David Lynchs Shockingly Peaceful Inner Life Chris Pizzello/Reuters/Corbis
David Lynch campaigning this month for an Oscar for Laura Dern, the star of
Inland Empire. The cow is a non sequitur.
By ALEX WILLIAMS
Published: December 31, 2006
Los Angeles
Freek Van Asperen Pressphoto Agency/Corbis
David Lynch, the auteur and author.
IF you were looking for a Tom Cruise to preach to a new generation the gospel
of Transcendental Meditation, a hippie-era spiritual practice espousing inner
harmony, David Lynch would be one of the least likely candidates.
As the director who conjured the reptilian mutant baby of Eraserhead and
the dancing dwarf of Twin Peaks, Mr. Lynch has built his career by imposing
his nightmares on the rest of us.
The idea of the inscrutable David Lynch, Hollywoods leading surrealist and
eccentric, reborn as the guru of bliss seems a little odd even to Mr. Lynch
himself.
Now 60, he remembers how he recoiled from the concept when he heard about it
in the late 1960s, when the movement founded by the Indian spiritual leader
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was experiencing its first wave of popularity among
young people in the West thanks to proselytizing by pop stars like the Beatles
and Donovan.
The word harmony would make me want to puke, recalled Mr. Lynch, speaking
on a clear, chilly afternoon in the glassed-in painting studio atop his
Modernist concrete-walled house in the Hollywood Hills. Even as an Eagle Scout
and a popular student at a public high school in Alexandria, Va., he composed
paintings, influenced by the grotesqueries of Francis Bacon, in a studio with
walls that he and a friend painted black.
Meditation would be a sickening thing to consider, because you want that
edge to create, he said, wearing worn khaki trousers and a tattered black
sports jacket with a hole in the right elbow the size of a saucer. I dont
want to be a namby-pamby.
Besides, he added, you would get chicks when youre angry.
That all changed in 1973, when the future filmmaker discovered meditation,
which he believes allowed him to quiet and exploit his inner demons. He
said that he has not missed a day since.
And now, the low-key auteur is emerging as the most visible, even fiery,
proponent of the resurgent practice, which is being used increasingly in
schools and in the workplace, as well as by a new generation of stars,
including Heather Graham, Laura Dern and the record executive Rick Rubin.
In July 2005, Mr. Lynch began the David Lynch Foundation, which finances
Transcendental Meditation scholarships for students in middle schools and high
schools to study the practice. Later that year, he embarked on a series of
lectures on college campuses that attracted significant attention in the news
media.
This winter, Mr. Lynch is taking the message to the masses. His
autobiography-cum-self-help book, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation,
Consciousness, and Creativity (Tarcher/Penguin), will be released this week.
Next month, he will preside over a series of readings and discussions, in
tandem with concerts by Donovan, at Lincoln Center in New York, the Kennedy
Center in Washington and the Kodak Theater in Los Angeles.
Its weird, said Mr. Lynch, in the flat folksy accent of his native
Missoula, Mont., speaking of his increasing involvement. I guess its as
simple as this: I wish I had heard it earlier.
The idea of David Lynch serving as the spokesman for anything is a bit of a
stretch. Mr. Lynch suffers from a lifelong fear of public speaking I still
hate it, he said and will happily recount how he has tape-recorded speeches
at home for awards ceremonies, then played them into the microphone at the
podium.
I call him the reluctant yogi, said Robert Roth, a spokesman for the
Transcendental Meditation organization and the vice president of the
foundation. It was Mr. Roth who initially nudged Mr. Lynch onto the college
lecture circuit. He added: If I didnt say, Please ask questions, David
would just stand up there. He doesnt care how awkward anyone else feels.
Transcendental Meditation is a trademarked mental technique introduced by
Maharishi in 1958 based on the proposition that a practitioner, by repeating a
private mantra throughout two 20-minute sessions a day, can achieve a state of
restful alertness and, theoretically, tap into a unified field of energy.
The training process involves working with personal instructors over five days
at one of about 1,000 Transcendental Meditation centers worldwide, and it costs
about $2,500.
In the 60s, adherents posed Transcendental Meditation as a natural
alternative to mind-expanding drugs like LSD. Now, proponents, including Mr.
Lynch, argue that it can serve as an antidote to a stress-filled world,
particularly for adolescents. Mr. Lynch cites his increasing concern for young
people as the primary reason he launched his crusade.
David has become a huge promoter of T.M., said Donovan, whose real name is
Donovan Leitch. Mr. Leitch learned the practice from Maharishi himself, along
with the Beatles, Mia Farrow and Mike Love of the Beach Boys, in Rishikesh,
India, in 1968. Mr. Leitch added that Mr. Lynch has been able to capitalize
on his fame and redirect meditation back where it belongs, with the students.
