What David Lynch Credits for His Success, and What He Says Unlocks a Greater Intelligence in All of Us
He’s been described as the most important director of our era. David Lynch is a true Renaissance man when it comes to filmmaking- from directing and producing, to writing and composing his own films.In this interview, Dr. Oz sits down with David to discuss his work promoting meditation, and why he believes it’s the secret to lasting happiness and greater intelligence. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Anger going, like I said, it just gives you this heavy weight of negativity start lifting gives you such a great feeling.
And an edge, energy, you're diving into an ocean of infinite energy.
You're out of bed in the morning.
Ideas are flowing.
You've got the energy to do them.
Hey, everyone. everyone.
I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
We'll see you next time.
you Coming to you from the Avenue of the Americas in New York City, at the Sirius Studio.
We just took over, and I've taken it over for good reason today, because we've got a big crew in studio.
And we can talk about a topic that's very important to me, dear to my heart, which we've spoken about on the show many times, which is how we teach and pass along legacies to our kids.
But I brought together a cast of characters that...
May not be the usual ones you would have expected to share this insight with you.
And leading this group is the well-known film director, David Lynch.
David, thanks for joining us.
Good to see you, Dr. Oz.
I'll do a more detailed intro in a second.
George Griffith is also joining us, who's a younger gentleman in the same genre.
George, thanks for joining us.
Thank you, Mehmet.
And also Bob Roth, who actually is the vice president, I guess, of the David Lynch Foundation.
Thanks for joining us.
Thank you.
So here's a big story, America.
I think that one of the biggest challenges we have is that as we go through life and sort of figure out what pitfalls lie in hiding for us and work through these issues, we so frequently don't pass along that mentorship to the next generation.
And I think in order to reverse this process, in my case through looking at how kids take care of what they do control, which is their own bodies, And of course, if they don't control their own bodies, they can't control the world outside of those bodies either.
You begin to realize that we've not done our duty as physicians passing along that legacy.
But I think the same is true in the creative arts, which is why we are going to focus on that a little bit today.
But I thought to be proactive about this, instead of maligning the system and complaining about what we haven't done, we talk about some solutions that seem to be working.
We've spoken earlier on this program about HealthCore.
Which goes into schools to teach kids about their bodies, to develop the mental resilience and insight and value of the most valuable thing that they've gotten, their own bodies, in order to allow them to catapult themselves into life.
But to do this right, you actually have to get past them understanding what to eat and how to exercise.
It's much more about...
Where they see their place on this planet.
And to do that, there's some tools that seem to work pretty well.
And Transcendental Meditation is one of the leading candidates in that category.
And of course, the big challenge is how do you teach consciousness to kids when you can't get them to even brush their teeth in the morning?
And to do that, you need some thought leaders, some big thinkers, some folks that have an ability to transcend different walks of life, to wake up the new generation to something that we may have wandered upon in our own lives.
And to do that, I thought we'd start with David Lynch.
And just to give you, the few of you out there who don't know everything about David Lynch, I spent the last few weeks, because George Griffin, who's one of our other guests today, forced it upon me.
Watching every single thing I could about David Lynch.
Watching him on the web.
Movies made about him.
Movies made by him.
Mulholland Drive.
Eraserhead.
Elephant Man.
Twin Peaks.
Of course television program.
Many of you may have first been introduced to David Lynch's work through.
And the list goes on and on and on.
And we'll talk a tiny bit about these.
Although I don't pretend to be terribly cognizant of any movie genre.
So I'm not going to debate the intricacies of Inland Empire.
But I do want to understand what makes David Lynch tick.
And the reason I want to do that is I want to understand how a kid from Philadelphia, or a kid who spent some time in Philadelphia, not from Philly originally, I guess, becomes a well-known movie director, and what path allowed him to get there, and what insights he gained from that daily meditation that he adopted along the road that he's tried to pass on to kids.
Bob Roth has been instrumental in applying some of these techniques to 70,000 kids now around the country.
I want to understand how that works.
What are the pitfalls?
What can we as adults out there listen to this program, share with our kids in our school systems to make it happen?
And I want to talk to George a little bit because George is a new generation of I want to understand a little bit about what George, who lives in Los Angeles, but attended New York University's Tisch School of Arts, and was in the Circle of Square Professional Workshop, which is a very high-end place for folks in your space.
