Quotes from Caryl Matrisciana

Now I look back and realize the devastating impact that Hair's message had on my thinking, religious outlook, attitudes and morality.

Despite our live-for-today philosophy, eventually tomorrow came. Upon returning home, I discovered with dismay that my bank accounts were almost empty.

Hair represented the foundational ideas that prepared us and our world for the principles that underlie today's most influential mindset -- New Age thinking.

Life was very good to me. Yet I also recall an increasing frequency of deep, inner pain. I remember days of depression. I can still feel the loneliness and the struggle. What was happening? I had every material thing and achieved all the success I could ask for. Yet I felt emotionally bankrupt.

I became deeply committed to the New Age agenda, although I must admit I did not understand the spiritual implications. I merely longed for self-improvement and hungered after some kind of peace and love.

The more I attempted to escape through self-consultation, self-help therapies, psychology, psychiatry, and self-analysis, the more frustrated I became.

My life experiences had taught me more about India and its religious ramifications than any of my enlightened friends would have dared guess. And in my recollection, nothing to be found along the streets of Calcutta, Bombay or Madras promised a better life to anyone.

So, in accepting the New Age teachings in the 1960s, had I somehow accepted the very religion that had frightened me so much as a child?

I had erroneously become convinced that I had the power to alter my reality, when in fact it was demonic spirits that were at work in my life.

Little did I comprehend at the time that through this musical I was being subtly introduced to a new religious system. One song ridiculed the faith of my youth. It encouraged us not to believe in God per se, but instead, to see that we ourselves were like gods.

Nervously I looked around, but most of the audience joined in. They seemed unaware that they were praying. They didn't realize they were invoking and praising an Indian deity.

Yoga, a practice that is at the heart of Hindu philosophy and religion, means to yoke. Its goal is to unite man with Brahman, the Hindu concept of 'God' or (god-consciousness). Brahman represents everything. It is seen as the all, the absolute. Brahman is both all good and all bad and is the power and the force of the universe--the god of India.

The theory behind vegetarian eating as the highest form of purity led me to campaign tirelessly for animal rights. Many times I considered animal rights to be more important than human priorities. I didn't realize until years later that I was developing an attitude towards animals I had rejected growing up in India. Some animals were becoming sacred in my eyes. And I was placing their value well above that of human beings.

Even in Bengal, where I had spent most of my growing years, this sect (which was established there in the fifteenth century A.D.) did not display the sort of fanatic trancelike madness that we witnessed on Oxford Street or on the stage of 'Hair'.

I wondered why Westerners were so enthralled with a religious activity that didn't incite much enthusiasm even among its own people in India.

The same attitude sparked my extreme attempts to protect the environment. Nature was a goddess, part of Mother Earth, to be reverenced and honored. Nature had to be allowed to survive, even at the expense of human needs. In my holistic reasoning, I saw the created as the Creator--I deified nature and man--

Without fully realizing it, however, I was actually placing myself in a godlike position of authority.

Back in the days before CDs, or even cassette recordings, I would spend hours consumed with listening to rhythmic vinyl record albums, unaware that they infiltrated my subconscious with mystical religiosity.

So it was that I justified my morals and ethics. Everything became relative.

The show moved along captivatingly. In the same way that the Hare Krishna sect was glorified, suddenly so was Yoga. Yoga! Alarm bells rang in my mind. The Yoga I had seen in India was intense, arduous and serious -- a discipline taught by avowed spiritual masters who prepared their disciples for death. So why did 'Hair's' hero in the song 'Donna' go to India to see the Yoga light? Why was it associated with drugs and reincarnation and presented as such a sweet, new spiritual experience?