One morning in the summer of 2012, I was driving down Mulholland Drive while I was pregnant with David Lynch in the back seat of a limousine. Lynch was 66 years old at the time. He was handsome and well-groomed: blazer, white shirt, American Liquor in his breast pocket, white hair, fake hawk style. It was 100 degrees outside, a muffled sound came from the radio's speakers, and the air conditioner was on full blast.
Through the tinted windows, Los Angeles floats by — surrounded by blue skies. I'm interviewing Lynch for an article new york times Magazine profiles his recent emergence as a purveyor of the practice of Transcendental Meditation. I've interviewed Lynch many times over the years, and despite the journalist's need to maintain objectivity, it's hard not to love him. He was so original and clear, with his crisp twang and keen observation of the world. He was a bit grumpy that day - he was going through a detox, he explained, and his wife, Emily, was about to have a baby. But there was something about our conversation that felt like the stakes were high—almost life or death. I’ve been circling it ever since.
As we walked through Hollywood, we came face to face to talk about why he turned so intensely to Transcendental Meditation late in life, decades after becoming a beloved and critically acclaimed filmmaker. Lynch learned TM in the early 1970s, when legions of Americans adopted the technique popularized by the Beatles' Indian guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. "I've told this story a million times. Okay, Claire," he told me in the limo, his tone careful. "I was in a room with the teacher and I got my mantra. She said 'Okay, you sit comfortably in this chair, close your eyes and do what I'm teaching you and start chanting the mantra.' I was 20 Come back in a few minutes. So I sat comfortably in the chair, closed my eyes, and started chanting like I was in an elevator and they cut the cord and I felt. It was so blissful, I couldn't believe it. I thought, 'Where is this experience? This is beyond. '" He started practicing twice a day and never missed one.
Lynch considers Transcendental Meditation to be the foundation of his existence as a Hollywood artist. "In 1984, my movie dune "Being freed, meditation saved my life," he said matter-of-factly. "Because if I hadn't meditated, I probably would have killed myself." I don't have the final cut dune. It released to terrible reviews and didn't make a penny. So I died twice. I didn’t make the movie I wanted to make because I didn’t have the final cut. Meditation literally saved me. If you have joy within you, you can bear some heavy things. If you don't, they'll knock you down. "
Lynch said meditation has been a personal thing to him for decades. He would leave the set, quietly justifying himself, and, as he puts it, "dive into it." If someone asked him, he would share his experience and sometimes even pay friends to learn from it. But beyond that, he blazed his own trail. He built his life in Los Angeles, where he made strange and amazing films and television, recorded music, took photos, and painted. He was married and divorced several times. He has children. He drinks red wine and smokes cigarettes.
But things changed, he says, in 2002, when he traveled to Europe for a unique and expensive experience: an initiation course. Maharishi, who has rarely been seen in public for years, has offered select long-time meditators the chance to pay $1 million to spend a month with him - and promises new consciousness. Lynch took the leap and went to Holland. He just finished filming mulholland drivehe told me, he thought, “I can change this.”
He was initially disappointed when he learned that Maharishi would not be with him in person but would communicate with the group via conference call from his residence upstairs. Still, Lynch said, like everything Maharishi did, his absence made sense. "When I replay it in my head, he's right there," he said. "It's a weird thing. He's right above us, but it's coming through the TV. But it's like there's no TV. That's the way it is." To me, it sounds like a David Lynch movie The premise of - watching the master on TV while waiting for enlightenment downstairs. But for Lynch, time with Maharishi was transformative. He left with a new purpose: He wanted to help the world meditate. “It was a very happy month,” he told me. "I wouldn't give it up for anything. But at the same time, when I left there, I didn't care one bit about enlightenment. I just loved the people here. I didn't care if I was enlightened. When I came back, It’s like I’m a different person.”
After the initiation course, Lynch began spending a lot of time trying to help as many people as possible learn Transcendental Meditation. To this end, he founded the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness Education and World Peace in 2005. The foundation held star-studded fundraisers, and young people in Hollywood began coming to Lynch's home for meditation classes. Thanks to Lynch's advocacy, hundreds of thousands of children have learned to meditate. But he was equally powerful in bringing celebrities into TM. Because of Lynch, celebrities such as Hugh Jackman, Steve Martin, Tom Hanks, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Oprah Winfrey and Ellen DeGeneres have learned got this technology. He also recruited longtime meditators such as Jerry Seinfeld, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr to help raise funds for meditation instruction.
