I Argued With David Lynch About Meditation. He Was Right
On a summer morning in 2012, I was very pregnant in the back seat of a limo with David Lynch, being chauffered along Mulholland Drive. Lynch was 66 years old at the time. He was handsome and sharply dressed in his uniform: blazer, white shirt, American Spirits in his breast pocket, white hair, swooped in a faux-hawk. It was 100 degrees outside, the radio murmured from the speakers, and the air conditioning was doing its best.
Beyond the tinted windows, Los Angeles floated by — blue skies all around. I was interviewing Lynch for a piece in The New York Times Magazine about his recent emergence as an evangelist for the practice of Transcendental Meditation. I’d interviewed Lynch a number of times over the years and despite the journalistic imperative of objectivity, it was hard not to love him. He was so solidly original and clear, with his crisp nasal twang, his sharp observations about the world. That day, he was a bit grumpy — he was on a cleanse, he explained, and his wife, Emily, was about to have a baby, too. But there was something about our conversation that felt high-stakes — almost life or death. I’ve been circling it ever since.
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Facing each other as we made our way through Hollywood, we were talking about why he had taken this late-in-life turn, after decades as a beloved and critically acclaimed filmmaker, to such an intense focus on Transcendental Meditation. Lynch had learned T.M. in the early 1970s, part of a huge wave of Americans who adopted the technique popularized by the Beatles’ Indian guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. “I’ve told this story a million times. OK, Claire,” he said to me in the limo, carefully enunciating. “I was in the room with the teacher and I got my mantra. She said, ‘OK, you sit comfortably in this chair, close the eyes, do as I taught you, start the mantra. I’ll be back in 20 minutes.’ So I sat comfortably in the chair, closed my eyes, started the mantra. As I’ve said many times before, it was as if I was in an elevator and they cut the cables. Within I went. And boom. I was in so much bliss, I couldn’t believe it. I thought, ‘Where has this experience been? This is beyond the beyond.’” He began to practice twice a day, never missing a session.
Lynch saw Transcendental Meditation as fundamental to his survival as an artist in Hollywood. “In 1984, my film Dune was released, and meditation saved my life,” he said matter-of-factly. “Because if I hadn’t been meditating, I probably would’ve committed suicide. I didn’t have final cut on Dune. It was released and it got terrible reviews and it didn’t make a nickel. So I died the death twice. I didn’t make the film I wanted to make, because I didn’t have final cut. Meditation really saved me. If you have that happiness built up inside, you can withstand some heavy things. And if you don’t, they’ll knock you down.”
For decades, Lynch said, meditation was a private thing for him. He would leave the set and quietly excuse himself, “diving within,” as he called it. If people asked him about it, he would share his experience and sometimes even pay for a friend to learn. But otherwise he forged his own path. He built a life for himself in Los Angeles, where he made strange and amazing movies and television, recorded music, took photographs, made paintings. He got married and divorced, a few times. He had children. He drank red wine and smoked his cigarettes.
But something changed, he said, in 2002, when he traveled to Europe for an exclusive and expensive experience: the Enlightenment Course. Maharishi, who had barely been seen in public for years, was offering select, longtime meditators the chance to pay a million dollars to spend a month with him — with the promise of a new consciousness. Lynch took the leap and went to the Netherlands. He had just finished filming Mulholland Drive, he told me, and he thought, “I could swing this.”
Initially, he was disappointed when he learned that Maharishi would not be with him physically, instead communicating with the small group via teleconference from his quarters upstairs. Still, like all things Maharishi did, Lynch says, his absence made sense. “When I play it back in my mind, he was right there,” he said. “It’s a strange thing. He was right above us but came through the television. But it was as if there was no television. And that’s the way it was.” It sounded to me like the premise of a David Lynch movie — waiting downstairs for enlightenment while watching a guru on a television. But for Lynch, the time with Maharishi was transformative. He left with a new sense of purpose: He wanted to help the world meditate. “That month was extremely blissful,” he told me. “And I wouldn’t have given it up for anything. But at the same time, when I left there, I did not care one bit about enlightenment. I just loved the people. I didn’t care if I got enlightened or not. I was just a different person when I came back.”
After the Enlightenment Course, Lynch began to spend much of his time trying to help as many people as possible learn Transcendental Meditation. To that end, in 2005, he started the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace. The foundation held star-studded fundraisers, and young Hollywood began coming to Lynch’s house for meditation sessions. With Lynch’s advocacy, hundreds of thousands of children learned to meditate. But he was equally powerful in bringing celebrities to T.M. Because of Lynch, celebrities such as Hugh Jackman, Steve Martin, Tom Hanks, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Oprah Winfrey, and Ellen DeGeneres all learned the technique. He also recruited back longtime meditators such as Jerry Seinfeld, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr to help raise money to teach meditation.
