How that was done was to teach while playing. I listened to him and his groups for hours and hours, with and without being loaded. Dope enhanced the experience, but the same kind of meditative state could be reached with the right mood, time, and place. Here is a taste of the ideas:
``In the Indian musical tradition, ragas are associated with different times of the day, or with seasons. Indian classical music is always set in a raga. Non-classical music such as popular Indian film songs and ghazals sometimes use ragas in their compositions. Joep Bor of the Rotterdam Conservatory of Music defined Raga as "tonal framework for composition and improvisation."[2] Nazir Jairazbhoy, chairman of UCLA's department of ethnomusicology, characterized ragas as separated by scale, line of ascent and descent, transilience, emphasized notes and register, and intonation and ornaments...''
It wasn't just time of day, but seasons, and these are made to correspond to male and female, as well states of the soul or mind. This stuff is waay deep and I say that with irony and not irony. It was in my mind of course completely secular, but it also had an impact on my sense of art history, particularly western medieval non-christian arts that featured abstract designs that tried to achieve something similar at a lower level of development and awareness.
The real klincher to how this works came out in the music of The Apu Trilogy, by Satyajit Ray which I saw first about the same time:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apu_Trilogy
``This semi-autobiographical novel describes the growing up of Apu, a small boy in a Bengal village. He went ahead with the film after meeting Jean Renoir during filming of The River (1951) and after watching the Italian neorealist film Bicycle Thieves (1948) while he was in London. Besides the influence of European cinema and Bengali literature, Ray is also indebted to the Indian theatrical tradition, particularly the rasa theory of classical Sanskrit drama. The complicated doctrine of rasa "centers predominantly on feeling experienced not only by the characters but also conveyed in a certain artistic way to the spectator. The duality of this kind of a rasa imbrication" shows in The Apu Trilogy.''
Art majors at Berkeley during that period had a lot of time on their hands to enjoy and study these things not in the regular course catalogs. The cycles of the raga were made to correspond to the cycles in the trilogy. These cycles form a combination of minor and major cycles, as in the development of the characters, their moods, their positions within their life cycles and then major to the scope of all the stories put together.
I saw the films a few years ago and only then saw, or think I saw the major forms of the composition, since I had finally lived through them myself as boy, student, young married adult, and struggling artist, birth of my son, and then his develop etc, and then looking back as a man in his sixties.
Just the other night I was at a dinner that included my son, grandkids, as well as my science buddy, his father, and his son, who was struggling with his first serious relationship... while my buddy finally had a great relationship with a woman who put on the dinner. Among the other guests was one of buddy's favorite former students, an interesting young woman who was near finishing a pharmacist degree and going through the heavy load of chemistry. My son who was a chemistry major and her had a fun conversation about their struggles to get through this highly technical stuff...
The combination of Ray's early film Trilogy and Shankar's music were great poetic works. I wasn't thinking about them last week, but they certainly taught me how to look at this heart of the human condition. It helps to understand the nature of an extended family, and what is destroyed by our wars in the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan where you see it turned to bloody pulp.
I am glad Ravi Shankar lived a long happy life and hopefully so did Satyajit Ray. With the sidenote that happiness is not monolithic and simple. It includes complicated satisfactions, grievences turn just, forsight completed as reality with backgrounds of sadness and shadows.
CG