Speaking of filmmaker David Lynch and the actor he discovered, my apparent double Kyle MacLachlan, by a strange coincidence Lynch gave a talk we attended at the University of Washington last night. Lynch’s latest project is perhaps his strangest yet: nothing less than funding transcendence.
Lynch has been funding the transcendence of inner city public school students for some time. Now he’s decided to offer the experience to university students as well, first on the east coast, and now on the west.
This is no joke. We’re talking Transcendental Meditation here, and Lynch has been a daily practitioner for over 30 years – about the same time he started making Eraserhead.
Seems Lynch was a TM prodigy: they gave him a mantra and showed him into the meditation room down at the local TM center, and on his very first try he immediately found himself swimming in the boundless seas of undifferentiated transcendent joy (talk about eraserhead…), which he found so compelling that he cried out in disappointment when they came to retrieve him 20 minutes later.
Since then he’s being meditating religiously, twice a day, rain or shine, no matter how grueling his Hollywood schedule. Within weeks TM allayed the anger, born of the frustrations and anxieties of the undiscovered filmaker’s life, that before TM he used to take out on his wife. And throughout his career it has given him solace and provided the even keel he needed to sail the turbulent waters of a Hollywood career.
Now through his foundation Lynch offers the benefits of TM to university students across the country, to help them remain calm and creative like him, no matter the pressures their professors put them through. By doing so, he hopes to help promote peace throughout the world, since the more people there are meditating, the more coherent everyone’s brainwaves become, resulting in less crime and war throughout the world community. Studies undertaken by the Maharishi University of Management (MUM) prove it.
Accompanying Lynch were two formerly conventional academics who turned their backs on top-flight university careers to take up positions of leadership within the MUM: quantum physicist John Hagelin and brain researcher Fred Travis. All came across as snake-oil salesmen when singing the praises of TM – even Lynch, despite his endearing weird habit of wiggling the fingers of one hand while gesticulating in support of his presentation.
Yet I don’t doubt that Lynch – and perhaps the two MUM professors administrators as well – are sincere in their experience-based support for TM, and fundamentally altruistic in their desire to bring its benefits to others and the world at large. Lynch at least – unlike the others – has no personal financial and institutional benefit to gain from the expansion of TM. Indeed, through his foundation he’s paying the freight.
And I don’t doubt that this project could make a difference in the psychological health of the nation, and contribute largely to achieving world peace. The evidence is compelling: meditators are calmer, more well adjusted than non-meditators, and once they reach critical mass they can change the tone of debate and discussion in an entire society.
I’d rather see Lynch put his money into expanding the practitioners of TM than into, say, expanding the audience for his troubling and unbalanced movies – as he intimated himself, you probably need TM to be able to handle their imagery – or for the American Cycle plays at the Intiman, whose Grapes of Wrath I began this blog critiquing.
Unfortunately for the success of his project at the University of Washington, however, the occular demonstration Fred Travis gave of TM’s effects on a test subject’s EEG didn’t seem to work properly last night. The promised coherence and rythmic regularity never appeared in the young man’s squiggly EEG traces, vitiating the hyperbolic build-up Travis and the others when they announced the upcoming demonstration had given of the effect.
This may merely have been due to the difficulty of meditating on stage in front of a large audience, with an EEG hairnet pinching your scalp and thearical floodlights piercing your eyelids. Still, it must have worked in other venues – why else would Travis attempt it tonight?
On the other hand, I also have experience difficulty in meditating successfully since moving to Seattle. By the beach in Los Angeles where I grew up – or in late-hippy Santa Cruz where I went to college – the meditative state came on much more easily. Even in the Silicon Valley where I lived before here, I could usually muster its trademark relaxation response. But in Seattle – it’s not easy. I succeed maybe once every score of trials.
Could it be there’s something anti-meditative about the prevailing brainwaves in post-millennium Seattle? That where a completely inexperienced David Lynch could immedately achieve transcedence in early 1970s LA, in Seattle 2005 even an experienced meditator finds it difficult to realize? Is transcendence something the prevailing winds of social psychology are blowing against around here?
Going by my own recent experience and the evidence of Travis’s test subject last night, I’d have to conclude – maybe so. In which case Lynch’s project is even more admirable – it could be seen as a rear-guard, perhaps last-ditch attempt to salvage some of the peace that came with the understanding of the so-called “me decade” of the 1970s in an environment that has forgotten, or even become actively hostile to its restorative pleasures. Maybe through his efforts I and others like me will soon be able to begin meditating effectively in Seattle yet once more, when the young minds of college students start seconding our efforts once again.
All I can say about Lynch’s decision to fund transcendence, then, is hallelujah – or more appropriately: AUM.
Except that I balk at that word “transcendence” – I thought we were talking “transcendental.” And they aren’t the same. At least since Kant, “transcendental” implies foregoing any claim to experiencing the truly transcendent, and instead contenting outselves with experiencing and knowing what we actually can know as earthly beings.
And so with this joyful feeling of pure, undifferentiated subjectivity we sometimes feel during deep meditation: it’s not transcendent, just transcendental – something we can experience here and now, 20 minutes at a time if we’re lucky, as Travis explained a kind of shutting our mind’s inner eye as well as our outer eyes – repeating the mantra as a kind of inner eyelid that shuts out other thoughts – so both can get some much needed R&R. Once you start thinking about anything in particular, though – the feeling vanishes.
It was precisely all this talk of “transcendence” that made the presentation seem insincere and deceptive – as I said earlier, as if they were a company of snake oil salesmen (ironically, Travis closed his talk with a still from the Wizard of Oz). Not that we can’t entertain some hope, after experiencing the peaceful joy and persistent subjectivity that comes when we put our own minds to sleep in this fashion, that a similar joy and persistence may await us after we are truly laid asleep in body, that we might remain a living soul. If this be not a vain belief, oh sylvan why, pace Wordsworth. Let the world go away,je pense donc je suis , selon Descartes. The so-called Ding an sich conceals itself endlessly, tracing its extravangance in a flurry of representamens, thank your kindly Messrs. Derrida and Peirce.
The oily odor also emanted from the not-quite-articulated claim that Transcendental Meditation is the best if not only way for people today to achieve such a state, and that if you don’t pay them for a mantra, you might not be able to get there properly – claims debunked long ago in The Relaxation Reponse, and even a book an uncle of mine wrote a year or two before his own untimely demise, whose title unfortunately escapes me.
So maybe Lynch should save his money for other endeavors after all. Why fund transcendence – when all we’ll get for your philanthropy is the same old transcendental. How to meditate is no trade secret – or shouldn’t be. I hate seeing someone give a lot of money just so people who should know better can keep MUM.