Lynch began to travel the globe, speaking out about his practice of T.M. and its positive benefits. He wrote a book, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, and participated in several documentaries that followed him as he spoke to film students in Estonia, Brazil, Ukraine, and other places on the topic. The results of his efforts were significant: Over the past 20 years, according to David Lynch Foundation CEO Bobby Roth, the organization has raised over $100 million, taught more than a million people to meditate, and instituted meditation programs in schools and hospitals around the world. “I think he was responsible for more people learning T.M. than any other figure since Maharishi,” says Roth, an author and a teacher of T.M. for the past 53 years, who has run the foundation since its inception. “That’s his legacy. He wasn’t just an actor who put his name on something, some cause. He went everywhere, he traveled around the world, worked long hours and weeks and months. We would be nowhere without David Lynch and his energy and his focus and his conviction.”
But that day back in 2012, Lynch paused his story about meditation and world transformation and stared at me. “Now, Claire,” Lynch said, his bright blue eyes suddenly focused intently on me. “When I first met you, I felt that you had doubts. Is that a real feeling?” I winced when Lynch said this. While I wanted to just go with him on all of this, he had put his finger on something fundamentally true about me: I was a doubter.
While everything Lynch was describing sounded straightforward and so obviously good, I had some baggage around the subject. I had spent my childhood living at the center of what was then called the Movement — the Transcendental Meditation Movement — in rural Iowa in the 1980s. Those were strange years — I lived on the campus of the Maharishi International University, and I attended the Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment. Much of our learning was focused on Maharishi’s philosophy about how the world worked and how one could attain elevated states of consciousness and enlightenment through the practice of his meditation techniques. We all understood that Maharishi’s way of being in the world was better, more elevated. Together with our parents and teachers, we spent our days and nights living in accordance with the vision of our guru. He wasn’t even around — he lived, Oz-like, in a compound in Europe, and I never met him. In his absence, our world got a little strange and insular.
At school, administrators asked us to emulate Maharishi in every aspect. Negative thinking was a no-no. Inside the halls of the Maharishi School, a recurring refrain to me was, “Claire, can you think of how to say that as a positive?” I often couldn’t. By the time I was a teenager, in the early Nineties, my identity was formed in contradiction to all that was spiritual and striving. One of my most powerful sources of inspiration and rebellion was a steady diet of film and music that my community disapproved of — and as a part of that program, I was obsessed with David Lynch. As a teenager, I watched all his movies and was mesmerized by his dark world, and the idea that the subconscious could be turned into art, not just meditated away. Through his films, Lynch helped shape my idea of what art could be and the importance of exploring our shadows. So you can imagine my surprise when, a decade after I moved away from Iowa, this childhood hero of mine became a spokesperson of sorts 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 role had become. He said he was just a messenger, but I pushed him. “It could be argued that you are the T.M. movement. WTF, David?” I said, hoping to lighten the mood. He laughed, but he was fed up with me, and my persnickety focus on the past, the cultural weirdness that had happened in the 1980s, and my perception of parts of the Movement as cultish. He didn’t like this. “Old news,” he told me when I first brought up questions about religiosity and T.M. “Total bullshit.”
“Like I told you,” he said, testily, “I love Maharishi. I love what he taught. If you’re part of the Movement, you’re on some salary or whatever. I’m not part of the Movement in that way. But I am 100 percent for Maharishi and his programs. The most important thing to me is the technique. That’s the thing. And without that, it just is totally meaningless. It’s just, like, an intellectual thing. But the technique showed me that peace and happiness and all these positive things are really possible. They really do exist within.”
We both left that car ride exhausted, not quite seeing each other’s point of view. My article on Lynch came out the following spring. He hated it. Roth called me that day and said that Lynch was deeply hurt — that he’d had trouble making it past a sub-headline, inserted by a copy editor at the last minute, that took a shot at the filmmaker for not having made a movie in a long time. I was disappointed about that. I wouldn’t have chosen that headline and didn’t like being a bad thing that happened to David Lynch.
Lynch and I never spoke after that article. He went on to make Twin Peaks: The Return and to continue to work on music and art. I wrote a book about the Transcendental Meditation Movement and raised my two daughters. Weirdly, I became friends with Lynch’s wife Emily and watched our daughters play together. As time passed, and I felt farther away from the strange, insular world of the Movement in the 1980s, I could see more clearly the truth of what Lynch had said that day in the car: Who cares about the past if you’re having a good experience? For me, meditation was a simple and effective practice that helped me navigate the world better. Last summer, as my family was going through a stressful transition, I took my now-teenage daughters down to the David Lynch Foundation offices near New York’s Grand Central Station, where Bobby Roth taught them both their adult mantras. Neither of them are particularly regular in their practice, and they tease me about having grown up in a cult. I get annoyed by this, ironically. But I know at some point they will have the tool if they need it. As Lynch said to me, “Hello, it works.”
Claire Hoffman is the author of Greetings From Utopia Park. Her new book Sister, Sinner comes out in April.
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