll say in a humiliating way, I couldn't deal with it. And I sort of shut myself off and I went and just started working on my music, something I could do. And then at his death, when he finally left his body, I was cultivating a strong desire to go to India and study more. And I was at that time, I was also studying yoga, Ayurvedic medicine. So he went into a coma for three years. Three years. And then when he died. At the end of the coma. He never came out of the coma. He never came out of the coma. And when he left his body, I decided, I'm going to India now. That was a sign for me and I quit the band. And this is at the peak of the band. It was at the peak of Youth of Today. Was that hard to walk away from all that? You know what? I was at a point where I was saying, and you probably experienced this too, and I'm sure Eddie probably does too. Sometimes when you become very successful at something, that same thing sorts, the thing that you love so it can eat away at you as well. Sometimes the people, I'll share with you how I saw it. I remember sitting in an ashram on 24th street, a shivananda ashram. Shivananda was like a Swami. He traveled the world. He taught the teachings of yoga outside India. And he wrote lots of books. There's a library of books store up on 24th street where he has an ashram in New York City. And I remember reading this one quote by him in the midst of my life as in a band and being a teenager living in New York City. And it was before you, the first one was really interesting. Where is your happiness coming from? Is it coming from your day to day living? Or is it just happiness from your ego? And I thought, where is my happiness coming from? Is it from me being a person that I want to be? Is it from people nowadays, they collect houses, they collect cars, they collect so many things. I collected records. I collected rare punk records. And in my brain I thought, oh man, you got to understand what the music scene was like that if you're unfamiliar with it. There was a band that was great and they put out 1,000 seven inch records. And then the band broke up. Yet the punk scene always grew. So these records you bought for two bucks are now worth people pay $100 for that record. And so me and my guitar player Purcell, we had like thousands of incredibly rare punk records that if you remember the world of records, no one played their records because you could damage them. What you did was you put everything on a cassette. And so I started thinking about this quote by the Swami who said, man, where am I getting my pleasure from? I'm thinking, well, my records are pleasurable. I was like, well, actually the music is pleasurable. The records are only pleasurable when somebody comes over to my house and says, oh my God, you got that record. That rare record is so impossible to look at. And so once I've read that, it was the first shattering of my concept of self and what is joy and what is pleasure based on my ego and all those records that I really valued. And I have really valuable records. And we started our own record company at the time. So we would basically print limited editions of our band. We put out all our friends records, Sick of it All, Gorilla Biscuits. These were all bands that we grew up with, our own band, Youth of Today. And so we put out these records, we'd make limited edition and then we trade these. It's like printing your own currency, basically. To make a long story short, after I've read that one quote, my whole concept of pleasure changed and I took all those records and I threw them out on stage to all fans, record collector fans. Wow. All the rare ones? All the rare ones. It was so liberating for me to do that. It was like the, it was like maybe like the first attempt of shedding my ego. That was a roundabout story. But the second part of what that Swami wrote was, and I'm paraphrasing this, of course, the diseases of the soul are not new. They're ancient. The soul is pure. The spirit is pure. But it gets covered by lust, greed, anger and envy. And I started thinking, well, not me. Lusty. I'm not greedy. I'm not angry. I'm in a band. I have no money. You know. And if you'd ever been in a band, it costs money to buy a guitar. Got a guitar? It costs money to buy strings. It costs money to buy an amp. So it's just like it's a money pit to be in a band. You get paid 50 bucks or whatever. So I'm thinking, not me. But as my band got more successful, I realized, man, I do have, there is money out there that I want. I remember I got offered money for the first time being in a band. Wow. I can get money. I should get, you know, I wrote these songs. I should get more of that money. Then you get into a fight with the drummer. No, I should get that money. We should split it four ways. No, wait. I do so much more. I book everything. And I realize, wow, I wasn't not greedy. I just had no money. I'm covered with greed. All these people hate the greedy, hate the rich, hate the 1%. You got to see what would happen if you were in that position. Yeah. So that was like my first lesson in like, actually, I'm complete. I thought I was above it because I didn't drink, because I didn't smoke, because I was a vegetarian. Big deal. Big deal. And spirituality starts to work on these subtle things that are plaguing me. And you know, the people who really want social justice out there, it's very easy to point the finger at everybody and watch what everybody else is doing wrong. But on the yogic