Transcendental Meditation faded from the pop culture landscape after the
70s. Before Mr. Lynch, a marquee celebrity advocate was the illusionist Doug
Henning, who died in 2000. But it hardly disappeared. Maharishi, now believed
to be 90, still directs the movement, which claims more than 6 million
adherents, from a log house on a 65-acre compound in the Dutch village of
Vlodrop. The organization operates the Maharishi University of Management in
Fairfield, Iowa; its own incorporated town, Vedic City (population 325), is
nearby.
Over the years, the practice has been the subject of numerous scientific
studies, including one by the University of Michigan Health System in 2003,
which indicated that sixth graders who were practicing such meditation appeared
to score significantly higher on tests of self-esteem and emotional competence.
But critics allege that it can inspire an unhealthy devotion. Rick A. Ross,
who operates a nonprofit research organization in Jersey City called the Rick
A. Ross Institute for the Study of Destructive Cults, Controversial Groups and
Movements, said that the evidence he has studied indicates that Transcendental
Meditation can be relaxing when not practiced excessively. But the movement
fits some criteria he uses to define cults. It is a personality-driven group,
with Maharishi as its totalitarian leader, Mr. Ross said, which at its
extremes can be seen as one in which people lose much of their ability for
critical thinking.
Mr. Lynchs book on meditation is to be released this week.
But Mr. Lynch, who was raised Presbyterian, insisted that Transcendental
Meditation is neither a cult nor a theology, but simply a practice one learns,
then pursues in private.
As an artist, Mr. Lynch said, it has allowed him to unleash his imagination
and be, in a word, weirder. He said that many of his ideas the big fish of
his books title come to him during meditation. Among these big fish are the
sitcom-starring rabbits and the Greek chorus of prostitutes in his fantastical
three-hour new film, Inland Empire, now showing in limited release.
Of course, artists are allowed their quirks, and Mr. Lynch revels in his.
Last month, to campaign for an Academy Award nomination for Laura Dern, the
star of his new movie, Mr. Lynch sat on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and
La Brea with a cow and a giant poster of Ms. Derns face.
Early in his career, while other Hollywood hopefuls were losing themselves to
cocaine, Mr. Lynch got strung out on milkshakes, visiting a Los Angeles Bobs
Big Boy almost daily for seven years. Now more health conscious, he favors the
veggie burgers at Astro Burger. To be a grown-up and to do what you want to do
is the most beautiful thing, he said, his gray-flecked hair pomaded into what
looked like a tangle of swaying prairie grass. But this doesnt happen for
most people. Sadly, they have to make ends meet.
For these people, Mr. Lynch argues in the book, meditation can be a way out.
For example, an unhappy insurance salesman who learns to dive within will
find his soul-crushing commutes and stale breakfasts enlivened by ideas. Little
by little, Mr. Lynch said, the salesman will find his weekdays becoming more
like Saturday morning the sun is coming out, this beautiful warmth, with his
favorite breakfast, birds chirping.
If you were a burglar, youd become a much better burglar, he added. But
after a while, you would probably say, well, wait a minute. You would probably
have compassion for people you were burglarizing. You might even bring some
stuff back.
The directors goal is to raise $7 billion to help open seven peace
universities around the world. He also endorses Maharishis belief that a mass
demonstration of yogic flying a so-called advanced technique in which
meditators, seated in the lotus position, begin hopping in unison and
theoretically start to hover can radiate peaceful energy out to the world.
(Asked if he had tried this, he responded: Yes. Did it work? No.)
Mr. Lynch writes in his book that he began meditating on the recommendation
of his sister, Martha. At the time, Mr. Lynch was a year into a torturous
five-year quest to complete his first feature film, Eraserhead, which was
released in 1977, and was separating from his first of three wives, Peggy
Lentz.
There was a hollowness inside, he recalled. I thought, something is
drastically wrong.
He dropped in on a Transcendental Meditation center. After 20 minutes, he
felt a weight lifted.
The side effect of growing that consciousness, he explained, is, negative
things start going away. Like fear. Its like the suffocating rubber clown suit
begins to dissolve. Certainly, the teachings of gentle-voiced Maharishi never
made Mr. Lynch go soft. You dont have to suffer to show suffering, he said
of the violence in his movies. The filmmaker sees no contradiction between
inner harmony and external edginess.
I heard Charles Bukowski started meditation late in his life, Mr. Lynch
said, referring to the poet laureate of Skid Row, who died in 1994. He was an
angry, angry guy, but he apparently loved meditation.
Of course, just as meditation never got Mr. Lynch over a taste for the
macabre, it never quenched Mr. Bukowskis famous thirst for whiskey. Well,
maybe in time, it would have, Mr. Lynch said with a smile. In the meantime
just more enjoyment of the whiskey.
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