Coltrane's "Equinox": Blues as Meditation

Coltrane's "Equinox" came up on the radio the other day and it struck me again how this is nothing but a blues, yes, but it's a slanted one, and I mean that it a good way. It relies on the minor note and chord patterns of the blues, but comes across as something else entirely. To me it makes an impact like an Eastern/Hindu mantra meditation, and I think that was intentional on Coltrane's part. I've not seen it mapped out by anyone else, and I'm not a true musicologist, but it seems to me that this cut, recorded in 1960, inaugurates 'Trane's path to 1964's A Love Supreme, where the connection with Eastern religion is explicit, even underlined, with the musicians chanting the words along with the main, repetitive musical motif. 

At the Wikipedia page, they suggest that Tran's extrapolations on the theme in "Equinox" call to mind the testifying in a sanctified church. Yes, there is that, but to me it sounds like the variations that spin out endlessly in your mind as the mantra morphs and expands upon itself. Again, this is more explicit in A Love Supreme. Earlier this year, I discussed Stanley Crouch's thesis that "progress" in jazz depends on the art form applying its core attributes in adventurous ways, as opposed to importing foreign or "exotic" elements. There's not sitar here. Just the most fundamental element of the music, the blues, reimagined as a means to states of consciousness that were becoming more available to those of us in the West, as the dialogue between global cultures exploded during the 20th century.