What are the tools you garnered through this experience that you could pass on to the next generation?
What could make it cool for kids to pay attention to this?
So, David, let me go back to you.
Sure thing.
So, you're minding your own business, meddling through poverty in Philadelphia, and what happened?
Well, Philadelphia, we don't want to talk about Philadelphia.
But it's a great place to leave.
And then I went to Los Angeles, California.
At that time, had zero interest in meditation.
Just wanted to work.
Thought meditation was a waste of time.
Two things got me thinking.
One, a phrase.
True happiness does not exist out there.
True happiness lies within.
And this phrase has some truth to it, to me.
But in the phrase, they don't tell you where the within is, nor how to get there.
Where did you hear the phrase?
I don't know where I first heard this phrase.
But when I heard it, it made an impression.
And I thought about it.
Then one day it dawned on me that maybe meditation was the way to go within.
Within is the key word.
And you mentioned the word transcendent.
Transcendental meditation is a mental technique, an ancient form of meditation that allows any human being to dive within and transcend.
Experience the big ocean of vibrant totality of consciousness.
It's always been there.
When you experience it, you infuse some of that with each meditation and you expand consciousness.
When you expand that consciousness, consciousness has qualities.
In that ocean within is infinite intelligence, infinite creativity, infinite happiness, infinite love, infinite energy, infinite dynamic peace.
And you infuse that and grow in that.
It's the deepest level of life.
You can dive in there and experience it.
Such a blessing.
Now, you've got a kid named Bobby in a classroom.
And he's suffering so much stress and tension, anxiety, all these things swimming inside Bobby.
He's not doing well in school.
And it's, you know, a trauma to him, his parents, everybody, filled with anger sometimes, depression, sorrow.
And you could paint those classrooms pretty colors.
You can do one more one-on-one time with him.
You can feed him good food.
But his consciousness, his intelligence, all these things are going to stay exactly the same.
And they're going to say, why isn't Bobby doing better?
Why are these grades in C's and D's instead of A's and B's?
What's going on?
You give him this technique.
He learns easy, effortless, to dive within.
Euphoric, beautiful, blissful experience.
Starts growing in that.
Suddenly, Bobby is happier from the inside.
More intelligence, IQ goes up.
His grades are going up.
His relationships with his fellow students are improving.
He's able to focus, comprehend, and it happens every time.
Bobby is becoming a happy camper.
And it just goes like that, by diving within, transcending, experiencing that big ocean of consciousness.
The book, by the way, Catching the Big Fish, Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, is a wonderful summary of this.
You describe it so beautifully that I know you've lived there.
I know you've been there.
But the real question is, and I was watching this documentary again that George was having me watch on you, and I was thinking to myself, when George Griffith, who's, by the way, from Philadelphia, And so is my wife, Lisa.
So for everyone in Philadelphia who turned the radio off when David said it was a good place to be from.
And I grew up in Delaware, so I'm from the same area.
I really do love Philadelphia.
I think you do, actually, in some ways.
But you describe in one of these documentaries a story about being in an underpass and a couple of cops coming up close to you.
And you're carrying a, was it a Billy Club Gorto-Toe story?
It was a stick with nails yesterday.
It was a one-by-three with nails, big nails, driven through different directions.
So the cops came up to you, screeched to the side of me.
The cop says, what do you got there, bud?
I showed it to him.
He says, good for you.
And it took off.
The real question is, would that David Lynch have listened to anyone talking to him about Transcendental Meditation?
At that time...
You know, the right person talking to me about it might have listened.
Might have listened.
So George, why does it matter to you what David Lynch thinks about meditation?
Well, I've been a huge fan of David Lynch since I was a very young person, since I first called Blue Velvet.
My father had The Elephant Man on tape when we first got a VCR, because it was nominated for an Academy Award.
David was nominated for Best Director.
And, you know, what I've been most curious about is that you've been meditating for decades prior to first becoming vocal about it and going on tour with John Hagelin in 2005. And I would listen to you speak and what really resonated with me was when you would talk about how there's a common misperception with not just young artists but artists in general that you have to you have to be living within and created from a place of horror
and misery and I have to say I was a disciple of this kind of idea and it was such a relief to hear you talk about how That's great for the work, to put into the work, but maybe not so great for the vessel that you are.
And I would love if you could talk about that a little bit.
