David Lynch’s guide to life

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The photographer, musician and director of Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway and Twin Peaks tells Christopher Kanal how he finds happiness

David Lynch and transcendental meditation

David Lynch by Adam Bordow

“An idea is like a very strong dog that lets you go here and there. You love your dog. You get so excited by some ideas you have that off you go. It’s the idea that drives the boat.

Right now I’m working on these little tiny sculptures with matchsticks and I’m also working on a lamp. I like things coming out of a flat surface and going into a flat surface. It is so thrilling to me. I really like to build things. Many things I do involve others for help, but with painting and sculpture you are on your own. You are very quiet. I don’t talk to myself out loud.

I’ve been meditating twice a day for almost 38 years. TM – Transcendental Meditation – is a technique that opens the door to the deepest level of life, the transcendent, the ocean of pure consciousness, the unified field, easily and effortlessly. It is a transformative thing for the human being. People are getting hip to this now and are finding that when you do transcend it is a glorious, profound thing. Happiness is there, creativity is there and peace is there. Energy and love are there. It all comes up from within and life gets better and better and better.

“If you want to truly clean the machine you need to dive within yourself and transcend”

I’d be a very different person without TM. I was very weak. I was frightened. I had anxieties. I had a kind of melancholy and had a lot of pent up anger. All these negative things swimming inside the human being affects your behavior and your ability to catch ideas and realize them. It also affects your ability to be happy in relationships.

Stress makes people do strange things and they suffer. This can be so easily eliminated. With TM, the side effect of the expansion of consciousness is that negativity starts to lift away. The negativity is out there but it’s like you’re building a beautiful happy flak jacket and it doesn’t affect you in the same way. Negativity can eat you and kill you.  It becomes less and less and less. Exercise is good for people within reason but when you come back from jogging you sit down and realise that all those anxieties are still there and that anger towards this thing or that person. Running round the block doesn’t get rid of those things.

If you want to truly clean the machine you need to dive within yourself and transcend. You go beyond and experience that field which is eternal and unbounded at the base of matter and the base of mind. Scientists found that same field by going deeper and deeper into matter and there it was. TM takes you to the same field but does it through the mind. You reach the ocean of pure consciousness and you transcend. Boom! You got it Jack…”

 

davidlynch.com