From the time that they pronounced me deaf was a good 45 minutes.
They cut my clothes and then they paddled my heart, my heart had stopped.
And I could see people screaming and crying, but I didn't realize that was actually my
physical body because I was somewhere else.
The only thing that I could feel, if you could imagine, absolute love and peace, there wasn't
anything else to be felt.
I was greeted by people I'd known in the past.
On back home again.
Incredibly safe and felt at home.
Welcome welcome to round trip death everybody.
And I would like to welcome our special guest, Ragnoth, or in other words, Ray Ragnoth Kapo.
Did I say that right?
Thank you.
Good.
I'm glad I got close.
Before we get into your interesting, interesting story, tell us just a little bit about you.
Sure.
Thank you.
When I was young, I started a band that became pretty popular within the punk and the hardcore
music scene in New York City and became international.
When people hear punk, they think of it's crazy, noisy, negative, but this was very, the message
was very positive.
We were into clean living, clean diet, positive mental attitudes, self control.
And I started diving deeper into Eastern thought and Eastern spirituality.
But the success of the band, my father had won into a coma for three years, side by side
with my success of the band.
And then when he left his body, when I was 22, I had enough study under my belt that
I realized I want to study spirituality myself.
I want to enter the experiment.
And I went to India to move into an ashram.
I lived in ashrams in and out of India for about six and a half years, studied bhakti
yoga.
Now years later, I have a household myself.
I'm the opposite of a monk.
I was a monk for six and a half years.
Now I have five children.
I run a retreat center in upstate New York.
I teach yoga internationally.
I just published my book called From Punk to Monk, A Memoir.
I can't wait to read it.
It looks super interesting.
Thank you.
It's getting good, very, very positive reviews on Amazon.
Is it?
That's awesome.
It's great for me, yeah.
Okay, for those that don't know the punk scene that well, tell me the name of the band.
The band that I started when I was a teenager was Youth of Today, famous for popularizing
straight edge, which means no drinking, no smoking, and vegetarianism, which at that
time was not really in the conversation.
It was very peculiar to be interested in vegetarianism, clean living, what to speak
of within the punk scene, which was really drugs, et cetera, and violence.
From what I know about the punk scene, yeah, it seems completely opposite.
It was the opposite.
It was only bound in the punk scene.
I think the common denominator was it was very loud, fast music and very harsh vocals.
But that's what I was into.
I was attracted to that energy, mosh pit stage diving, all that stuff.
I just wasn't into a negative lifestyle.
That was the message we put out there to the world.
Without expecting it, we got thousands of followers.
I think some of that is just the age of young men.
A lot of us go through this weird stage.
I don't know, but you really acted on yours, obviously.
Just to give our listeners an idea of where we're going today, this is going to be really
interesting, but we're not talking about the normal everyday NDE here.
We're not going to be talking about dying, heart stopping, going through the tunnel
to the light and all that.
But something that I personally believe is much more common, which is the spiritually
transformative experience is also known as STEs.
They can come from all kinds of different things.
They can come from trauma, like we're going to talk about with you.
They can come from meditation.
They can come from other types of spiritual places or experiences that can change us deeply
and help us become a better person.
We're going down that road today.
Like I said, I think it's much more common.
I think it's something that we need to be talking about from time to time.
If you don't mind, Roggenath, if you would just go back and tell us about what led up
to that horrifying night in New York City.
Okay.
Now, my first experience was not that horrifying night.
That's in the book.
It happened years later.
Okay.
I've got them backwards then.
You got it backwards, but...
Chronologically, let's start with the first one.
Okay.
Well, I don't think there was like an aha moment for me.
And I think sometimes people are waiting for that hard shift of the pulling of the lever.
Now I was going south and now I'm going north.
I think it was more like a straw on a camel's back.
And it builds and builds and builds and builds and builds.
And then there becomes like a fire inside that says, you know what?
There is nothing of this material world for me here.
And if you do that with the proper cultivation of some type of spiritual information, then
when things get really dark, you can turn towards light.
If you don't have any proper spiritual cultivation of spiritual information, things get really
dark and you head south and people become intoxicated in alcoholism, suicidal, take
drugs, etc.
So for me, there was a spiritual calling.
It had to get to a boiling point for me to act on it.
And I just feel like the universe knows exactly what that recipe is.
And so for me, it was a combination.