Yeah, I think, well, artists, they want to have an edge.
And a lot of artists think anger is an edge.
And I've been there, you know, 100%.
I don't want any feel-good, white kitten kind of thing.
You know?
And so, it's really tricky.
It's very tricky to explain that, you know, anger, real anger, kind of bitter anger, it occupies the mind.
And it poisons the person, and it poisons the environment.
No one likes to be around a really, truly angry person.
And it actually squeezes the conduit of creativity.
So it's kind of mind control, anger controlling it, very little creativity, and yet they think it's very cool.
Now, if that same artist could dive within and experience bliss, waves of happiness, And this starts unfolding.
This anger, because I had that anger, it starts to lift away.
You work in way more freedom.
You're diving into an ocean of infinite creativity.
This creativity starts flowing in.
And I'm telling you, this flow of ideas goes.
And a kind of a knowingness called intuition goes.
All these things is what feed the work.
Anger going, like I said, it just gives you this heavy weight of negativity start lifting, gives you such a great feeling and an edge, energy.
You're diving into an ocean of infinite energy.
You're out of bed in the morning.
Ideas are flowing.
You've got the energy to do them in a kind of a new, bright, shiny freedom.
And that's a power.
Infinite power is there.
This feeds the artist's work.
And you can show suffering and you can show all the wrongs and all this stuff powerfully, more powerfully, more and more and more powerfully.
But I always end up saying the artist doesn't have to suffer to show suffering.
You've got to understand it, but you don't have to suffer to show suffering any more than you have to die to shoot a death scene.
All right, so George, 10 years ago, when you were sort of just embarking on life, what would it have taken for you to pay attention to a message like that?
Well, I have to say, I pricked up my ears pretty quickly when I started to realize that David was the one talking about it, because I have great respect for...
I feel like he's a visionary.
And I think Hopper called you an American surrealist.
I think you're one of the truest American surrealists.
And it wasn't until about four years ago that I sort of saw you being public about your meditation.
Is that true?
Is that about when it was?
About then, yeah.
I mean, at least in such a...
Prolific way.
Bobby Roth got me on the road.
When we come back, I'm going to pester Bobby Roth a little bit about that, but I want to go one generation past and ask Arabella, I'm going to pull out the big guns today, who's in Film School of Columbia, Arabella Oz.
I'm going to ask her what you're taking away from this discussion.
So Bob Ross joining us.
Vice President of the David Lynch Foundation.
He's been teaching Transcendental Meditation for 40 years.
He gives you pretty much just about any background you want to have in the field.
National Director of Transcendental Meditation in this country.
When David Lynch was speaking earlier about his vision for how it impacts kids, you know, grades go up, maybe truancy rates might fall.
There's a general happiness that allows them to focus and to achieve and have a vision for where they're going.
They can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
How does this reduce the productivity?
Does that actually happen?
Are these measurable benefits of TM? In the last 35 years, there's actually been several hundred research studies on transcendental meditation conducted at Harvard and Stanford and UCLA and published in all the major journals.
And the National Institutes of Health has now funded $24 million.
On research on brain functioning and cardiovascular health on Transcendental Meditation over the last 18 years.
The interesting thing is, is David's description of the mind diving within and experiencing this ocean of consciousness within, as you say always on your show, mind and body are intimately correlated.
So if something is taking place in the mind, it's got to show up in the body.
It's got to show up in brain functioning.
And repeatedly they find that during Transcendental Meditation, the 20-minute period of just, it's a quiet practice, you close the eyes, and the mind just quiets down, the body gains a state of rest in many regards, deeper than the deepest part of deep sleep, while at the same time, EEG and brain imaging shows a unique state of sort of inner wakefulness and brainwave coherence.
And that has very practical benefits in terms of heart disease, at least.
I mean, people don't realize that one in five African-American teens have high blood pressure.
Yeah.
So you have reductions in cardiovascular disease, you have reductions in anxiety, depression, all these stress and stress-related disorders.
And that's really the reason why this is offered now in so many schools as a quiet time program, actual official program in public and private schools in the U.S. So a lot of the listeners are driving, so they shouldn't do this as you describe it.
No, no, no.
Take us through sort of the 122nd version of this.
If you're going to teach someone who's dear to you about this or do it yourself, how would you start?
Transcendental meditation itself is taught.
