RIP David Lynch
Cult filmmaker David Lynch, who was recently diagnosed with emphysema, died on January 16, 2025, at age 78. Known for surreal and macabre films like Eraserhead, Mulholland Drive and Blue Velvet and the tv series Twin Peaks, he had a vision like no other. But he also was devoted to meditation and started the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace to teach others about the benefits. (See vid below.)
He started Transcendental Meditation after he saw how it helped his sister. Meditation made him calmer and lighter. He dedicated his book Room to Dream, to “His Holiness Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and the world family.”
Here are some quotes from his autobiography/self-help book, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity:
Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re beautiful.
Everything, anything that is a thing, comes up from the deepest level. Modern physics calls that level the Unified Field. The more your consciousness—your awareness—is expanded, the deeper you go toward this source, and the bigger fish you can catch.
Eraserhead is my most spiritual movie. No one understands when I say that, but it is.
Eraserhead was growing in a certain way, and I didn’t know what it meant. I was looking for a key to unlock what these sequences were saying. Of course, I understood some of it, but I didn’t know the thing that just pulled it all together. And it was a struggle. So I got out my Bible and I started reading. And one day, I read a sentence. And I closed the Bible, because that was it; that was it. And then I saw the thing as a whole. And it fulfilled this vision for me, 100 percent.
I don’t think I’ll ever say what that sentence was.