Sometimes you see people's spiritual transformation, you see it in a midlife crisis, or you see
it in a person's old age thinking, what have I done with my life?
Or you see it miraculously in a young child.
I've met young children who are like spiritually lit up.
For me, it sort of happened with a combination of success within a material sphere, meets
my father going into a coma for three years, which was sort of tragic.
It's a tragic sort of place to be in where you don't know if a person's alive or if
they're dead.
Are they a vegetable?
Are they conscious?
Do they hear what I say?
Are they just like brain dead, like a lobotomy or something?
What is going on?
So in that confusing state where someone very solid in your life becomes now a mystery wrapped
in an enigma, it's like, what is he now?
And if he could happen to him at such a reasonably young age, he was 64 years old, I'm 58 years
old.
So if it could happen to him randomly, that could happen to me randomly.
And it started to make me question how solid the material world is, how we're building
these homes in sand, so to speak, like we're building castles of sand, and we expect to
find everlasting love, everlasting joy in a temporary world.
It started making me question the very foundation of what is life about?
Why are we here?
What are we meant to do in the short amount of time that we're here?
And that was a driving force on my quest for spirituality.
That's my story.
I think it comes in different recipes for different people.
Well, I think the huge key to it there is you are asking questions.
And there was something going on in your life like your father in a coma that caused you
to ask the questions that so many people don't.
It's hard to have a transformation unless you're willing to dig deep and go, I don't
get this.
Be humble enough to admit, I don't get it.
I want to know more.
I'm curious, what were some of those questions you were really digging on?
Sure.
First of all, I just want to clarify the point you're making is incredibly valid.
People oftentimes do ask questions like, you know, I work in advertising, but what am I
selling?
I'm selling people things they don't need.
And I think it's about me, by the way.
Oh, are you an advertiser?
That's been my career.
Yeah.
Oh, so thank you for talking about you.
But then you're obviously asking the questions.
Yes.
I suppose if you're in that position, because someone recently said that to me, I'm an advertiser,
I'm selling people things they don't need, but then I thought, oh, well, that's just
the way life is.
You just do it.
So they get a question and then they don't follow through with the answers to that question.
Because usually when you follow through the answers, you get another question and another
question and it opens one door after another after another and it brings you into different
chambers of a castle, so to speak.
Sometimes people just never open the first door.
They get a question, but then they, eh, it's not worth thinking too deep.
It is worth thinking that deep.
If I'm going to base my whole ideas of meaning and direction and values and ethics and family
and love, I got to ask those questions.
So I think the first questions were for me is what is a win?
Like what's a win?
Is it just to be, you know, have a house in a swimming pool, you know, do whatever you
want?
Is that a win?
Is it freedom?
Is it love and romance?
Is it a wonder loss where you get to travel all over the world and put your foot in every
continent?
Is it, is it just go for it and have as much sense pleasure and like a hedonistic sense
pleasure?
What actually is a win?
And I really started to analyze each one and I started journaling on all of that as
a teenager.
And I think those were the questions and the understanding like, hey, life is tragically
short and it can even be shorter.
It's not like, you know, my dad perhaps didn't live the full term of life by averages, but
there's people that die when they're six and nine and 15.
So okay, what happens if I die in two years?
In that case, I'm an old man right now.
What am I doing with these next two years then?
So to value the moment and ask the questions, what am I going to do that's actually significant?
And even that question, is there a significance of this life or is life actually nothing and
we just try to create some meaning to it?
These were the questions running through my mind as a teenager.
Those are good questions.
Most teenagers are just thinking, what does that girl think about me and, you know, what
are we going to do to party tonight?
By the way, speaking of that, the punk rock scene in New York, you were the quote straight
edgers.
Where were you playing?
Wasn't it mostly bars and places like that?
Yeah, actually encounter intuitive.
Actually no, there's good questions.
They would oftentimes they'd play matinees shows, which were all ages, which means kids
underage could come.
Sometimes they'd put a mark on your hand, which means you can't drink.
That's where the in straight edge people generally would wear an X on their hands because if
you had a big X on your hand, you couldn't drink at the bar.
They started wearing as a symbol of pride almost.
We're going to wear an X on my hand anyway, even though there's no alcohol served.
But we had we played night clubs and we prefer playing all all ages clubs as well that way
because a lot of our fans were, you know, under 18.
I think back then the drinking age was 18.