This isn't sort of meditation light like LITE. It's done really with a mentoring, a coach.
You have a trained teacher.
It takes about one hour a day over four consecutive days.
And then you've got it.
And what you learn during that time is you receive a sound, a specific sound called a mantra.
It means a sound with no meaning.
And you're taught how to use that sound effortlessly.
Is that what mantra means?
It just means sound.
It's a sound with no meaning.
Is it Sanskrit?
What's the origin?
Sanskrit sound predates Hinduism.
This is not a religion.
This is not religious.
But it's a sound.
Mantra means sound with no meaning.
And if you had meaning, you stay on the intellect.
What is kitchen?
So a lot of humans say mantras all the time not knowing it.
They say things that have no meaning.
Yeah, but the difference here is it's a sound.
The specific has a soothing life-supporting effect.
I got it.
And so it comes from this ancient meditation tradition, oldest in the world, and you learn how to use that.
It's done silently.
It's done sitting comfortably in a chair.
You can do it on a train.
You can do it on a plane.
You can do it in a car if someone else is driving.
And automatically, a 10-year-old child with ADHD who couldn't close his or her eyes for one minute and sit quietly loves 10 minutes of TM. Because it's not just wasting your time, it's actually diving within, settling in, and you feel deep physical relaxation, and stress is thrown off, and you feel much better.
And the reason why I started...
I come from a doctor's family.
At the end, I said, it's all sounding good.
And I said, do I have to believe in any of this for it to work?
And the guy said, you could be 100% skeptical.
It will work just as well as if you believe in it.
And I said, that's my kind of thing.
Because it's a human being thing.
Exactly.
So some of the most skeptical people around are the young ones.
They should be skeptical.
They're supposed to be out there, challenging, changing.
So Arabella, how old are you now?
19. 18. 18. That was close.
I did that on purpose, everybody.
I was there when she was born.
So, Herbal Az, who's at Columbia, and you've got a lot of classmates.
I've met a bunch of them.
You know, appropriately skeptical.
For both your generation and maybe the generation behind you, one that's still growing, how does this sound?
Well, I think it all comes down to who you're hearing it from.
I'm a big fan of Mr. Lynch's work as an artist and as a person, so I'll take what he says and apply it to me as an artist, as a person.
And going to Columbia as a freshman, I was having a hard time, a lot of stress, a lot of anxiety, and my dad would always say, like, just apply it to, just have it feed your creativity.
Like, negative experiences help you grow as an artist.
And I think I'll go with Mr. Lynch's interpretation of that.
What I was specifically trying to say was that people do their most creative work frequently when they're depressed because depression is not something you should be fearful of and run from.
It's a wake-up call.
And so it calls for you to treat it, not to run from it, which is how we traditionally manage it in America.
In America, when you get depressed, someone gives you a medication.
And those medications, yeah, they work, but they only work in conjunction with therapy.
And what they generally do is sort of dull you a little bit so you can begin to engage life again.
But if you try to use the medications by themselves, you're numbing yourself to the wake-up call that depression really represents.
And so of all the things I've been struck by just talking about this, David, when you said that you didn't have to use the dark spot for creativity, that to me is incredibly profound because I also share your belief that everyone sort of looks to the dark for the creative stimulus, for the spark.
But sometimes the creative stimulus comes from, even if what you're going to ultimately create doesn't sound light, it comes from lightness, from airiness of creativity.
A flow of ideas.
And I always say, you know, ideas are the number one thing for human beings.
We don't do anything, create anything without an idea first.
And so this flow of ideas.
Ideas are always coming up.
And they say that everything comes from this ocean within.
plus everything in the universe, the unified field, unity of all the particles and all the forces of creation.
You dive into that.
That's the source of thought, source of ideas.
You got a container of consciousness, it's like a ball.
And it will stay the same size your whole life unless you do something truly to expand it.
The only thing that expands it is transcending, experiencing that big ocean.
Now the ball of consciousness starts to grow.
You can catch ideas at a deeper level.
The deeper you catch them, the more information.
So there's ideas for everything.
And everybody knows the experience of catching an idea.
And you're just going to catch more of them, and you're going to catch them on a deeper level.
They'll have more information, more thrill, and your work will benefit from this.
So when do you go to the dark side?
I mean, I was watching videos of you painting the floor, or you're doing something like that.
