first look

Brain Trust

David Lynch says TM practitioners do it deeper

By Dave Metz

Photographed by Jeff Minton

Magnificent Obsession

Every afternoon at precisely 5:30, David Lynch Hollywood hilltop office goes off-line. Phones and fax machines are silenced. The staff heads into Lynch´s soundproof recording studio and each member settles into a comfy chair. No one says a word. And for the next 45 minutes, they dip deeper into their consciousness and experience the benefits of transcendental meditation.

Ommm.

Is this the same urbane filmmaker responsible for such dark, impenetrable cinematic turns as "Blue Velvet" and "Lost Highway"?

Indeed it is. In fact, Lynch has been meditating for the better part of the last 30 years - not because he´s some new-age fantasist searching for inner peace (although he says that´s an added bonus), but because he thrives on surfing the random thoughts swimming around his subconsciousness. For years he´s used the technique to help him find the surreal, sometimes monstrous, images that define his films.

"See, I love ideas," says Lynch, who stresses that TM is not a religion, but a technique. "And ideas are thoughts, right? So the source of all thought is the unified field, the absolute. It´s pure consciousness. And the whole process of these thoughts rising out is the principle of TM."

It was during regular, twice-daily sessions that he came up with much of the imagery in "Mulholland Drive," for instance, and according to Mark Frost, who co-created the TV series "Twin Peaks" with Lynch in 1990, other sessions have been equally fruitful. "One morning," says Frost, "David showed up after meditating and said, 'Mark, I have this image of a tabletop full of doughnuts.'"

Unsure where that would bring them, a tabletop full of doughnuts was written into a scene about detectives trying to track down a criminal. "It turned out that image of all those doughnuts there made (the detectives) think of something that wound up solving that case," says Frost.

Finding gems - even if they´re doughnuts - is only part of Lynch´s interest in TM. As he points out, there´s years of scientific evidence that suggests TM can be beneficial in numerous ways - from increased brain activity to slowing down the aging process. In fact, he sees it as nothing less than a way to evolve more quickly as a human being.

"Evolution is a very small incline plane," says the 57-year-old. "So if you wanna speed that up, you wanna meditate. All roads lead to Rome. But some are dirt roads, some are two-lane highways, and one is the superhighway."