Okay, I teased it earlier.
We better jump to it.
Tell me about the beat down night.
Okay.
All right, that was that was a very spiritually.
This is one of those beautiful gifts of pain, which I open my book with, but it happens
a little bit later on my spiritual journey.
I was a monk.
This is another twist in the book plot twist, which was after I became a monk after I lived
like three years as a monk, I started to realize no, no, no, no, the teachings of India are
not giving up what you do.
It's taking what you do and use them in a spiritual way to glorify divinity instead of glorifying
your ego.
And that was the big shift.
So what I did was at that point, I started a band not far different from my first band,
but with spiritual ideas and spiritual lessons and this band, it sounds, oh, come on, how
did that work out?
I'll tell you how it worked out.
It became bigger than the first band and we toured internationally.
One night we did a performance.
Again, we're all monks.
We cook our own food wherever we go.
We meditate for two hours a day.
We set up just like a regular band.
We set up merchandise and we have roadies.
What was it called?
This band was called Shelter.
So yeah, and that night after the show, I'm not going to tell the whole story because
it's in the book.
I also tell the story on Joe Rogan too, but basically randomly we played in a ghetto and
in that ghetto we got attacked by these guys with guns, baseball bats, and I got the living
crap beat out of me.
Randomly.
Randomly and senselessly.
A little more detail.
Were you on stage?
Were you headed home?
No, thank you.
It was after the performance, after everybody was leaving and I was getting interviewed
outside and the band and the roadies were loading up our vehicle, which was parked inside the
club.
And so while I was getting interviewed outside in the alley, I see a car pull up with a gang
of guys get out of it and they just start beating somebody up randomly.
Young guy.
I mean, the people go to our shows are young, you know, under 25 and 14 and up, 14 to 25.
So then they stop beating one guy and they beat another guy.
By the time they got to the third person, everybody's sort of running.
I ran in the club and I said, hey, you guys, we got to get out of here.
It's two in the morning and there's like a gang of guys outside just kicking the crap
about everyone.
And so all our van doors were open and I could see they were in the middle of loading in
all the gear and the merchandise and they just said, you know, we can't go anywhere.
We're not even loaded out yet.
And all of a sudden the bad guys, they drove their car in the club and they parked right
in front of our van.
The biggest guy, the leader of them got out and the guy was, I mean, you couldn't
create an evil villain.
This guy was so huge and ripped and massive.
And he put his hand in his pocket and just said, I've got a gun and I'm going to kill
everyone tonight.
Now, there wasn't a lot of people left in the club.
There was a couple of bands.
There was a sound man and people breaking down the PA and there was our band breaking
down our equipment.
And I was like, oh my God, we are trapped in a club with a bunch of crazy guys.
To make a long story short, they started beating people up in the club.
And then this is going to sound crazy.
So I'm going to ask you just to believe this.
But all the guys in the band were younger than me.
So they all said, well, Raghu, what are we going to do?
At the time I was like, I don't know why.
I was like, let's not fight back.
Let's not run.
I was convinced we were all dead.
So I just said, you know, we're going to die.
And so we're going to chant.
Hey, just a quick interruption.
This month we're asking for your support for the show.
It's definitely a labor of love for Will and I, but it takes a ton of time and money and
we need donations to keep things going.
For those that donated last week, we thank you from the bottom of our hearts.
For everyone else, it's easy.
Go to roundtripdeath.com, click on the little donation button in the upper right hand corner.
You can show your support for the podcast and help us move forward.
We have had requests for video interviews.
That's something that will be unveiling soon as well as other improvements.
Thank you.
Thank you in advance.
Now back to the guest.
So in the tradition I follow, and there's a lot of traditions of Indian that the munchers
are very sacred.
They're like divine sounds.
And that at the time of death, when you're old or dying, you're to close your eyes and
you're to meditate on these divine mantras so you can pass through this body and through
this world and reconnect.
That's the goal of yoga.
So I went into the drum, I'm into the car rather, and I got a clay Indian drum that I
play.
And we all stood in a circle and we started chanting these prayers, these munchers, like
singing a song.
It was the most surreal thing you could ever think of.
Here's chaos breaking out everywhere and we're in a circle singing.
Now we didn't look like munchers.
You didn't hope the fear go away.
You know what?
I don't know what happened, but I definitely had a transcendental experience because they
came up to all of us and all the guys in my band ran.
