Two years after Pharoah Sanders’ Karma, Alice Coltrane delivered the ultimate statement of free-form holy music with Universal Consciousness, a sonic capture of devotional rites in a crystal temple of the mind. Achieving transcendence where others from that period – Popol Vuh, for example – ultimately failed, Coltrane and her free-jazz accomplices definitively demonstrate that human weakness can only be overwhelmed through devotion to art which strives to fuse with the cosmic.