http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/living/education/12793022.htm
Posted on Sun, Oct. 02, 2005 David Lynch wants everyone to ... relax He says TM helped him. By Amy S. Rosenberg Inquirer Staff Writer Here's a quiz. To get in a David Lynch frame of mind, a David Lynch kind of head, do you: A. Drive around a small town with strains of the Blue Velvet movie soundtrack playing in the background, thinking dark, creepy thoughts about undulating folds and the underbelly of small-town life? B. Go to Bob's Big Boy every day for seven years for a burger, chocolate shake and inspiration? C. Twice daily, take 20 minutes out of your over-caffeinated, nicotine-infused existence to sit down, repeat your mantra, and become so convinced of the value of transcendental meditation that you travel the country to tell equally over-caffeinated, possibly also nicotine-infused, but definitely stressed-out college students things such as "Bliss is our nature"? Bliss is our nature? This is now the message from the creator of Eraserhead, the film starring that poufy-haired guy and the mutant baby. Apparently, it's an all-of-the-above phase of life for mind-bending filmmaker Lynch, who says his 32 years of meditating have rid him of the anger, anxiety and fear that gripped him when he was a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts right here in stress-inducing Philadelphia. Lynch, 59, is now touring college campuses with a band of TM devotees (including a physicist, a professor of nuclear medicine, and a volunteer student who meditates on stage while hooked up to an EEG machine) to raise $7 billion (yes, billion) for a new nonprofit. The David Lynch Foundation - dedicated to "consciousness-based world peace and education" - seeks to make transcendental meditation available to hopped-up college students, and to younger kids, too, who are suffering from lots of high blood pressure, anxiety and other ailments. "I want God to dance with us in a flow of bliss," Lynch told the overflow crowd at the University of Pennsylvania the other night, speaking in his surprisingly Poindexter-y voice, with that unmistakable shock of big-head hair and dressed in the same skinny black tie, white shirt, and black suit he has worn since his high school yearbook picture. "We're not made to suffer," he said. An unlikely message, perhaps, from someone whose psyche has coughed up such discomfiting works as Blue Velvet, The Elephant Man, and Twin Peaks (but also, as he reminded the students, the rather blissful The Straight Story, a true tale about a guy who drives his John Deere riding mower cross-country to mend his relations with his dying brother). Lynch does not see a disconnect between his meditation practices - a "diving into the ocean within to create a world of peace" sort of thing - and his ability to create dark, edgy art. He is finishing up a new film, Inland Empire, which he describes as being about "a woman in trouble," starring Lynch regular Laura Dern. "You don't have to suffer to show suffering," he said. "You don't have to be angry to show anger. Those negative emotions start lifting when you start meditating. You should have an edge. But you should get rid of those things that keep you from creating." Three decades of TM have not, however, rid him of his fear of public speaking, he says. And so, minutes before he was to appear on stage at Penn's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology on Thursday night, the idol of many a camera-waving film student stood in an alleyway just off Spruce Street, leaned his head against the brick wall, closed his eyes, and tried to calm himself. "It's like everything, relative," Lynch had explained backstage a few minutes earlier. "If it was 32 years ago, you'd have me in a stretcher." Now, he said, jabbing a finger into the shoulder of a reporter (lightly, lightly, not at all menacingly - but this is a guy who used a severed ear as a plot device, so there is a slight recoil), he strives to reach that "field of unity," where he can tap into positive energy (jab), bliss (jab), intelligence (jab), universal love (jab), creativity (jab), and more energy and sharpness (he stopped jabbing and headed outside, presumably to dive into his ocean of calm). No doubt, academic, financial and social pressures among college students are real concerns. (Just ask the hundreds of students who arrived early but were still turned away from Lynch's lecture after the 780-seat auditorium filled up. Inside, though, the students in the artsy crowd often seemed to be the ones offering up an admiring reassurance to the disarmingly awkward Lynch.) In the book College of the Overwhelmed, Harvard mental-health services chief Dr. Richard Kadison cites statistics that find nearly half of all students experience depression during college, and one in 10 will consider suicide. Too often, Kadison writes, students resort to such destructive behaviors as eating disorders, drug abuse, cutting themselves and suicide attempts. Kadison said he supports Lynch's efforts. "I'm a strong believer that meditation, yoga, relaxation breathing and similar exercises can be a great stress reducer in college," Kadison said via e-mail. Practitioners of TM - a technique developed 50 years ago by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi that involves 20 minutes of silently repeating a mantra with one's eyes closed - believe it produces an experience of "physiological restful alertness." Among Lynch's audience of wired, fatigued, overachieving college students, some said they would be open to Lynch's ideas, though most seemed more intent on getting their Eraserhead posters signed. (And one cynical film major derided the whole thing as Lynch's "Kabbalah midlife moment"). "It's inspiring and optimistic," said Andrea Scott, a senior at Penn. "I'm tempted." Some of the Lynch devotees, the ones whose lives were forever altered by Blue Velvet, seemed willing to put this latest peek inside the filmmaker's consciousness into the general Bizarro-Lynch file. But whether his bliss mission would ultimately serve his art was another question. "You're not going to find a fictional drama about meditation at the movies," said Dan Brohawn, 21, a senior film student at Temple. ______________________________________________________ Yahoo! for Good Donate to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort. http://store.yahoo.com/redcross-donate3/ ------------------------ Yahoo! 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