Some people ran under the van, above the van, in the van, here and there, and I was standing
alone surrounded and the guy grabs a gun and he looks at me and says, do you want some?
And I didn't know what to do.
And I put my hands like in a namaste.
I'm still wearing this big clay drum.
Put my hands in like a prayer mudra and I just said, I'm a devotee of Lord Krishna and I
have no idea why you're angry.
I said it in a very calm voice and then I felt like a thousand fists in my face and I tell
you I have never felt helpless in my life until that moment, like totally helpless.
And every time I got hit, something very peculiar happened.
Every time I got hit, I was chanting.
I was chanting some divine mantra, some name of God, Madhava Govinda Krishna Ram.
Every time I hit and as I was getting hit, I was thinking, these guys are about to like
kill me because all I know, I've seen this happen before.
Someone falls to the ground and then they start getting hit, kicked and their head stomped.
And I was thinking, and there's no way to get out of this.
And so I just thought, I'm about to die and I'm chanting divine names.
This is the perfection of my life.
And I can't explain, I don't think it was me because I'm not a very evolved person.
But I feel like there was some divine intervention that took away all of my anxiety.
I had no anxiety.
And then five girls came with baseball bats and I thought they were there to save me,
but they were the girlfriends of these guys and they started hitting me repeatedly with
a baseball bat three times on the head.
And then still I continued chanting through each hit.
And again, I was like floored, I was like, I cannot believe what's happening right now.
I am in divine consciousness.
So anyway, that's a teaser for the story.
But yeah, it was an out of body experience where I thought, I can't die.
I can't be killed.
The body, yeah, they can wreck this body, they can damage this body, but I'm not the
body, I'm a driver of this body.
And I felt like it was not just because, like again, I'm so evolved or I'm this being of
light.
It's more that there was some divine intervention.
Like yeah, in a spiritual way, we do reach up.
But also there's a benevolent divine force reaching down.
So I felt that divine force reaching down and giving me some type of clarity in a time
where there should be nothing but panic, fear, anxiety, begging for forgiveness or
anger and spite and revenge.
There was none of that.
I tell you, I don't want it to happen again.
I wouldn't pray for it again, but it was the most spiritual experience in my life.
That's crazy.
That's hard to.
It was crazy.
It's hard to believe and hard to understand, but amazing and good for you for being at
a place where you could react like that.
Just curious.
I don't want to get too off tangent here, but were your other bandmates and friends,
were they okay or did they all get beaten up too?
You know what happened?
I didn't realize this till later.
They had all jumped in the van.
And even though we are sort of parked in by the bad guy's car, they had started the car
and they plowed through their vehicle, the other people's vehicle.
And they all escaped, but when they did a head count, they realized I wasn't in the
car with them.
And so yeah, it was a little sketchy.
They didn't get hurt.
I miraculously, you know, I went to the emergency room and despite five hits with a baseball
bat and getting pounded on, the doctors were like, you don't have a concussion.
You don't have any broken bones.
And we're just going to give you some ibuprofen on heavy doses.
So I couldn't walk for two days or move for two days, but three days later I played a
show with a cane.
Unbelievable.
It was unbelievable.
The twists and turns this crazy world takes us, isn't it?
So you had already had some major spiritual transformations before that, but be a little
more specific on what happened that night, not physically, but spiritually.
What changed in you?
What kind of switch flipped at that point?
You know, that's a great question.
I always, you know, I study, I'm a fan and it's what I do is I study wisdom literature
of the East.
I study it.
I try to imbibe it, but it's almost like a fruit, you know, to really study the fruit
without biting into the fruit or experiencing it, you can never, I can never quite explain
what a plum is to you until you take a bite of a plum.
I can explain, well, it's sweet, it's round, it's sort of fruity, you know, it's hard to
really understand it.
So by studying wisdom literature, you can understand, okay, life is temporary.
Yeah, of course life is temporary.
Life is full of pain.
Yeah, I could live life is momentary.
It could end at any minute.
It's almost like a dream.
Yeah, that makes sense.
All these things make sense, but I remember where I was after the after all the violence
was over and everything was a mess and people took off and I thought they were, I thought
they were killing my band members, I was in some garage that was open and I was on my
knees.
I didn't know where my health, what my health condition was.
I thought I had a broken skull because blood was all over my face.
