Lynch on transcendental meditation

Started by MacGuffin, February 02, 2005, 04:16:47 PM

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MacGuffin

Lynch article in Sun-Times - The Chicago Sun-Times recently featured an article on Lynch and his interest in transcendental meditation:


Lynch: ‘Bliss is our nature’
BY Cathleen Falsani - Religion Reporter

LOS ANGELES -- The word critics use most often to describe director David Lynch's films is "dark."

"Weird" is a close second.

The cinematic otherworlds Lynch creates, whether they're the quirky Lumberton and Twin Peaks, industrial Victorian England, or the shadowy underbelly of the Hollywood Hills, are surreal, sordid, nightmarish.

One might expect the soul behind such celluloid visions to be just as dark. But as Lynch explains what motivates him spiritually -- in his life, in his art -- he peppers the conversation with concepts such as "light," "peace" and "bliss."

Much has been written about the stark contrast between the 58-year-old director of films such as "Eraserhead," "The Elephant Man," "Blue Velvet," and "Mulholland Drive," who looks like a classic clean-cut everyman -- think a fair-haired Jimmy Stewart -- and the bizarre, brutal characters he creates in his movies.

But the greater contrast, perhaps, may lie much farther beneath Lynch's surface.

"Negativity is like darkness -- it goes away when you turn on this light of peace and unity," Lynch says, between sips from his ever-present coffee mug and drags on his American Spirit cigarette. "Bliss is our nature. Bliss. We should be like little puppy dogs. So happy. ... And that includes unbounded, infinite intelligence, creativity, consciousness."

Puppy dogs and consciousness? Where is this coming from? It seems so . . . unlikely.

"Pretty much everything I'm going to tell you I've learned from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi," Lynch says, staring off into the middle distance of his screening room. "I've been practicing transcendental meditation, the Maharishi's transcendental meditation, for 31 years."

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi is an octogenarian Hindu monk from India best known for being the Beatles' guru in the 1960s. Nearly 60 years ago, Maharishi, as he is known, developed a simplified meditation technique based on the Indian Vedic spiritual tradition, that is supposed to help its practitioner "transcend" to a higher state of consciousness and profound relaxation by silently repeating a one-syllable Sanskrit mantra for about 20 minutes a day.

Lynch, who describes Maharishi as "a holy man who teaches you how to become a holy person," says he was introduced to transcendental meditation by his sister in the early 1970s, around the time he was making his first feature-length film, the black-and-white cult favorite "Eraserhead."

Blissed out

Transcendental meditation and the Maharishi's guidance have transformed his life, Lynch says. A framed picture of the smiling guru sits next to the phone and several bottles of Ayurvedic herbs on the desk in Lynch's industrial art studio, where abstract artwork -- one piece included what appeared to be a baby doll's arm protruding from the canvas -- hangs on the walls.

Before he began meditating twice daily, "I had anger, I had fears, I had anxieties," Lynch says. "I still have them. I'm not enlightened. But it's much, much, much, much better. Life is so beautiful.

"Maharishi says there is an expression, 'The world is as you are.' They use the example that if you have dark-blue, dirty sunglasses on, that's the way the world is to you. If you have rose-colored glasses, that's the way the world is to you. Change from within."

Born in Missoula, Mont., the son of a research scientist and a language tutor, Lynch was raised as a Presbyterian Christian.

He says his earliest memory of God was "a feeling of happiness," and that he still believes in God, in a slightly less abstract form.

"The kingdom of heaven, God the almighty merciful father, is that totality," he says, when asked to define who or what God is. "It's that level. It's the almighty merciful father, and the divine mother, the kingdom of heaven, the absolute, divine being, bliss consciousness, creative intelligence. These are all names, but it is that.

"It is unchanging, eternal. It is. There is nothing. It's that level that never had a beginning, it is, and it will be forever more," he says. "That, I think, if you said that's God, you wouldn't be wrong."