It's like that you spilled, I don't know what you were throwing on the floor, you know, sacrificed lamb blood or something.
No, no, no, no, no.
That's how rumors get started.
Let's get real.
Yeah.
So you threw some paint that was in a bucket, and then you were scrubbing it around, and George was trying to translate what was happening.
But, you know, there are times when we all have darkness that sort of descends upon us, and you've got to get through that.
Sure.
Einstein said, if you want to solve a problem, you can't solve it at the level of the problem.
You've got to get underneath it.
You can't get more underneath it than this deepest level of life, unity.
So when you experience that, it's like an ocean of solutions.
They'll come up.
And it's so beautiful.
Like I said, the number one tool of the artist is intuition.
Intuition separates the men from the boys.
Knowing when seeing that it isn't correct, and then immediately seeing a way to make it correct.
A subtle thing, but huge, huge thing.
Ocean of all knowingness is there.
Dive in there.
Unfold that.
And watch it, you know, your work, you know, benefit from that.
Intuition.
A hundred different violinists all playing the same music.
But one of them has got more of this.
And that one violin player will pull a note and dive into that next one just so everyone in the audience, the hair goes up, you know, and they get goosebumps.
How is this?
How is that?
It's that beautiful thing of knowingness.
It's deep, deep, you know, knowing of the music.
Deep, deep knowing of the paint.
Deep, deep knowing of the cinema.
The more of that consciousness you have, the more you'll know.
And it goes like that.
And the happier you'll be in your work.
And if you can scrub a floor...
And age a floor and get it real, you know, and get down in there.
It's so beautiful to get dirty in your work and get into it and throw it.
It's not lamb's blood.
It was probably black paint or something.
And get down in there and work it in there.
It was black and white.
I want to go to George after this question.
When I watch your movies, you mention intuition, but there's something always a little bit off.
That prevents you from entering into a rut.
I don't know if they wipe their eyes and it's the wrong sound for that motion.
In Mulholland Drive, there are just weird, subtle things that just caught you.
You weren't even sure, but your intuition told you, beware.
Get the antenna up there.
I know you do it on purpose, but as a viewer, as an unsophisticated viewer like me, you're even unaware of it.
You just feel unsettled.
You're struggling to find deeper meaning.
Not because you're telling me to find deeper meaning, but I'm sort of forced to go there because things are incongruent.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
These are the flow of ideas.
It's not really so much an intellectual thing as it is an intuitive thing.
So you're going along, and now a feature film has got to pull...
A viewer forward in a certain way for two or two and a half hours.
It's tricky business.
And anything that comes along and breaks that, throw the viewer out.
And you have to almost start all over again.
It's a tender, tender thing.
So all these elements have to flow together in a correct way, correct to you based on the ideas, for the thing to work, hold together as a whole.
So, George, Alpha Rat Productions is your production company.
You take some of these ideas that sometimes always don't seem like they'll fit together perfectly and try to craft this movement forward that you want your viewer to experience.
How do you tap into that creative energy that David describes as a ball that gets larger and larger as you develop bigger awareness?
Well, from listening to David, I don't know that I have tapped it nearly as much as I would like to.
But I do know that something that I believe is what you were referring to, that I have always been inspired by David's work, is that there's a difference between mystery and confusion.
And so I think that a lot of times, you know, there's a certain type of viewer that maybe somewhere in the middle of Mulholland Drive goes, whoa, I'm out of here.
Because I think that the mystery is a little bit...
Silenzio.
Well, I think that sometimes that's unnerving.
One of my favorite things I've heard David say in reference to film is that life doesn't make any sense.
Right?
Life frequently doesn't make sense.
Frequently.
Frequently doesn't make sense.
Ultimately it does.
But they don't question that nearly as much as when they're presented with similar things that feel like they don't make sense in the cinema or in art.
And anyway, the mystery is something that I've always found really intriguing because it feels like And I feel like more and more as you've gone along, that your films have been more...
I don't know, there's been a trust that we can go in that direction.
Beautiful.
Beautiful.
Cinema can say abstractions.
And I always say that.
And life is filled with abstractions.
Things that we sense that are difficult to put into words.
And poets can say those things.
Cinema is a language that can say those abstractions.
And so it's a beautiful language.
See what abstractions that are cool to me is I spend my whole life trying to get people to change their health behaviors, right?