path, it's about like putting the microscope on herself. Where am I wrong? If I really want to change, how can I start to really do some psychic surgery of my own ego, of all these other things that are baked onto the spirit? So anyway, that was, I can't remember how you got on that tangent. Sorry, I go on tangents a lot. Feel free to go on tangents. But that was my first glimpse of like where I'm at. And so my point was, my success, oh, you said, well, was it hard to give up the band? Yes. And I was like, no, I was so over it. I was over, because here's another one, Envy. That plagues the soul, they say. So there's people that are looking up to Joe Rogan. I want to be like that. And there's people that maybe you're looking, although you're pretty big right now. I don't know if you're looking up to anybody, but the feeling like in a corporate world where someone wants your position. And that plagues a person. A person who's not gracious or a person who's like, there's a scarcity mentality. There's a younger, I know in the music world, there's a band coming up and there's a band I want to get to. And I realized that all these real subtle things, they were plaguing my heart. And these are the things I wanted to work on. And yeah. So yeah, was it hard to give up? No, it wasn't. It was great. I relinquished it. You were on like a spiritual quest. I was on a spiritual quest. A legitimate one. People talk about that kind of stuff all the time, like getting spiritual or being on a spiritual quest, but you legitimately went on this quest. And that's why I found it so fascinating. That was what was so appealing to me. It's like, okay, this is a real one. Because there's not a lot of real ones. There's a lot of people that pretend to be on these spiritual quest, but really they just want everybody to think they're spiritual. It's like you were talking about the pleasure. What's the pleasure of owning records? Well, the big pleasure was people coming over your house to think you're cool because you have these records. That's the coolest record, man. That's the same thing with spirituality in a lot of ways. What people love is the fact that someone finds out that you do yoga every day. Someone finds out that you meditate. Someone finds out that you've read these books. The ego is so damn sneaky, isn't it? Oh, it's so sneaky. And sometimes it's fucking obvious as shit. It's like a funny story. Brian Callan, when I first met him. He did you with us too? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I love that guy to death. But when I first met him, I went over his house. He had an apartment in Venice. No doorknob. Doorknob had been broken out so you could just open his door and walk in. Anybody could open his door. And people would walk. He would come downstairs and there was a homeless lady cooking in his kitchen. She goes, son, you got it going on. And he was like, what? He's just eating my food. She was just cooking food in his house. But I came over his house and he had a book. I forget what book it was. It was something obvious, like the catcher in the rye or something like that. Sitting on his, I go, it was just sitting on his coffee table. I go, you're not reading that book. You put that book out here so when girls come over they think you're smart. And he's like, you're so right I'm a fraud. We were both howling and laughing. But that's a thing that people do. People want a well-stocked library not just to read those books. Read the books then. Read the books. Yes, but it's also, there's an issue where people want people to think that you're this brilliant, erudite, interesting person because you have all these books in your house. Like, there's a factor in that. They say the jiva or the spirit has to go through eight elements and each element to leave the material universe. This is according to the yogis. And they get progressively double in size. And the last one, so the first one is earth. And then that last one is ego. It's the hardest. It's the biggest of all of them. And it's so refined. Even people, you do altruistic things. You do things for yourself betterment. It gets wound up in religion. It gets wound up in diet. It gets wound up in politics. It gets wound up in race. It gets wound up in animal rights. It gets wound up in, against animal rights. You know? Everything. The ego is the biggest thing. And you can sort of see it on a person too. And almost better than seeing it on someone else is to see it on yourself. That's the work of the yogi. It's trying to see, man, I was motivated by that. Look, that was ill motivated again. So yeah, it's a constant checking in with the ego. I think that was part of my, I mean, think about it. I came from sort of like a scene where everything, everybody had to be cool a certain way. There was a certain look, a certain dress, certain sneakers we wore, certain haircuts we wore. And now I'm wearing a dopey robe. I'm wearing a dopey robe. I'm wearing a dopey robe. I'm wearing a dopey robe. I'm wearing a dopey robe. I'm wearing a dopey robe. I'm wearing a dopey robe. I'm wearing a dopey robe. I'm wearing a dopey robe. I'm wearing a dopey robe. I'm wearing a dopey robe. I'm wearing a dopey robe. I'm wearing a dopey robe. I'm wearing a dopey robe. I'm wearing a dopey robe. I'm wearing a dopey robe. I'm wearing a dopey robe. I'm wearing a dopey robe. I'm wearing a dopey robe. I'm wearing a dopey robe. I'm wearing a dopey robe. I'm wearing a dopey robe. I'm wearing a dopey robe.