SHELTER • Ray Cappo • 15 April 1995

Could you start by summarising the origins and main philosophy of Krishna consciousness?

Ray: Krishna originates in ancient India. It’s simply a way of saying God. You’ll find many similarities with other religions, but in Krishna consciousness you’ll also find things that are unique, things you can’t find in other religions. It’s been kept secret and passed down from gurus to disciples for thousands of years. In the sixties one of the gurus came to America by boat. He was seventy years old and translated many of these books. That’s how the Krishna movement became known to the rest of us. That’s how I first heard about it too, by reading books.

Our simplest belief is that everything is a spirit soul. That spirit soul is pure. When it becomes confused, people start thinking, ‘I’m a material body, and this person is a material body.’ But the reality is that everything, everyone, is spiritual. That’s not a girl, that’s a spirit soul. That’s not a tree, that’s a spirit soul. I’m not a boy, I’m a spirit soul. The first illusion is thinking I’m a body, and all the other illusions start with that: I’m a white man, I’m German, I’m American, you’re an animal, and because you’re an animal I can take advantage of you. This is my land and I was here first. These are all basic illusions that come from thinking I’m this body. The first step towards spiritual advancement is understanding that you’re not this body.

Understanding it this way breaks down all those walls and religious barriers. For example, a kid wrote me a letter saying, ‘I’m a pastor. I’m a SHELTER fan, but I’ve become a pastor. I’m praying for you to be converted. I know you’re Krishna, but I’m praying for your conversion.’ I wrote back: ‘You don’t understand what I’ve been saying all these years. I am a Christian, meaning I follow Christ’s teachings. I follow Buddha’s teachings and Mohammed’s teachings, because Christ taught, “Love God with your heart, mind and soul,” and that’s Krishna consciousness.’

Through Krishna consciousness you get something more: you get to understand who that person is. It’s like saying, ‘I love my girlfriend.’ I ask, ‘What does she look like?’ and you say, ‘I don’t know.’ ‘What does she like doing?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘What are her hobbies?’ ‘I don’t know.’ How can you love that person? It’s difficult; you’ve got to love that personality. Krishna consciousness says you love that attraction from your source, from God. The word God is so vague; it means the good one. I love God, I love the good one. Anybody can be the good one. I’m the good one, you’re the good one. And Krishna is the most attractive person.

Krishna consciousness gives you detailed information about that personality through these Sanskrit scriptures. It’s very interesting. It’s a form of meditation practised by chanting mantras. There are certain restrictions: you don’t smoke, drink or eat meat, and you only have sex to have children. By practising these restrictions you develop a kind of peace, a freedom from bodily urges. Some people think, ‘What’s wrong with lust?’ But lust means you’re unsatisfied, and that’s what makes us unhappy. Without peace, how can anyone be happy?

You also believe in reincarnation. From what you’ve just said about the spirit soul and what I know about reincarnation, moving from one body to another is nothing more than changing clothes for the soul.

Ray: It’s changing clothes right now. Every second the body changes. Cells are always falling off the body, and when you eat you add something new. For example, you get suntanned, and a few days later you’re no longer tanned. Did your tan fade? No, your skin actually changed; you’re getting new skin cells. It’s the same when you get your hair cut. We’re watching our bodies change, like the hands of a clock: they move very slowly, but they are moving. Similarly, our bodies grow and we watch them grow. But we remain the same; we’re just watching the changes around us.

It’s like someone in an elevator watching the floors go by. The first floor is sporting goods, the second laundry, the third housewares. You’re watching all those floors go by. You also see your body go through so many changes: childhood, youth, middle age, old age. The soul never dies; it’s eternal. But your body is always dying. The body is like a cloud around us; it doesn’t stay the same even for a second. You can compare it to a river, always flowing. In one sense you could say the river isn’t even here because it’s always changing.

So the step from death to rebirth is no different from the bodily changes we experience every day?

