The director of “Elephant Man”, who died this Thursday, January 16, was a great defender of transcendental meditation.
It was his second passion after cinema. Director David Lynch, who died this Thursday, January 16, was a fervent follower of transcendental meditation, a technique taught by the Indian spiritual master Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. After Inland Empire (2006), his last film, the filmmaker devoted the entire second part of his life to promoting this practice.
It was his sister, in 1973, who introduced him to transcendental meditation when he was 27 years old. “I felt like I was in an elevator whose cable had been cut,” he says after his first session. “Boom! I fell into complete bliss – pure happiness (…) You are carried away into an ocean of pure consciousness”. From then on, he will meditate twice for twenty minutes every day.
“Meditate America”
In 2005, the author of cults Elephant Man (1980), Blue Velvet (1986) et Mulholland Drive (2001) launched the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace, whose goal is to raise funds to teach transcendental meditation to people experiencing psychological distress.
“I had no idea the power and depth of this technique until I saw with my own eyes how it was practiced by veterans suffering from the hell of post-traumatic stress and by women and girls who survived terrible violence,” explains David Lynch on his foundation’s website.
-In December 2020, the director launched the program “Medidate America”. The goal: that transcendental meditation be made available to Americans “in the same way that approved medications are made available to the population.”
The first phase of the initiative was to conduct “large-scale randomized controlled trials investigating the technique’s benefits for healing trauma, reducing high blood pressure and the risk of heart disease and stroke, as well as reducing anxiety and depression.”
The results of these tests were then to serve as an argument for reimbursement of transcendental meditation. “Thus, no less than 300 million people will be able to meditate, which will transform the health of the population and the entire nation,” promised the Foundation.
Transcendental meditation has attracted many personalities since the 1950s, from the Beatles to Martin Scorsese to Hugh Jackman.