'Not mind control'

Transcendental meditators insist theirs is simply a spiritual practice or discipline, and not a religion unto itself. There are transcendental meditators of every religion and of no religion. In bucolic Fairfield, Iowa, the transcendental meditation capital of the United States and home to Maharishi University of Management, the mayor, a meditator, is a practicing Roman Catholic.

"It's not mind control," Lynch says of transcendental meditation. "Anybody in any religion who practices transcendental meditation generally says that it gives them deeper appreciation of their religion, greater insight into their religion. The bigger picture starts unfolding and things that used to bug you stop bugging you so much.

"It's not that you go dead or numb. It's, there's just too much happiness and consciousness and wakefulness and understanding growing for you to be, you know, suffering so much, or caught up in some narrow little thing. It just starts getting better, and better, and better, and better."

A twice-divorced father of two sons and a daughter (all of whom are transcendental meditators), Lynch says while he adheres to no particular religion himself, he respects all religions.

"I sort of think that the great religions are like rivers. Each one is beautiful and they all flow into one ocean," he says. "It's like a mystery. I love mysteries. And they lead somewhere. And once in a while you're going along, feeling the mystery, and you become a seeker. It just happens. I don't know quite how it happens, but you want to know. You want to experience, and you learn about things.

"That's what happened with transcendental meditation. I heard about it and I said, 'I've gotta have it.' And I'm glad I took that."

Flying high

Lynch's resume is long and varied.

Film director. Screenwriter. Painter. Furniture designer (he often designs pieces for his sets). Composer. Actor. Photographer ("I shoot nudes and factories," he says).

And, most recently, flier.

Yogic flier, that is.

Advanced transcendental meditators, known by the Sanskrit term siddha, practice what they describe as a dynamic form of meditation, where they are physically lifted off the ground in a state of profound bliss.

In reality, so-called yogic flying looks a lot more like hopping on one's knees than levitating. In the Golden Domes of Pure Knowledge in Fairfield, Iowa, more than 1,000 siddhas spend hours a day "flying" on foam rubber cushions, spontaneously hopping in the lotus position, eyes closed, giggling blissfully.

"I'm not a great flier," admits Lynch, who has been a siddha for about three years and usually practices alone. "But the experience, when it kicks in, is so phenomenal, it's not funny. It's intense bliss. And I've seen the unbounded ocean pour into me and it's so beautiful.

"It is what they call 'bubbling bliss,' and it is so intense and so fantastic. Bliss is physical, emotional, mental and spiritual happiness. It's so beautiful it'll make you laugh like a little kid. It's like we're light bulbs, it just fills you up with light. And then an offshoot of that, as we see in the light bulb, the light goes beyond the bulb. So it affects the environment, and this is the principle that will being perpetual peace on earth."

Lynch is talking about the theory of constructive interference in physics, which is exemplified by stereo speakers. If there is a single speaker on each side of a room, the sound produced is in stereo. But if the two speakers are pushed together, the sound is amplified exponentially.

Maharishi, who trained as a physicist before becoming a monk, says constructive interference can be applied to transcendental meditation as well. Many of his devotees, including Lynch, believe that transcendental meditation not only produces positive effects in its practitioners -- lowering blood pressure, reducing stress, increasing focus -- it does the same for society, reducing crime rates and even ending war.

The greater the number of people meditating together, the greater the effect, Maharishi and his scientific researchers say. A few years ago, after the events of Sept. 11, he devised a plan to establish "peace palaces" around the world with thousands of full-time meditators, to bring about peace.

It's a cause to which Lynch says he is personally devoted.

"Large groups of yogic fliers . . . together produce an exponential effect of bliss, coherence, peace," he says, matter-of-factly. "The square root of 1 percent of the world's population, in a group, going day in and day out, will bring about peace.

"And that's what I've been trying to do in talking to people about this, and trying to raise the money to make it on a permanent basis, and I haven't had a whole lot of luck, but I'm still trying," he says.

