Pursuit of Spiritual Life Leads to Role as Guru

A jazz critic once wrote that the late saxophone virtuoso John Coltrane, like no jazzman before him, deliberately offered his work as a form of religious expression, raising his music from the saloons to the heavens.

“In his use of jazz as prayer and meditation, Coltrane was beyond all doubt the principal spiritual force in music,” wrote Edward Strickland shortly after Coltrane’s 1967 death from liver disease at the age of 40.

His pianist-wife, Alice, who was exposed to her husband’s informal studies of Hinduism, took a serious look at the religion after his death and has emerged as a guru of growing repute.

She was accepted this year as a spiritual guide for a congregation of East Indian-American Hindus in the San Fernando Valley.

In the late 1960s, even while raising four children, she entered a period of austere spiritual testing. She studied with Swami Satchidananda, well-known as founder of the Integral Yoga Institute, traveling with him to India and Sri Lanka.

“I received my mantra initiation from Satchidananda,” she said.

During the early 1970s, she recorded music expressing her spiritual pilgrimage and devotional life. But it was not until 1975 that she donned robes symbolic of the celibate, consecrated life. She also took the name Swami Turiyasangitananda, which she said means the “transcendental Lord’s highest song of bliss.”

The owner of Jowcol Music in Los Angeles, she works to preserve the memory of John Coltrane by organizing annual jazz festivals in his name.

By her own account, Alice Coltrane, 54, devotes most of her time to spiritual teaching, having created the Vedantic Center in Woodland Hills as a nonprofit organization in 1976.

In 1983, the center acquired 48 acres in Agoura’s Triunfo Canyon in the Santa Monica Mountains. A racially mixed community of 23 adults and 13 children plus 10 non-resident students studies there--about the same number as during the last five years.

Students concentrate on prayer and meditation--”chanting the One Lord’s many names”--and scriptural studies, according to literature from the Vedantic Center. Modest dress, a vegetarian diet, periodic fasting and occasional silence are observed as well.

She has written two books, “Monumental Eternal,” a kind of spiritual biography, and “Endless Wisdom,” which she said contains hundreds of scriptures divinely revealed to her.

An excerpt from “Endless Wisdom” reads: “They shall be thrice blest these that remove the dust from the mirror of the mind, insomuch that they shall behold the inner radiance of their souls.”

Asked in an interview about reports that she practices levitation, she said she does but that she has no witnesses because she does it only in private.

“I don’t encourage the development of mystical practices because it detracts from devotion to God,” she said.