It's a pretty simple task, you'd think, until you realize that maybe 20% of the challenge is knowledge.
80% of it is the emotional hook that you would give a darn about doing it.
Because otherwise, why would seemingly rational people do irrational things, like smoking cigarettes, which we'll talk about later on, by the way.
That's part two of the show.
But we do this all the time, and it just clicked to me.
That's exactly what it's about, because these are abstract concepts.
I can't put it into words, because it can't be put into words, as well as the art form could deliver the message.
So to get someone to change a behavior...
It could be as mundane as eating 100 calories less a day or stopping cigarettes or significantly more sophisticated like how to deal with depression.
Maybe we rely too much on the spoken word as a scientist would express it and not enough on the phraseology that will be given forth by an artist who might be able to capture that abstract concept.
Just a thought.
George.
I was just wondering if Dave could talk a little bit about the distinction between concentrating and contemplating Versus meditating and how that fits into your process.
Yeah.
There's many, many forms of meditation.
And some are concentration.
Some are contemplation.
And they say that concentration keeps a person on the surface of life.
Contemplation, concentration, there's mental things going on.
You stay on the surface.
Transcendental meditation is a unique...
An ancient form of meditation that shocked the Indians when Maharishi first told them.
They couldn't get around that it was effortless transcending.
They'd been working hard.
Transcendental meditation, you don't have to give up worldly pleasures.
You don't have to go to a cave.
You don't have to go to the forest.
It's effortless transcending.
And you start on the surface...
And you sit.
Close your eyes.
Start that mantra.
Very specific sound vibration thought that has to be life supporting at all levels of mind and intellect.
It turns the awareness 180 degrees within and you dive.
Easy.
Effortless.
And then, boom!
Unbounded awareness.
Unbounded consciousness.
It's so beautiful.
And that's the big home of us.
It's called the self.
The self.
Know thyself.
And it transforms life, experiencing that deepest level.
So it's money in the bank.
Now, if it was very difficult, how would you get a 10-year-old kid to sit and struggle for an hour or two, you know, forcing this?
They sit.
Boom!
It's an innocent process for human beings, and they love it.
It's their technique, and things get better and better and better.
The parents must be, you know, euphoric seeing Bobby shining in consciousness.
His grades going up, his health improving.
You know, relationships improving.
And he's not suffering.
He might have a mild depression.
It's lifting away.
He might have anger.
And you see the anger go.
You see strong, very angry guys.
They say, wait a minute, this meditation.
But when they do it, they all say, I would have killed this guy.
Now, it just rolls off me.
It's way cooler.
Anger is actually, they say, a sign of weakness.
It's a sign of weakness.
Now, boom, they let it go.
They just let it go.
They could kill the guy, but they let it go.
And they start loving the guy that's giving him trouble.
Put their arm around him, say, pal, you know, let's go have a coffee.
It goes like that.
That's beautifully described.
We've got a lot more to discuss, so stay with us right after the break.
All right, Bob.
You were going to comment a little bit on that beautiful soliloquy, that description of transcendental meditation and how we just turn everything upside down by offering a pain, not pain-free necessarily, because you might have to go through some discomfort, but you don't have to be an aesthetic.
Yeah, I think the interesting thing is when we offer this with the foundations, working with your foundation to provide, and others to provide this in the schools, is we don't teach a philosophy.
We don't teach any do's and don'ts.
What we do, as David was saying, is we just provide a student from the age of 10 years through college.
We offer programs.
We provide scholarships, complete funding.
And to provide the student with the experience of that quiet level of the mind.
It's as if, right now, the mind, you could say quickly, it's like a surface of the ocean is active and noisy and like choppy waves, but there's a level of the ocean which is quiet and silent.
And that silent level of the ocean is always there.
Just like the mind is active and noisy and thoughts are like, gotta, gotta, gotta, worry, worry, worry.
Right.
But there's a level of our mind that's always silent.
It's there yesterday, it's there now, it's there tomorrow.
Describe the foundation scholarship work.
So what does that mean when you give the kids a scholarship?
What we do is we go into a school and we work with a school and a school basically signs on to a program.
They establish quiet time.
And they have 10 or 15 minutes of quiet time at the beginning of the school day and at the end of the school day.
They carve off some minutes off of each class and the whole school is quiet.
And the classes, the kids can be reading or napping, but increasingly schools come to the David Lynch Foundation.
