From Sex to the Super-conscious: The Beatles Experience

Our friend Nate Rabe this time on his Sunday musings enters the nether worlds of scandal,Sadhus, music and the Beatles.Those were very early days around the forties when the West had still not got over their fantasies about an India of elephants,trees, snakes and levitating Sadhus : an Incredible India of magic and undiscovered treasures.The Classical musicians and dancers like Uday Shanker, Ravi Shanker, the Vilayat Khans,Bauls some decades later were making their very own discoveries of a new ethos and culture of women, sex and drugs in the West.Both the West and the East seemed to have a need for each other looking for their own and sometimes contrarian Brave New Worlds.Money was playing the willing pimp for music, mysticism,fantasy and sometimes honest curiosity.
Aldous Huxley had discovered early the wonder that was India.Regrettably the 'mescaline drug' came in the way.The Beach Boys,David Lynch the avant garde film-maker,Clint Eastwood had come and gone seeing the Guru.Allen Ginsberg with the Bauls was also trying to make poetry from a new cosmic experience that was never happening.The Beatles had had enough of speed and fame .They were looking for a cooling off.
Drugs were not enough for 'highs"while closer home Hindustani Classical music was running out of its steady patrons of Nawabs, Zemindars,rajahs post the Independence.Both had its protagonists seeking relief and sometimes salvation from across their own shores far and away...
These stray connects are being made to remember a past in which native and foreign vulnerabilities abound which calls for better understanding and a lot of heart.Whether Beatles made better music because of Mahesh or their sojourn in India is moot.Let the fans decide.
Ah ! the new word 'priapic'.Learnt that one Nate sure.But was the Guru all about that ? Maybe the Farrow sisters were too sleepy to know. The Bhagwan Rajneesh phenomenon was just about on its way and pretty things of the better worlds had not quite finished with sex and looking for "super consciousness from crossed seminal fluids instead'.Everything was there sans music.Was then the phallus in the brains of the West or in the "lingams" worshipped over millennia in our backyards?

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