Recently, the filmmaker established the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace to ensure that any child who wants to learn transcendental meditation can do so. The foundation will cover the costs of meditation instruction (about $2,500 per person), and will provide some scholarships for students who want to attend colleges where transcendental meditation is taught, such as the Maharishi's university in Iowa.

"We're just this little ball of people floating near the edge of what we call the Milky Way galaxy," Lynch says, "and there ought to be enough power to light this little ball up with peace."

Loving the abstract

Lighting up yet another cigarette -- a no-no for most hyper-health-conscious transcendental meditators, many of whom are strict teetotaling, caffeine-free vegetarians -- Lynch explains that meditation has allowed him to tap into a deep well of creativity.

"It's the field of pure creativity," he says, his voice rising. "For artists, it seems to me, to be the greatest thing to be able to dive in and go to the source of creativity. Ideas come from there, creativity comes from there. All these anxieties and fears and things that just kill us, all of those start going away. It becomes like a fluid, pure open channel of ideas. It is REALLY GOOD."

Many of Lynch's films have surreally complicated plots -- "Mulholland Drive," for example -- and can be difficult to explain to the uninitiated. Is it easier, perhaps, to describe how his films feel than what they're about?

"That's very good," he says, clearly pleased with the question. "That's very good because the things that I love in life are abstractions. I don't think a film should be totally abstractions, but I think a story that I love holds those abstractions."

"Ideas inspire me. Ideas, to me, are everything. They're all seeds, and, in a lot of ways, they're like the Vedas, the laws of nature," he says.

Does he try to infuse his films with lessons he's learned from Maharishi and transcendental meditation?

"No, no no. They say, if you want to send a message, go to Western Union," he says, wryly. "Film is a different thing. I love painting, I love photography, and I love music. And you know, if it comes through there, it comes through there in an innocent way. I'm not about to make a film to sell this thing.

"I want to make films based on ideas that I've fallen in love with."



DAVID LYNCH

Age: 58

Raised: Presbyterian

Now: Nothing in particular

Attends: He's practiced twice-daily transcendental meditation for the last 31 years and is a siddha, or "yogic flier"

Words to live by: "Change from within."
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


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NEON MERCURY

Quote from: MacGuffinLynch article in Sun-Times - The Chicago Sun-Times recently featured an article on Lynch and his interest in transcendental meditation:


"I want to make films based on ideas that I've fallen in love with."


well please hurry up.
you know you are slacking off when terrence malick has made a follow-up to a film before you have..............

Gabe


MacGuffin

Words From the Front
Interview With David Lynch
by Kristine McKenna

In person, David Lynch bears only the vaguest resemblance to the image most people have of him. He is, of course, an artist of extreme complexity, but he's not a weirdo and the people who work with him adore him because he's respectful and appreciative of their contributions to his art.

Lynch has been working under the radar on his latest film, Inland Empire, for quite a while; it commenced principal photography two years ago in Lodz, Poland, and features Polish actors Karolina Gruszka and Krzysztof Majchrzak, along with Laura Dern, Jeremy Irons, Harry Dean Stanton and Justin Theroux. It's his first digital film, but it won't be his last as he loves the freedom digital affords. "Film is over for me," declares Lynch, who's thus far handled the financing of Inland Empire, which is being produced by his longtime partner, Mary Sweeney.

I've been interviewing Lynch semi-regularly for 25 years now, and each time I see him I'm struck by his ability to retain the best parts of his personality; he remains an enthusiastic, open and very funny man, and he never fails to tell me something useful and inspiring. Herewith, some excerpts from our latest conversation.

You've said in the past that your daily meditation practice is what enables you to maintain such a high level of creativity. What was going on in your life at the point when you were able to commit yourself to meditation?

