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Director David Lynch answers questions in Columbia Hall about his filmmaking and Transcendental Meditation. Lynch also promoted the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace, an organization devoted to bringing the benefits of meditation to students.
By Emily Smith
News Reporter
David Lynch, the director of dark films that often leave audiences in a disconcerted state, has found inner peace through transcendental meditation for 32 years.
This is why he has started a foundation that raises money to provide college students with scholarships that will help pay the costs of learning transcendental meditation and why he came to speak to University students Tuesday night in Columbia Hall.
The talk in Columbia 150 was not only sold out, but had a large audience overflow in the EMU Ballroom, where people watched a live broadcast of the talk. People at Oregon State University and Western Oregon University also saw the broadcast.
The concept that two audio speakers, when close together, produce four times the sound of one, is the same concept that when applied to groups of people practicing transcendental meditation will usher in world peace, Lynch believes.
Lynch did not prepare a speech, but asked audience members to get things rolling by asking questions.
When asked if he would consider re-releasing some of his films with a director’s commentary, the answer was “no.”
“You work so hard to get a film a certain way. ... It should stand alone,” Lynch said.
Other audience members asked for some clarification on the meanings and messages of his films, but he did not give answers to the questions they asked.
One spectator brought up the cost of learning transcendental meditation — classes cost about $2,500 — and asked Lynch why he wasn’t trying to do something to lower the price. Lynch said that if someone wants it bad enough, they will find the money to pay for it, and the high price is why he is raising money for meditation scholarships.
Lynch said it makes sense to start the spread of peaceful consciousness in Washington, D.C., where 500 students are about to embark on transcendental meditation classes available through scholarships provided by the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace.
Lynch was joined by quantum physicist and president of his new foundation Dr. John Hagelin, who was recently featured in the film “What the Bleep Do We Know?”
Hagelin explained how the coherence of electrical activity in the brain directly affects memory, emotional maturity, creativity and IQ levels and how transcendental meditation helps to build patterns of that activity.
“Everything good about the brain relies on electrical synchronicity,” he said.
He said that when a person’s brain doesn’t operate in this fashion, the person is living in bondage, a bondage that has that person completely bound to the object or problem in front of them. Whether they like the object of their attention or dislike it, that bondage controls the person’s entire reality at that moment.
Neuroscientist Dr. Fred Travis, director of the Center for the Brain, Consciousness and Cognition at the Maharishi International University, in Fairfield, Iowa, showed what happens to the brain during transcendental meditation by measuring the brain waves of a student on the overhead as the student meditated in front of the audience.
People watched as his brain waves went from being erratic and unsynchronized to more even and synchronized in a matter of seconds.
Travis said that the frontal executive system, the “CEO of the brain,” is extremely important in decision making. He showed a scan of a violent criminal’s brain and the frontal lobe was inactive. He said that when a person, like a college student, is under constant stress, they aren’t using their frontal executive systems. He said transcendental meditation strengthens this part of the brain.
Travis said the way a person uses his or her brain today affects the brain they will have tomorrow. He left students with an image from the “Wizard of Oz,” in which the Scarecrow is being handed a piece of paper by the wizard after enduring a perilous quest for a brain.
He told students, “Don’t be content with just getting a piece of paper from college.”
esmith@dailyemerald.com
© 2005 Oregon Daily Emerald