Ray: We’re changing bodies right now. Although the water in the river appears the same, it’s completely different. It runs through my hands, and now it’s different water. Now you have a completely different body. You’re not a stretched-out version of your five-year-old self. Completely new molecules, new hairs on your head, new veins in your body. This is a completely different hand. Then you go through another change at death, when this vehicle stops working, just as your soul enters your mother’s womb. You take on a new identity and think, ‘Oh, I’m a German guy.’ Next time you think, ‘I’m a Swedish woman,’ or, ‘I’m a dog and I like chasing cats.’ The dog thinks cats are great. That has nothing to do with the spirit soul; it’s just how the mind works. We have certain limitations in different bodies. The mind is shaped in a certain way, but the soul is completely separate.

It’s like sitting at a computer. The user now has the computer’s intelligence. You can go into Windows, whatever program you have. You’re within that computer’s brain, just as the soul is within your brain right now. We can’t extricate ourselves from the computer, the body’s hard drive. Intelligence is something we can analyse, and we can analyse the body. Who is doing the analysing? That’s the spirit, the spirit soul!

The Krishna movement’s most important source is the Bhagavad-gita, mainly a conversation between Krishna and Arjuna, one of his followers. In it Krishna says enlightenment can be achieved through inaction. What does that mean?

Ray: That’s exactly what SHELTER is. It’s called inaction in action. Everything you do produces a reaction. Do something good and you get a good reaction; do something bad and you get a bad reaction. The real problem of life is that you must die. People have a million problems: paying bills, a car that isn’t working properly, problems at college. But the real problem is that you’re going to die. Someone who understands the science of reincarnation doesn’t want to die because he doesn’t want to be born again. Birth means growing old and dying again. So yogis or devotees aren’t interested in being born again. They want to leave the cycle of birth and death. Sometimes, when you study these philosophies, you see a wheel. It represents that cycle. We really want to escape the wheel and return to the spiritual world.

Devotees don’t want any reaction, good or bad. A good reaction means being born into a rich family and being very beautiful. But they’re not interested in that either, because ultimately even the rich and beautiful must die. A devotee wants akarma, which means no karma.

The person asking Krishna questions said, ‘I want to stop doing anything. I’m just going to sit here.’ He was on a battlefield and didn’t want to fight. But fighting was his duty. He thought not fighting was inaction, but because it was his duty to fight, he would get a reaction for not doing it. That meant he’d have to be born again. You’re getting action even through inaction; you’re getting a reaction. Krishna said that if he fought—basically he was protecting his people from enemies—if he did his duty and protected those people, it would look like action, but he wouldn’t get a reaction because he was doing it for Krishna.

Whenever you serve Krishna, there’s no reaction. For example, we’re not vegetarians. Some people think we are, but we only eat vegetarian food offered to Krishna. It’s not ordinary vegetarian food, because killing animals produces a reaction, but killing plants does too. Even vegetarians get a reaction for killing plants. Devotees take the food and offer it to Krishna: ‘Please, Krishna, accept this offering.’ Krishna says, ‘If you offer it with devotion, I accept the reaction for killing those plants.’ Now the food is filled with akarma, or no reaction. If you eat food that has been killed, you ultimately have to accept some reaction for the killing. As the Bible says, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ That’s a simple way of putting it. So what do you do? If you don’t kill anything, how do you live? You take the food and offer it to Krishna, and he accepts the reaction. It’s the same with all your work: if you do it spiritually, Krishna takes that reaction. That’s how it works, and that’s the whole key to the Bhagavad-gita. Do your duty, carry out your activities spiritually, and you won’t get a reaction.

Is there a way to get rid of karma once you’ve accumulated it? Nobody can be a Krishna devotee from birth, so everyone has some karma when they become a follower.