I was 27 and I was in the middle of the first year of Eraserhead and things were going great. I had this unbelievable place to work—the stables at AFI—I had all the equipment I needed, I had people helping me, I had money to do it, and it was like a dream come true, yet I wasn't happy. That saying 'happiness comes from within' started making sense to me and meditation seemed like a good way to go within. I'd always thought yogis sitting cross-legged in the woods were wasting their time, but I suddenly understood that all the rest is a waste of time. Meditation is the vehicle that takes you to the place where you can experience the unified field and that's the only experience that lights the full brain. It's a holistic experience and it's not a foreign place—it's a field of pure bliss consciousness and it's the whole enchilada. People think they're fully awake when they wake up in the morning but there are degrees of wakefulness, and you begin waking up more and more when you meditate, until finally one day you're fully awake, which is the state of enlightenment. This is the potential of every human being and if you visit that unified field twice a day, every day begins to feel like a Saturday morning with your favorite breakfast, it's sunny, and you've got the whole weekend ahead with all your projects that you're looking forward to doing.

There are many types of meditation. Why did you pick transcendental meditation?

I lucked into it. My sister was doing it, then one day she mentioned it to me and I don't know why—maybe it was the sound of her voice and the time that I heard it—but bang! I said I've gotta have that. Transcendental meditation is the way of the householder in that it allows you to stay in the world. Some people like the recluse way and want to go into the cave, and there are mantras that will take you right out of activity and put you into that cave. But transcendental meditation is a way of integrating these two worlds and activity is part of it. It's like dipping a white cloth into gold dye; you dip it and that's meditation, then you hang it on the line in sunshine and that's activity. The sun bleaches it until it's white again, so you dip it and hang it again, and each time you do that a little more of the gold stays in the cloth. Then one day that gold is locked in. It isn't going anywhere no matter how violent the activity, and at that point two opposites have been united at a deep level. In the west people think yeah, like I'm really gonna give up my dental practice and go to the cave, but you don't have to quit dentistry. Meditate before you go to work and you'll start liking the people that come in and you'll start getting ideas about dentistry. Maybe you'll invent something and get into the finer points of a cavity and honing that bad boy. Things get cooler.

If you were running the world, what's the first thing you'd do?

I'd get people going on consciousness-based education. Stress levels in children are going way up and there are so many bad side effects to stress. Kids are on drugs, they're overweight—they are not happy campers and being a kid should be a beautiful thing. Kids take to meditation like ducks to water. The so-called knowledge we try to cram down their throats is useless and that's why there are things like cheating—it's all a bunch of baloney. It's a sick, twisted, stupid world now. It's ridiculous.

What's America's problem?

It's locked in an old, ignorant way of thinking. Things are pretty low right now but lots of people are working to enliven that field of unity in world consciousness. John Lennon described meditation as 'melting the iceberg,' and when that heat starts coming up some people love it, but it can be too much for some people and they fly apart. So, it's gotta come up gently—it has been coming up pretty gently, too, but the bunch running the show here in America are working overtime in a negative way.

How did you interpret 9/11?

You don't get something for nothing and America's been up to a lot of nasty business for a long time. But Maharishi says instead of fighting darkness you should just turn on the light, so lets turn on the light and start having fun.

What makes you angry?

There's an increasing amount of censorship in America and that is not a good sign. It really makes you wonder what's going on with this country.

Is man on the road to extinguishing himself?

No. Quantum physics has verified the existence of the unified field and Vedic science understands how it emerges—in fact, Vedic science is the science of the unified field. There's a whole bunch of trouble in this world but the way to get out of it is there; just enliven that field of unity. It sounds like magic but it's science—it's the real thing and the resistance to it is based on fear. But it's not something to be afraid of—it's us.

Your beliefs are deeply optimistic, yet many people find darkness in your work. How do you explain that?

Films and paintings reflect the world and when the world changes the art will change. We live in a world of duality but beneath it is unity. We live in a world of boundaries but beneath it it's unbounded. Einstein said you can't solve a problem at the level of the problem—you gotta get underneath it, and you can't get more underneath than the unified field. So get in there and water the root then enjoy the fruit. Water that root and the tree comes up to perfection. You don't have to worry about a single leaf if you get nourishment at that fundamental level.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


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Pubrick

under the paving stones.