Lynch began traveling the world speaking about his TM practice and its positive benefits. He wrote a book, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Awareness, and Creativityand participated in several documentaries that followed him as he spoke about the topic to film students in Estonia, Brazil, Ukraine, and elsewhere. The results of his efforts have been significant: Over the past 20 years, the organization has raised more than $100 million, taught more than 1 million people to meditate, and has Meditation programs are offered in schools and hospitals around the world. world. "I think he has the most people to learn TM since the Maharishi," said Ross, an author and TM teacher for the past 53 years who has managed the foundation since its inception. "That's his legacy. He wasn't just an actor who put his name to something, some cause. He traveled around, traveled the world, worked long hours, weeks, months. If Without David Lynch, his energy, his focus and his belief, we would have accomplished nothing."
But that day in 2012, Lynch paused from his story about meditation and world transformation to stare at me. "Now, Claire," Lynch said, his bright blue eyes suddenly focused on me intently. "When I first met you, I felt that you had doubts. Is this a real feeling?" When Lynch said this, I frowned. While I wanted to go along with him on all this, he pointed out some basic truths about me: I am a skeptic.
While everything Lynch describes sounds simple and obviously good, I have some baggage about this subject. My childhood was at the center of the Transcendental Meditation movement in rural Iowa in the 1980s. It was a strange time - I lived on the campus of Maharishi International University and attended the Maharishi School of Initiation. Much of what we studied focused on Maharishi's philosophy of how the world works and how one can achieve higher states of consciousness and enlightenment by practicing his meditation techniques. We all know that Maharishi’s way of life is better and nobler. Together with our parents and teachers, we live day and night according to the Guru's vision. He wasn't even with me - he lived in a compound in Europe, like in Oz, and I never met him. Our world has become a little weird and isolating in his absence.
At school, the administrators asked us to emulate Maharishi in every aspect. Negative thoughts are taboo. In the halls of Maharishi's school, a phrase I heard over and over again was: "Claire, can you think of how to express something positive?" Often I couldn't. When I was a teenager, in the early nineties, my identity was formed in conflict with all spirituality and striving. One of my strongest sources of inspiration and rebellion was a constant diet of films and music that my community disapproved of—as part of that program, I became obsessed with David Lynch. As a teenager I watched all of his films and was fascinated by his dark world and the idea that the subconscious could be transformed into art rather than just meditation. Through his films, Lynch helped shape my ideas about what art is and the importance of exploring our shadows. So you can imagine that when I left Iowa for ten years, my childhood hero became the spokesperson for this wonderful thing called Transcendental Meditation.
As we sat in that car a dozen years ago, Lynch and I went back and forth about what his character had become. He said he was just a messenger, but I pushed him. "You can say that you yes TM movement. David, what the hell? ” I said, hoping to lighten the mood. He laughed, but he was tired of me, tired of me picking on the past, the cultural weirdness that happened in the 1980s, and how I felt about certain parts of the movement. He Don’t like this. “Old news,” he told me when I first raised the question about religious beliefs and TM, “it’s total bullshit. "
"Like I told you," he said testily, "I love Maharishi. I like what he teaches. If you're part of a movement, you get some paycheck or something. I'm not like that part of the movement. But I support Maharishi and his plan 100%. The most important thing for me is technology. Without that, it's just an intellectual thing, but this technology shows me that peace and happiness and all these positive things are. Possibly. They do exist."
We both left that ride exhausted, not fully understanding each other's perspective. My article on Lynch was published the following spring. He hates it. Ross called me that day and said that Lynch was deeply hurt—he was having a hard time getting past a last-minute subtitle inserted by his copy editor that attacked the filmmakers for not making the movie. over a long period of time. I'm disappointed with this. I wouldn't have chosen this title and wouldn't have liked to be the bad thing that happened to David Lynch.
After that article, Lynch and I never spoke again. he continues to do Twin Peaks: The Return and continued dedication to music and art. I wrote a book about the Transcendental Meditation movement and raised my two daughters. Oddly enough, I became friends with Lynch's wife, Emily, and watched our daughters play together. As time goes by and I feel further and further removed from the strange, insular world of sports in the 1980s, I can see more clearly the truth of what Lynch said in the car that day: If you care now, who Do you care about the past? A good experience? For me, meditation is a simple yet powerful practice that helps me better explore the world. Last summer, when my family was going through a stressful transition, I took my now-teenage daughter to the offices of the David Lynch Foundation near Grand Central Station, where Bobby Ross teaches Two of them adult spells. Neither of them practiced very regularly, and they mocked me for growing up in a cult. Ironically, I'm annoyed by this. But I know at some point they'll have that tool if they need it. As Lynch said to me: "Hello, it works."