We like to offer transcendental meditation.
So do you go in, someone like you goes in, Bob, and teaches the kids for a couple weeks?
Yeah, that's what happens is we're doing the school, for example, right now in Hartford, Connecticut, toughest high school in the state, 600 kids meditating.
So we go in and teach them individually.
We provide all the funding for the meditation teachers, and the schools pay nothing, and often we do research on it.
So someone's driving their car right now in Houston, Texas, or Des Moines, Iowa, or San Francisco, California.
How do they find out if they can get a David Lynch Foundation-sponsored Transcendental Meditation teacher in their school?
What they should do is they should just go to davidlinchfoundation.org, davidlinchfoundation.org, write us, and we can work with them.
So, I mean, there's many, many schools in the U.S. now, and there's a waiting list in New York City with 100 schools want programs.
And folks can donate through that as well?
Yeah, they can donate.
The foundation has provided many, many millions of dollars in the last three years to fund these inner-city schools, Native American tribes.
There's a study now going on with kids with bipolar disorder.
So how do you decide which schools to help and which ones you can't get to?
We do as many.
It's just in order.
We just do it in order.
You better call fast, guys.
Yeah.
All right, George, you're talking to me about the David Lynch's TV project.
Yes, it's been a long time coming.
This is the David Lynch Foundation Television Online.
It's dlf.tv.
It has a lot of video content.
It changes every day.
It's really exciting.
It's really easy to navigate.
I was wondering if you could talk about what are we going to see, what are we seeing now in there, and what's the thrust behind it.
It started as consciousness, creativity, and bliss.
Happiness.
Happiness in the work.
So it's about transcendental meditation because people want to know about what it is and what it isn't.
But it's about people who talk about their work, whatever it is, And get to show their work on the show.
And one of the things about the schools is, I think, you know, more and more and more, students will get to show their work on the DLF TV and talk about their work.
But also, sustainable living, green architecture, Shrapach Veda architecture, organic, you know, Vedic agriculture, farming.
There's so many things people are into that people gotta know about.
There's so many beautiful things going on.
And these people in all walks of life will be talking about what they're into.
I've got to ask this question.
The rubber clown, the suffocating rubber clown suit of negativity.
Did that come to you in a deep trance?
I don't know where it came.
Bobby got me out on a college tour.
And one night, I thought, you know, it is like a clown suit.
Because we're fools to be inside...
A suffocating rubber clown suit of negativity, whether it's anger or sorrow or just, you know, anxiety and fears.
And this suffocating rubber clown suit begins to dissolve.
And when it dissolves, like I say, this freedom, and you realize that the smell of this rubber was not pleasant...
Arabella, is there a suffocating rubber clown suit of negativity sometimes around your classmates?
Yes, around me.
Arabella, I doubt that.
Why do you think it's around you more than the average kid?
Well, not more than the average kid.
I mean, in many ways, I am an average kid.
So what is it about being 18, do you think, that increases that suffocating rubber clown suit of negativity?
Because I see it a lot in high school kids when I go around and talk to them.
It's so hard to break through.
And part of it is because kids are judging you.
They should.
They don't know who you are.
They don't give you any credit for what you did yesterday.
It doesn't matter what you have accomplished in a past life.
They want to know right now, in the present, what are you doing to change my life?
But I find that kids...
I went through it too.
I think a lot of folks appropriately become...
A negative rejecting of what they have been brought up around.
Again, which I think is healthy in a way.
But that becomes negative at times and traps people.
Well, also, specifically as a freshman in college, you think you're going through this huge change and everything will change and get better.
And you're in the city now and you have independence, new people.
And you realize that, you know, your happiness doesn't...
Isn't constituted on your environment and that causes a lot of anxiety and makes people or me upset.
And I see that a lot in my peers and my classmates.
So David, when you try to go out and talk to college campuses, which you described you were doing...
I suspect you run into this mindset over and over again.
Is there some way you use sort of to crack the nut to break through it?
No.
We're all human beings.
And that's the thing.
And everybody knows...
This thing about happiness, how Arabella said, I should be happy because I'm 19, I'm going to school or I want to go to school, I'm at the place I want to be.
How come I'm not really happy inside?
And that's exactly the experience I had.
You know, in the early days of Eraserhead, I had it made.