MacGuffin

Mahatma Lynch
David Lynch finds enlightenment -- The quirky ''Mulholland Drive'' director talks about transcendental meditation

''If you have a golf-ball-size consciousness, when you read a book you'll have a golf-ball-size understanding. But if you can expand that ball, then you read with more understanding,'' director David Lynch recently told a group of NYU students. Since September, he's been touring East Coast campuses touting meditation-based curricula (he goes west in November). A transcendental meditator for 32 years, he hopes to raise $7 billion to endow seven universities of world peace. Said Lynch: ''[Meditation] turns up our light. And like a lightbulb, we can enjoy the inner peace but also spread it—that's the key to world peace.'' Yes, he was serious.


Dates for Lynch's West Coast Tour Announced

The west coast dates and locations for Lynch's "Consciousness, Creativity and the Brain" tour have been announced. Tickets are free for all talks, but they've filled up quickly so if you plan on going we suggest getting their very early. Here are the dates:

Thursday, November 3 • 7:30 PM
University of Southern California
Bovard Auditorium
Los Angeles, CA

Friday, November 4 • 7:30 PM
University of California at San Diego
Price Center Theater
La Jolla, CA

Saturday, November 5 • 7:30 PM
University of California at Irvine
Crystal Cove Auditorium
Orange County, CA

Sunday, November 6 • 7:30 PM
University of California at Berkeley
Wheeler Auditorium
Berkeley, CA

Monday, November 7 • 7:30 PM
University of Washington
130 Kane Hall
Seattle, WA

Tuesday, November 8 • 7:30 PM
University of Oregon
Columbia 150
Eugene, OR
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


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GoneSavage

Mac forgot to include this link.  No new information but the website has a picture.

matt35mm

Quote from: MacGuffin on October 17, 2005, 05:06:38 PM
Saturday, November 5 • 7:30 PM
University of California at Irvine
Crystal Cove Auditorium
Orange County, CA
I saw this.  There was a live webcast to UC-Santa Cruz.  It was interesting because he answered any question--lots of questions about his films and process were answered, which was great.  The transcendental meditation thing was sorta interesting, but it was basically advertising his Foundation, and so the specifics of it were not given at the webcast.  I've yet to visit the website for his foundation so I don't know if there'll be something requiring pay or anything.

At least worth it for his film discussions.  Interesting guy.

Pubrick

Quote from: matt35mm on November 06, 2005, 12:18:01 AM
I don't know if there'll be something requiring pay or anything.

that's what it's all about.
under the paving stones.

matt35mm

Ah yes.  Well... I won't be doing that, but the Lynch thing itself was interesting for the movie discussion, anyway.

w/o horse

Quote from: matt35mm on November 06, 2005, 12:18:01 AM
Quote from: MacGuffin on October 17, 2005, 05:06:38 PM
Saturday, November 5 • 7:30 PM
University of California at Irvine
Crystal Cove Auditorium
Orange County, CA
I saw this.  There was a live webcast to UC-Santa Cruz.  It was interesting because he answered any question--lots of questions about his films and process were answered, which was great.  The transcendental meditation thing was sorta interesting, but it was basically advertising his Foundation, and so the specifics of it were not given at the webcast.  I've yet to visit the website for his foundation so I don't know if there'll be something requiring pay or anything.

At least worth it for his film discussions.  Interesting guy.

I was there.  Maybe you saw me.  I didn't ask a question but I was plopped in the middle in the middle.  My picture with David is in the famous people thread.

He was like grandpa.  It was good times.  I learned that I'm like a lightbulb and that the Lost Highway dvd isn't coming soon.  Also, KFC afterwards.
Raven haired Linda and her school mate Linnea are studying after school, when their desires take over and they kiss and strip off their clothes. They take turns fingering and licking one another's trimmed pussies on the desks, then fuck each other to intense orgasms with colorful vibrators.

brockly


MacGuffin

Lynch Talks During Iowa Lynch Weekend are Online Now!