I thought I had a concussion because I was hit with a club and therefore I thought, you
know, my brain is going to hemorrhage and I'm going to fall asleep and I'm going to
die.
So my realization at that moment was very, very sanguine and very, very loud.
It was, it was, you just had an experience of being saved, meaning even though you're
about to leave your body, there was an intervention where you had divine vision.
You always say, you have some lyrics that say, oh, this world's like a dream.
It's not what it seems.
We think it's solid, but it fades.
You had that realization, but now you know that's a reality.
It's not just knowledge.
This is a real reality and your experience of the dream and guess what?
The dream is over.
You're about to fall asleep and wake up into a new dream.
And so then I got very, very prayerful and I thought, you know, I started saying prayers,
you know, and I worship God as Krishna.
That's the way they say God in India.
I said, Krishna, this world is a dream.
And no one knows where I am.
My mother doesn't know where I am.
I loved ones don't know where I am, but I'm about to leave my body.
But I tell you, Krishna, please, you gave me such divine vision and such focus.
If you're going to take me, please take me while I'm awake.
Don't let me fall asleep where my mind won't be, where my mind will be clouded and I'll
just, you know, I won't be able to meditate on you.
Take me now and I prayed to die with that focused vision.
I closed my eyes.
I got a vision of divinity of Krishna and I started chanting these beautiful Sanskrit
mantras that I had studied.
And now I felt like, wow, this is the final test of my study, these beautiful prayers
and mantras.
And then unfortunately I lived because I was in very, very great consciousness.
But when I lived, I realized, okay, Krishna wants something else from me in this life.
Have you figured out what that is, what else he wants of you in this life?
Yeah, he wants me to dedicate my heart, my mind, my soul, my thoughts, my words, do
what I do best as an offering.
That's what I did with the book.
That's what I did with my music.
That's what I do with my podcast is to translate all these cryptic ancient teachings into practical
life.
I lived like an impractical monk and now I live like a practical householder.
So it's like, how do you do that?
How do you find the balance within that?
And that's sort of my message.
Well, and that, by the way, startled me when we did our pre-interview the other day because
the whole living like a monk and having this yoga retreat and stuff, I don't know.
I guess I expected you to be sitting in a tent or something.
And it's fun.
Don't mean that rude in any way.
I do like tents.
I slept outside last night.
Or I should say to a teepee even is more what I was thinking.
But sure, no, behind you, you're just in a regular, really nice suburban home is what
it looks like to me.
Yeah, it's not suburban though.
I live in the woods pretty much.
Okay.
But yeah, I live on, you know, 11 acres farm and we have a retreat center here.
I have another second house that guests stay in.
Part of this house has guest rooms where we have people stay in and sort of like a spiritual
bed and breakfast of sorts.
It has four walls, but it's surrounded by nature.
But I don't live in a hobbit house.
But I have a strong, you know, my spiritual journey has brought me closer and closer to
nature and natural living for sure.
So I had in my notes the word drowning.
Did you have some kind of a drowning episode?
Yeah.
I had an episode of a new...
Do you want to talk about that?
Sure.
It was another great, another great, horrible experience.
And I think sometimes, by the way, if any listeners are going through hell out there
right now, because sometimes we have a season in our life where we're just going through
hell and I get it.
Sometimes that hell lasts a day or 20 minutes or sometimes that hell is like, you know,
a few months or a few years.
I got some good news for you.
It's at those times of hell that we find our biggest breakthroughs.
It's God directly speaking to us.
And sometimes when there's no hell, when things are just going wonderfully, we're never introspective.
Whenever I see a person going through hell, I was like, they must be sincere about their
spiritual life because it's the universe is forcing them to go deeper and ask some bigger
questions.
And those are the times we have to ask those questions.
So I did have a moment when that second band I did was starting getting really popular
and we had a hit record in Brazil.
And so we were on a Brazil tour.
I didn't even realize how big we were there at the time, but they were playing our song
on the radios and on MTV.
And we were doing all this press conferences and we were in Ipanema in Rio de Janeiro.
And I'm one of these persons.
I like to wake up very early.
I like to meditate, especially if there's like the beach or something like that.
I woke up and I sat and did meditation on my beads for like two hours.
And I studied a chapter of the Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit and this was like my travel spiritual
morning practice.
It felt really good.
The sun was coming up, went back to the hotel to see if anybody else was up.