I was working on an 18-acre estate in the middle of the best part of Beverly Hills, California.
I had the whole stables down below this 55-room mansion.
I had all the equipment I could dream of, a place to work.
Funding for my film.
And one day I looked inside and I was hollow in the happiness department.
I should have been happy.
How come I wasn't?
And that's when the final penny dropped.
I got to do something.
And I want to dive within.
I want to get that happiness.
I want to expand consciousness so I can grow faster.
And so one film isn't exactly like the other.
There's some growth.
I want to do it for the work and I want to do it for, you know, this bubble of happiness.
And people love that.
Every human being loves that.
Nobody wants to suffer.
And we're not made to suffer.
They say bliss is our nature.
Bliss.
It's time we got that flowing.
That's so beautiful.
George, when you watch the movies that David Lynch is directing, do you sometimes feel like you're in what one of these dream states might represent?
Well, you know, the past three weeks, I'm preparing for the interview.
I've been watching almost exclusively David's movie.
You became a complete sociopath, by the way.
He won't talk to anybody.
I can't get him on the phone.
He doesn't eat.
He lost 10 pounds.
It's the David Lynch diet.
It comes with the foundation work.
Yeah, well, you know, I actually, I've always...
I've always just felt very drawn to what at first was an unusual experience, what has become an experience I crave from David's films, is I enjoy letting go.
I don't think I see that a lot in contemporary film.
I think maybe Fellini, who shares a birthday with David, he was somebody that, I mean, as a child, my father was a cinephile.
And I see these movies.
What's the birthday, by the way?
What's your birthday?
January 20th.
January 20th.
Someone fact check that, please.
I grew up in a house where we didn't always sit around and say, you know, this and this happened.
We watched very good film just kind of constantly.
And so there was a real, for me anyway, there was a space to just...
Take in, take in, take in.
And as far as an American cinema growing up, Blue Velvet's my most distinct first memory of just saying, wow, you know, I live in Philadelphia, so I didn't have quite the separation from surface and troubling fissures.
You know, it was a lot more visible, but I loved, but it is what drew me to Blue Velvet, was this white fence and then An ear that we find.
They all live together.
I would like to ask David if he could talk about the unified field, which you referenced a number of times, but I don't know if everybody knows what that is.
Tell us what it is.
They say, you know, this within.
About 300 years ago, I'm not a scientist, but the scientists started looking within matter.
Diving within matter, they found...
that weren't visible, molecules.
They go deeper, find atoms.
They go deeper, find little electrons, protons.
They go deeper, little neutrinos or quarks or whatever.
And they find smaller and smaller particles.
They found four forces that act upon the particles.
On a deeper level, the four became three.
On a deeper level, the three became two.
And about 35 years ago, they discovered and verified a unified field, unity of all the particles and forces of creation.
Not only that, they said that everything that is a thing has emerged from this field in a process they call spontaneous sequential symmetry breaking.
Ancient Vedic science, science of consciousness, always known about this field, always known that consciousness from there emerges the field of relativity, all the things.
Mm-hmm.
It's one big, beautiful show.
But that name of the unified field in Vedic language is called Atma, meaning the self.
There's a line, know thyself.
It's all beginning to make sense to people.
It's the treasury, the unified field, big treasury.
Experience that and watch things get fuller, better, brighter.
Intuition, knowingness, just beautiful.
And negativity begins to lift when you expand consciousness.
And that is a big blessing to save you.
From that suffocating rubber clown suit and negativity.
So, David, teach me, if you had to just pick a five-minute clip of one of your movies to try to get across to an earnest desire of truth what TM was about.
Is there one?
And if not, would you be willing to think about creating something like that?
This would take someone on the voyage of what it might feel like if they actually found it.
Because what frustrates me the most, and I'm sure this is true for a lot of our listeners, is they don't know when they're there because they've never been there before.
And if you can describe it, you haven't done it.
You will know when you transcend.
My first meditation...
When I transcended, as I say, I was in an elevator and someone cut the cables.
And I went, vroom, within.
And I said, where has this experience been in life?
Unique, powerful, beautiful experience.
What film?
I say, in a weird way, The Elephant Man.
A very, you know, tortured surface.
So many of us experience, but within such a beautiful soul.
David Lynch, the word I'll use to describe you as love.
It was very beautifully described, very passionate, very heartfelt.