All clips have been added to the official LynchWeekend.com site. David offers some very cool information about TM and his films. He also gives his thoughts to the inspiration behind the title of his latest film, INLAND EMPIRE.

http://lynchweekend.org/replays.html
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


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MacGuffin

David Lynch Wades Into Deep Waters
The director talks about business, meditation, happiness, and how to make a good movie that withstands the test of time. Lend an ear.
Source: Business Week

David Lynch has never broken box office records, but that's fine with him. Since 1978, the iconoclastic director of such films as The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive, and TV series Twin Peaks, has persuaded studios, networks, and investors to provide backing for over 15 very un-Hollywood projects -- and come back for more.

Along the way, he has earned three Academy Award nominations for best director, a Palme d'Or from the Cannes Film Festival, worldwide critical acclaim, and a devoted following. In 1990, Time magazine proclaimed him a genius on its cover. Artistically uncompromising, Lynch, 60, is one of the few Hollywood directors who insist on -- and receive -- final cut on all films. He has developed one of the most unique and recognizable styles in world cinema.

To get his projects financed and distributed, Lynch has had to innovate in business as well as in filmmaking. As a graduate student at the American Film Institute in the late 1970s, he took a paper route delivering the Wall Street Journal to help fund the completion of his first feature film, Eraserhead. During that period, he discovered transcendental meditation, which has become integral to his creative process.

In 2005 he founded the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-based Education & World Peace, which is dedicated to teaching transcendental meditation in U.S. classrooms. Lynch frequently lectures on using meditation to enhance creativity and decision-making in business. BusinessWeek correspondent Justin Hibbard spoke with Lynch at the TiEcon 2006 conference in Santa Clara, Calif.

Most people don't associate meditation with business. Why are you talking to businesspeople about meditation?
For business, you need ideas. If your consciousness starts expanding, you've got a better chance of catching more ideas, bigger ideas. The analogy is fishing. The little fish are on the surface. Then you go deeper, and they get bigger and bigger down there. Big fish, big ideas.

You recommend that businesses offer meditation to employees in the workplace. Why would a company invest in that?
There are businesses that are run on fear. And then on the other side, there are businesses that are run in a much more humane way. Businesses that are run on fear are the theater of the absurd. You go to an office filled with fear, you begin to hate your work, hate turns to anger, you begin to be angry at your work, and your life is like a hell. You don't go the extra mile for that business. And it affects your home life, it affects everything.

Now, if I was running a big business, I would say to every employee, "You have a chance to learn to dive within." And within a couple of months, you start seeing people come to work brighter, happier, with way more eagerness to go the extra mile for you. It would become like a family. And the ideas would flow. For businesses, it's money in the bank.

How has meditation helped your ideas flow?
I'll give you an example from [my 2001 film] Mulholland Drive. It was built for an open-ended TV pilot. ABC hated it. So I got the opportunity to make it into a feature. Now an open-ended pilot needed to be closed suddenly. I sat down to meditate one night, and literally, like a string of pearls, all the ideas came. Normally, you meditate, and then you think after meditation. But this just happened to zip up, and I wrote those bad boys down as soon as I finished meditating, and that was it.

Is it unusual for ideas to come during meditation like that?
Yeah, it is. Your meditation is to go within, transcend, and experience pure consciousness. You come out refreshed, wide awake, and energetic. You can now focus on those problems, focus on your business, focus on your film. It's easier to focus, and it's a more intense focus.

Do ideas often come to you completely developed as they did in the Mulholland Drive example?
Yes, a lot of times they do. But a lot of other times you get a fragment. You get like a Rosetta Stone idea. And you fall in love with this fragment, and it is now the little idea that attracts all the other ideas to it. It's like bait at the end of the hook. It may end up being part of one scene, or it sets a tone for the whole film. Then you begin to focus on that, and more fish swim in and connect to it, and now you've got two or three scenes.

