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Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's University of Peace
(The Guardian, December 10, 2003)
[David Lynch] has lent his famous name and idiosyncratic hairstyle to a project to raise $1bn on behalf of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Indian guru of transcendental meditation who once entranced the Beatles, and who has for the past few decades been striving to build an earthly paradise. This venture has taken many different forms over the years, but almost all of them have involved buying up large swaths of real estate across America. . . . By yesterday the plan had changed again. The $1bn is for a meditation centre big enough to hold 8,000 skilled practitioners. Lynch explains that such a critical mass of positive thinking "broadcast" from one spot will be enough to pacify the world. . . . "If you understand the mechanics of TM, then you understand the mechanics of the peace-creating group," he explains. "When you do TM, this level of unity can be enlivening the world consciousness and it can go into the atmosphere. When the sun comes up the darkness goes away." . . . Lynch says he is not the recipient of a sudden revelation, but has been transcendentally meditating twice a day for the past 30 years, but is still "not enlightened". Furthermore, he admits that even if he was enlightened, serenity does not make for very interesting movies. . . . "Film can't just be a long line of bliss. There's something we all like about the human struggle," he says, but just as he appears about to delve into his darker muses, he adds cheerily: "Meantime I know that the Maharishi's peace plan will work and I want to do what I can to help it." . . . Lynch insists meditating has changed his life from an angry man who used to take his anger out on his first wife, to a man at peace, all in the space of two weeks back in 1973. . . . Along the way, Lynch came to believe the Maharishi's insistence that the inner peace was transferable. He repeats the TM claim that large-scale meditation in certain American cities, including Washington, had helped bring down the crime rate. . . . Most of Lynch's friends and colleagues in Hollywood believe that the first major step they could take towards world peace would be to vote George Bush out of power next November. Lynch says he agrees, but that the political world has diminishing interest for him. "I'm just watching C-SPAN and all these people are talking about surface problems and trying to solve them on the surface and as soon as they get one - three more pop up and it just goes like a merry-go-round, around and around and around. We see it all the time and people with good intentions are trying so hard," he says. "But this is now below the foundation bringing up unity and... all the stuff starts getting better - just like magic, but it's science, and it works." . . . Lynch talks a lot about achieving "coherence" in life through meditation, but most of his attempts to express the benefits of TM for the world often seem to struggle towards that goal before falling short, doomed forever to chasing the ineffable in vain. He seems aware that much of what he says will be taken as babbling, and even that his professional reputation might suffer if his many fans suspected he has become enslaved by a cult. For this reason, he suspects many of the Maharishi's followers in Hollywood have preferred silence, but Lynch seems like a man with nothing to lose. . . . "I think I know what you're saying about the cult thing... and I think people have agents and it's safer not to mix it up and come out as a spokesperson for this . . . it never seems to work out too well so they just keep quiet. It's a personal thing pretty much anyway," he says. "So it's just that this thing of peace is kind of important and I don't mind coming out and talking about it."

posted by Lorenzo 3:17 PM