Maybe they want to take a morning swim.
It's good to swim in the ocean before breakfast.
There's lots of tropical fruits.
Everything seems perfect.
And then the only person who was awake was our publicist, nice guy named Paulo.
I asked him, hey, let's go swim in this morning.
And he said, I said, before we eat, it's really healthy to, you know, to bathe first in the
salt water.
And he said, you know, I really don't want him.
Not a great swimmer.
I said, well, I'm not a great swimmer either.
We don't have to swim very good.
We'll just go splash around on the waves.
And because I'm a persuasive son of a bitch, I convinced him against his will to swim.
And so we're splashing around, not where the big waves are crashing, but sort of in the
aftermath of the waves.
But we happened to be in, I don't know if it was a storm or if this is how eponema is
regularly, but the waves were very big.
Everything was going great until I couldn't find Paulo anymore.
And I was like, where the heck is my friend?
No one is on the beach except me and him.
And I'm looking around.
And then finally I just hear a voice going, help me.
I have a cramp.
I'm drowning.
Please help me.
I was like, I couldn't even see where it's coming from.
But I heard it.
And then I looked and it was just in the deeper water.
And I saw his face on top of the water, just like coming out of the water.
Help me, please help me.
You know, I wasn't sure.
Is he joking or is he serious?
So I swam over, are you okay?
Hey man, you okay?
And then as soon as I went to him, I did what I wasn't supposed to do, which is you're never
supposed to approach a drowning person from the front.
You got to go from behind.
I never took that lifeguard course.
He gripped me with all of his force and held me underwater, which is, I think, from what
I understand, a natural instinct of a drowning person is you're fighting for your life.
And he pulled me underwater until I started choking.
And he's like scratched me with his nails.
It was like almost like this fight or flight type of situation in desperation.
And he started screaming, help me.
I'm drowning.
And I was still like worried about him, even though I was sort of choking.
But I was on the bottom of the ocean floor there.
I just sprung off the floor.
And I was like, are you okay?
Are you okay?
And he starts screaming at me again.
And again, with all force pulled me underneath.
And I started coughing and choking.
And then out of nowhere, two people came up and pulled him out of the water.
And at that point, I realized I'm the one that needs help.
Actually, I'm over my head.
I feel I feel I'm caught in a riptide.
And I need help.
And I just started saying, help me, help me.
And by my third help me, I was like in the impact zone of all these waves.
And the first wave knocked me.
I was just getting tumbled and tumbled.
But because I was in the rip, I just kept them getting pulled out.
And by the time I came above water again, hit in the impact zone again.
And by the third time I came up, I was dragged so far out to the ocean, it was almost laughable.
I was like, I actually got up, I said, this is almost like hysterical.
I am so far away from the sea.
I have no energy.
I have no breath.
And I better just start screaming for help.
Now, there's something humiliating.
And you just go, when you have to call out in desperation.
And I just started going, help me, help me.
But I was so far behind the waves that no one could hear me really.
There were some people on the beach at this point, but no one could hear me.
So finally, I just said, OK, humans aren't going to help you.
You're going to have to call out to God.
And I just said, Krishna, help me, Krishna.
And then, of course, no response.
And I thought, OK, humans aren't going to help.
Krishna is not going to help.
Guess what?
Today, Ray, you're going to die.
And guess what?
Happens all the time.
It's been happening since the beginning of time.
People screw around in the water.
They got caught out in the sea.
And they die.
It's not a big deal.
This happens.
And I was like, oh my god, I wasn't ready to die today.
I'm just about to start this big tour.
Our record is big.
And I started thinking, OK.
I'm just going to say a prayer and just give up.
And I just said, I know I'm not very evolved in my spiritual life.
And I know I was attached to all these things that are happening
and seem so exciting.
But my dear Lord, please, I know I'm not
advanced enough spiritually to be evolved.
I know it takes work in this world to evolve.
I said, but can I ask for this prayer
that in my next life I get born into a family that's
very focused on their spiritual life so they've
raised me from childhood, very focused.
And then I started chanting.
And I gave up.
And that's that.
That's that.
You drowned.
We haven't seen you since.
Yeah, I haven't been there since.
Yeah, no, a 12-year-old kid came out and saved me on a surfboard.
Just put my body over the surfboard and paddled me in.
You know, there's something that's been on my mind.