The more you have, the more easily the rest swim in. It's like there's more bait. And then one day, it's complete in script form. Then you go out and make the film, being true to those ideas.Now some other fish can swim in. You never turn down a good idea, or a good fish, but you don't want to take a bad idea, or a bad fish. So you go back and see how everything is progressing based on those original ideas. And if new ideas come in, you see if they really and truly marry to what has gone before.

How do you know whether an idea is good or bad?
Intuition. There's emotion and intellect, and then there's intuition, which is kind of emotion and intellect together. In business, you might not be able to explain an intuitive feeling to others, but you say, "I know that is the right way to go for me. I know that feels right. That is intuitively right." And you go that way. And maybe everybody else is telling you you're crazy, but you've got to take a risk.

You also say meditation helps with making decisions. Can you give an example from your work?
One night while we were making Lost Highway, we had a scene underneath a covering at an indoor-outdoor '50s kind of diner with a parking lot in the background. Everyone in the scene was dressed in dry clothes and didn't have wet hair. We came there and it started raining. We had already established a dry look. Now the parking lot in the back was wet.

There was a real indication that we were going to all go home. We would have lost a night and lost a lot of money. I decided to continue to shoot. I pictured the scene shot by shot and thought, what would make that parking lot wet other than rain? And so I put kids in the background shooting garden hoses, and therefore the rain looked like it came from that. The hoses idea saved the day.

So you used visualization?
Yeah, a lot of times it's that. You needed a solution, and solutions come more easily with the more consciousness you have. If consciousness is pure gold, all you need is the key to open up that big vault door, and all that gold is yours.

Your films have a unique and recognizable style. Do you do anything deliberate to avoid the obvious and clichéd?
No, because that's a false overlay. I'm just true to those ideas that thrill me. There is some thought to the audience toward the end of the process. You see a film with many people and you can learn a lot. You just sit with them. You can feel all the places where it's slow or there's no understanding or a reaction you didn't expect.

That's fine-tuning the whole thing near the end. But to do some false thing that's not really part of the idea is wrong. A film will live throughout time, and a lot of these false things are done for today's audience right now to make money, and they don't hold up. If you're true to the idea, then it will hold up.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


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MacGuffin

Lynch Book Available for Pre-Order

Lynch has written a book entitled "Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity" and will be available in Hardcover on December 28th, 2006. You can pre-order it from Amazon.com by clicking here.

Book Description
In this rare work of public disclosure, filmmaker David Lynch describes his personal methods of capturing and working with ideas, and the immense creative benefits he has experienced from the practice of meditation.

Over the last four decades, David Lynch has created some of the best-known and widely discussed screen works of our time. This distinctive writer-director's art bears not only the mark of box-office success but also criticalacclaim and cultural posterity.

Yet Lynch generally reveals little of himself, or the ideas behind his work. Now he provides a rare window into his methods as an artist and his personal working style. In Catching the Big Fish, Lynch writes candidly about the tremendous creative benefits he has gained from his thirty-two-year commitment to practicing Transcendental Meditation.

In brief chapters, Lynch describes the experience of "diving within" and "catching" ideas like fish-and then preparing them for television or movie screens, and other mediums in which Lynch works, such as photography and painting.

In the book's first section, Lynch discusses the development of his ideas-where they come from, how he grasps them, and which ones appeal to him the most. He then shares his passion for "the doing"-whether moviemaking, painting, or other creative expressions. Lynch talks specifically about how he puts his thoughts into action and how he engages with others around him. Finally, he discusses the self and the surrounding world -and how the process of "diving within" that has so deeply affected his own work can directly benefit others.

Catching the Big Fish provides unprecedented insight into Lynch's methods, as it also offers a set of practical ideas that speak to matters of personal fulfillment, increased creativity, and greater harmony with one's surroundings.

The book comes as a revelation to the legion of fans who have longed to better understand Lynch's deeply personal vision. And it is equally intriguing to anyone who grapples with questions such as: "Where do ideas come from?" and "How can I nurture creativity?"
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


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