Ray: Yes, because devotional service, devotion to Krishna, burns away past sins. The word sin has many Christian overtones, but basically it means reactions stored up like seeds. Devotional service destroys past sin. You can burn away those seeds, like the sun rising and destroying seeds. The sun of Krishna destroys the seeds of previous sinful actions. That’s why people chant Vishnu mantras, mantras to Vishnu or Krishna: they destroy karma. It helps simply to act in ways that don’t produce more karma.

People might say, ‘The murderer killed that little girl and got away with it. He didn’t go to prison.’ Nobody gets away with murder. There’s always a reaction; you can’t do something without one. The world is just. We never know what people did in their past lives, what sort of people we were. I could have been a mass murderer; I could have been Gandhi. Who knows? When something happens, you say, ‘Why me?’ There’s a book called ‘Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People?’ Because nobody’s good: we all do things that cause karma. If you didn’t do it in this life, you did it in a previous one. Then you get a reaction and think, ‘Why me?’ I’ll tell you why: because you did something to deserve it. People say, ‘No, I did nothing.’ You don’t know what you did in your previous lives. The whole reason we take a material body is that we’ve done something. Another definition of karma is bad activity.

When the body is temporary, how can there be peace? There can never be peace in the body. It’s like balancing an egg on your finger. How can there be peace? It could fall and break at any second. Peace only comes when we understand we’re not the body. Instead, people do the opposite and try to become more involved in the body. What happens then? Complete distress! If you’re the egg and it breaks, you’re ruined. There are so many great stories about the moment of death. The time of death is such an amazing thing. They say a materialistic person, a non-devotee, sees death as a mouse sees a cat. How does a mouse see a cat? With great fear! When people truly understand they’re not this body, they become pure. Then there’s no more fear.

What happens when the spirit finally leaves the cycle of reincarnation? What happens to the soul?

Ray: According to the Vedic scriptures, we begin at higher stages. We start developing a personal relationship with Krishna. People say they love God, but there are different ways of loving someone. You love a girlfriend one way, your mother another, your son another and your friend another. In America we have only one word for love. Sanskrit has many words describing different aspects of love. There are five main rasas, or relationships, we can have with Krishna. One is feeling the Lord is our child; another is feeling he’s our friend. Another is servant: Krishna is our servant. Then there’s a neutral relationship, like Krishna is a cow. The highest is called lover, who experiences all the other relationships. These are very esoteric things.

Eventually we all have one of these relationships with Krishna, and it becomes manifest in our lives. What follows is called spontaneous love. You even lose your normal vision and can no longer see others merely as human beings. You see everyone in a relationship with Krishna and begin seeing Krishna everywhere. His body is everywhere, but you have to develop the vision to see it. When you finally leave the body, there’s nothing holding you there. You’re out, and it’s glorious because you’re nearly out of the material universe. It’s not boring: there’s activity in the spiritual world.

It’s interesting that Krishna devotees don’t pray to God as the all-powerful person, although God is all-powerful. Some people do, like Christians and even some Hindus. But Krishna devotees want a more intimate relationship. Krishna wants that intimacy too, because he wants the experiences we have with love and friendship. He places a special illusion over us so that, once we’re in the spiritual world, we don’t understand that Krishna is God. You simply think he’s this kid or your son. There are so many stories in the scriptures about people in the spiritual world relating to Krishna. He has certain friends; sometimes they wrestle and beat him. Krishna wants to experience being a boy, so he puts them under an illusion so they don’t worship him. He doesn’t like that worship. He likes being a friend or a lover. He’s a dear friend or the greatest lover.

What advice would you give someone who wants to become a follower of Krishna?

Ray: It depends on where you’re starting. If you’re taking drugs, stop. You’re already in an illusion; why go through a second one? Use your intelligence to detach yourself from the body and practise Krishna meditation. Start reading and chanting the mantras. Eat vegetarian food and offer it to Krishna. Chanting every day is like a clock. It seems not to move, but after an hour you can see it has moved. It’s the same with chanting: if you observe, you’ll see it has an effect. Then nobody has to tell you anymore; you’ll see the effect in your consciousness.