Thank you so much for these stories and for your wisdom.
All real.
All real, my friend.
And I tell you, sometimes we need a dose of tragedy
to make us wake up to reality.
Tragedy, trials, whatever it is.
Yeah.
And something we touched on earlier,
you know, it's hard to ask those big questions
because of the ramifications of the answers.
Frankly, we don't want the answers sometimes,
because then we may have to change.
And that's hard.
Now, I, sorry, I feel like I need to go down a road that I just
don't normally go down.
So to my regular listeners, hey, if you don't like this,
fast forward, that's OK.
But I think there is so much misunderstanding
out there in religions.
And there's persecution.
There's people that just believe they're right
and everybody else is wrong.
And on this fundamentalism.
Yeah.
On this particular podcast, we keep it non-denominational.
Sure.
And we're not pushing any one religion
or putting down any other religion.
But you have mentioned Krishna and these Indian teachings
so much that I would just like, for people who have not
been exposed to that before, to feel a little bit more
comfortable with it.
Because some of us grew up in a time
where the only thing that we knew about what you're talking
about was the white robes and the tambourines
in the airports chanting or on Kala Kala Drive
in downtown Waikiki or wherever somebody was.
Right.
That was all that we knew about it.
And they were these crazy young hippies.
And who knows what they were chanting about or what.
So I think, one, it's a breath of fresh air
for us to see your regular people, just like people
of other denominations are.
And I believe from what you've said,
you believe in a God that may have a different name
than someone whose Christian would give that God.
Is there anything else that you would like to say
for people of all other religions out there
to just help keep the peace and the respect
amongst all of us?
Sure.
The idea, at least in Eastern thought,
in which why I was attracted to it,
is that there is one God.
We believe in one God.
And God has different names.
In the same way, you called me Ray.
And some people call me Ragnarok.
And my little kids call me Daddy.
And my mom's got a nickname for me.
So it's like, I'm the same person.
But I'll go by different names according
to different audiences.
Krishna just means the all attractive one.
God just means the one who is good.
So we believe in one, it's theistic.
But we believe that all people are on a spiritual journey.
And the soul is eternal.
And India has always been a hub
of spiritual information where people
from all over the world have gone to.
Because there's not a holy book.
There's cannons of literature dealing
with the metaphysical and the spiritual.
It's not devil work.
It predates the world's religions.
But that being said, it enhances.
I find, for example, I grew up Christian
and I have a great respect for Christianity.
I will go to church with my mom
and I'll sing the songs and accept the Eucharist, et cetera.
I don't think it's being unchaste
because there's one God.
And no church has a monopoly on truth.
Truth is truth is for all people.
And the truth is that there's one God.
And that we're all part and parcel of some higher power,
whatever you want to call your higher power.
And our job in this world is to remember
that I'm not a material being.
I'm not an American or a European
or I'm not black or white.
We're not of a particular gender.
We're actually a spirit soul
that's driving around in a vehicle.
And we should train ourselves to see spirit
in not only people that we're friends with,
but people that are different than us as well.
Even people that don't like us.
And we see spirit in all living entities.
We see spirit in animals.
We see spirit in trees.
We see spirit in planets.
And we see in the earth itself as a being.
So I don't feel like I'm really contradicting.
When I read the Bible, I find like, yeah,
I believe this, love your neighbor.
Love God with your heart, mind and soul.
That's the essence of the teachings of the East, actually.
So I feel there is, if we can ask the question,
what do we have in common
instead of what are our differences?
You're gonna find a more beautiful world, period.
And I asked that question as young age
when it comes to religion.
What do we have in common with these religions?
They all speak of some higher power.
They speak of controlling the senses,
controlling the mind.
They speak of temptations.
They speak of importance of compassion.
They believe in the importance of self-control.
They believe in the importance of forgiveness.
Why not say, hey, we got a lot in common?
Okay, there's some different outfits,
different haircuts, different ways of maybe meditation
or prayer.
Who cares?
Let that be a detail and let us come together
with some commonalities.
If we could do this in the world,
we wouldn't have this overwhelming hate and divisiveness
that is going on in the world, in politics, in high schools,
state to state, nation to nation.
It's disgusting.
I say this very frankly and easily
because it's woven into those teachings of ancient India
that anybody on their God path, we should support.
They have lessons to learn.
