Watching: Eternity’s Pillar

Overview

Throughout the mid-1980s, viewers tuning in late at night to Los Angeles’s KTTV Channel 11 could catch a broadcast unlike any other: ETERNITY’S PILLAR, a journey through the astral plane created and hosted by jazz visionary and spiritual guru Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda. Blending music, meditation, chanting, and an avant-garde video-art aesthetic, this singular audiovisual experience—four episodes of which are presented here—is a sublimely cosmic expression of Coltrane’s deep-held belief in music’s capacity to attain spiritual transcendence.