"Have you ever meditated with Dennis Hopper?"
The surprising question was aimed at film director David Lynch, who worked with Hopper in "Blue Velvet." Lynch answered with good humor, surely knowing that his film career would come up during his talk on the merits of Transcendental Meditation in Kay Spiritual Life Center Friday night.
"I don't know if Dennis is a meditator," Lynch responded. "But he probably could use it."
Lynch and physicist John Hagelin were invited to speak about Transcendental Meditation in an evening titled "Creating Peace." The event was co-sponsored by the Society for Peace and Conflict Resolution and hosted by professor Cara Gabriel for the Department of Performing Arts.
Transcendental Meditation is a relaxation technique designed to "enliven an individual's creativity, dynamism, orderliness, and organizing power, which result in increasing effectiveness and success in daily life," according to the program's Web site, www.tm.org.
Many could make the case that Lynch's body of work gives the impression that the director himself is awash with inner turmoil and unresolved neuroses. Works such as the TV series "Twin Peaks," "Mulholland Drive," "Dune," "The Elephant Man" and "Lost Highway" may point to a disjointed dark streak in Lynch's mind, but this allegation has no basis in reality.
Earlier in the day, Lynch sat in the corner of his hotel suite, awaiting an interview with an ATV crew. He looked cool and confidant, and although his angular gray hair and still body language radiated calm, it was almost betrayed by the warmth in his language, a product of his upbringing in Missoula, Mont. He spoke about how he views Transcendental Meditation and the teachings of its pioneer, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, as a vehicle for world peace, and his willingness to, only recently, start speaking of its merits after practicing for more than 30 years.
"The idea that the day after the Maharishi announced he could compile peace experts and engineers to implement his new technologies on peace - and that this couldn't come into being the next week - motivated me," Lynch said.
Lynch's collaboration with Hagelin - a noted physicist who specializes in the teachings of the Unified Field Theory, in which all matter is uniform - voiced the scientific reasoning of Transcendental Meditation. Hagelin and Lynch see this meditation as an objective toward the easing of tensions within individuals as well as groups. This easing, in turn, leads to the ultimate goal of achieving world peace.
"I came to [Transcendental Meditation] as a tool for peace through physics, specifically the realm of the Unified Field," Hagelin said. "When an individual meditates, human awareness systematically expands at the basis of mind and matter."
Hagelin was educated at Dartmouth and Harvard, and he taught at Stanford before accepting a post at the Maharishi University for Management in Fairfield, Iowa. Hagelin is also the president of the U.S. Peace Government, an organization founded on the principles of engaging in methods in the prevention of systemic violence, utilizing the theories of the Unified Field.
The far-reaching goals for the future of the TM movement include an extensive amount of fund-raising, with an effort to raise $1 billion toward a national university whose exclusive goal will be to find innovations in the sciences of peace at a core level of human existence.
"A billion is half the cost of a B-2 bomber," Lynch said. "Ideally, I'd like six or seven billion to be raised. It astonishes me when people act like it's such an unattainable figure. A billion used for military spending often never gets touched. People just use the interest. Like a fuel cell, it's the output that gets used."
Lynch chose to speak at AU for a specific reason.
"It's the best school in the area," he said. "I think it picked itself."
The reception given to Hagelin and Lynch Friday in Kay was certainly inviting. They spoke to a packed audience lured by the prospect of possibly uncovering an additional layer of Lynch's personality and perhaps a greater understanding of themselves.
Hagelin spoke first, citing that "the first stage in war is rising tensions over competing factions all over the world is creating an epidemic of stress."
He went on to say that Transcendental Meditation is a "proven new approach in creating peace," referencing many studies in which TM was applied to ease societal tensions in the greater D.C. area. Many charts and slides were used to explain how TM was used to provide greater health internally.
"Have you ever looked at an EEG," Hagelin lamented. "It's depressing. There is almost no communication between different areas of the mind."
During his own speaking portion as well as a question-and-answer period, Lynch related how he discovered Transcendental Meditation and how it had a profound effect in his life.
"During the early days of 'Eraserhead,'" Lynch said, referencing his 1977 film, "I had all of this anger. I thought it was pretty cool, but it wasn't so cool for my wife."
Lynch explained how Transcendental Meditation was the vessel to travel to the Unified Field, and how easily it could come to those who have only rudimentary knowledge of meditation. The benefits of Transcendental Meditation, as described by Lynch, reach every portion of one's life and make the "enjoyment of doing," as he calls it, that much greater.
Championing the cause of a university founded on the prospects of creating a realistic form of peace has become a crucial mission in the lives of both Lynch and Hagelin.
By sharing their expertise and personal experiences of Transcendental Meditation with the AU community, a new avenue of understanding the nature of art, science, war and peace has been opened or even alluded to in the minds of many.