We shouldn't try to, we're not trying to convert somebody
from this outfit to that outfit, join our club,
give up your club.
No, the idea is that we're spirit and we forgot.
And any way you can wake up and remember that fact,
that you're a spiritual being,
and that we're just around on this planet
for a short amount of time.
If you can wake up and remind yourself
of our real identity, that's a win.
So beautifully said.
Thank you, thank you.
One last thing, let's touch on before we take off.
And that is, like I alluded to earlier,
I think spiritually transformative experiences
are relatively common.
I think most people have an opportunity
to have at least one during their life.
And they may come in all kinds of forms,
whether it's being beat up or drowned
or some of these other things that we talked about.
What is your advice for someone
who's either going through something super difficult
right now or has just had one of these experiences
but doesn't quite know how to process it?
Gee, this just happened to me.
I know it was profound,
but I'm not quite sure what to do with this.
Sometimes it's no profound,
sometimes it's just plain tragic.
But we should always understand that there's a,
you ever see one of those tapestries on the wall?
It's like a embroidery with a beautiful picture
of a waterfall or something
and the sun rising in the background.
That's a very beautiful picture.
But if I was to flip that tapestry backwards,
it would just seem like a bunch of random threads.
And if I was to invite you in my home
and say, hey, look at my tapestry,
you would think, oh, so random.
So it starts with just hearing about analogies like this,
that things appear random,
but they have a very specific significance.
And when we understand what is the significance
and ask those questions, why did this happen?
Where is this goading me?
And don't let it goad you
to what a Christian would call like the devil.
Let it goad you towards light instead of darkness.
Let it goad you not towards revenge,
not towards spite, not towards hatred,
but towards what can I learn
and how can I grow from these things?
Let that be the burning question.
What is the greater plan?
Nothing is random in this world.
Everything is significant
because you're a significant being.
And therefore, everything is part
of some greater tapestry that I can't see
from my vantage point.
I'm just seeing what's right in front of my face
and it appears like a tragedy.
There's a greater plan.
Thank you.
Do you mind if I add just something to that?
And that is once we figure that out,
the next question is, how do we take that
and now better serve others with it?
Are you asking me that question?
No, I was just sharing that soap box,
but please if you want to add to that, please do.
Okay, that's a great statement.
It's sort of a statement now.
How can we give that away to other people?
Yeah, that's right on.
All right, my last question.
On a scale of one to 10, how much fear of death do you have?
You know, again, it's something I could very easily say,
I have no fear, I'm a spiritual being,
but you never know until you're in the situation,
but I do have faith because it's been proven to me
again and again that to the degree
that I am on my spiritual journey,
even if something's traumatic,
I feel like there will be intervention.
So I'm less worried about it.
And there's a saying that if Krishna wants to kill you,
no one can save you.
And Krishna wants to save you, no one can kill you.
So when you hear like when it's meant to die,
you're meant to die.
And if you're on a spiritual path, you'll be with God,
you'll be connected.
Even if you get hit in the head from behind
where then at that time where you're struck,
God will appear and be with you.
Nothing is random and everything is happening
for some purpose for our growth.
And if you're on a spiritual path,
you should understand that you're really putting yourself
in divine hands.
If anybody wants to read Punk to Monk
or find out a little bit more about you, Raganath,
we'll have some info in the show notes.
People can find it there.
Thanks for being with me today.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks so much.
And it's available on Audible for those who don't read.
I'm finding a lot of people,
a lot of people listen on Audible nowadays.
So I got a chance to read it on Audible,
which was very fun.
Oh, so it's all read by you.
That's awesome.
Yeah, I got to read it myself.
That was especially fun to do.
I've always wondered, as the author reading,
do you feel like making a little change here and there
as you're reading along?
Yes, I feel like ad-libbing it.
And the publisher told me I absolutely cannot,
it's gotta be exactly word for word.
They wouldn't let you ad-lib anything.
No, no, because at first I started doing it
and I just called them on the phone
and they were like, you cannot do that.
You gotta go over and redo it.
It sort of stinks, but it stinks, but it's intelligent
because I will just riff into a whole different story.
Part of me glad I didn't do it.
All right, thanks again.
Thank you so much for listening and supporting the show.
Just a reminder, click on over to roundtripdeath.com
to make a donation and we'll put a link in the show notes.
Until then, I wish you every good thing
that you're looking for in this life and the next.