First of all, when you were young, did you find that you’d second-guess yourself a lot more? Now that you’re older, do you find that you don’t second-guess yourself as much on artistic ideas? Like I totally understand when you do this, that there’s an idea floating off there.

And I also what to ask: I don’t think that there’s a lot of people in Hollywood who understand what you do. And I think Sam Shepard is the only other person right now who’s able to do what you do in a form that is out in the open for people to discover on that level. Have you ever thought of working with him, and are you a fan of him?

I’ve met Sam Shepard, respect him, but I’ve never worked with him. And there’s a lot of people that I respect and would like to work with, but you’ve got to get the person who’s right for the part. And that’s part of the common sense of making films.

And the other question was: Do we ever second guess ourselves? Sort of all the time. You know, this is one of the reasons that I’m out talking about this is to let you know about this business of consciousness and what it is and how it’s affected my life.

And if I could say just a hair about consciousness: it’s kind of easy to see, if we didn’t have consciousness, we wouldn’t know we existed. We wouldn’t know—even if we existed, we wouldn’t know. It’s the “I am”-ness, the Self of us—Being—and also our ability to understand. It’s our awareness; it’s our wakefulness. And it’s our inner happiness. Consciousness is a beautiful, beautiful thing. And we hardly ever hear about it. We don’t learn about it. 

Transcendental Meditation, as taught by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, is a mental technique. And this mental technique is easy to do. It’s effortless. And it’s so beautiful, because it allows any human being to dive within, experience subtler levels of mind and intellect, and to transcend and experience an ocean of pure consciousness within, at the source of thought. Transcendental Meditation is a vehicle that takes you to this pure field of consciousness, bliss, intelligence, creativity, love—the whole enchilada. And it’s the experience of this, the experiencing of it, that does everything. Once you dive in, touch it, get wet with it, experience it, you start to unfold it, and you grow in consciousness. That means you grow in bliss.

So all this business of filmmaking and all the anxieties and fears and pressures and all this stuff: the side effect of expanding consciousness, expanding bliss, expanding intelligence and creativity—the side effect of that—is: negative things begin to recede. And when I first began meditating, I had—among many other negative problems—I had an anger. And it was a real anger—an anger that just sat with me. And I would take this out on my first wife. So two weeks after I started meditating, she comes to me and she says, “What’s going on?” And I was quiet for a moment, because it could have been any number of things she might have been referring to . But I finally said, “What are you talking about?” And she said, “This anger: Where did it go?”

It’s magical. I didn’t even realize it was lifting—so naturally it lifts away. She realized it. Negativity begins to recede as this light of consciousness is ramped up.

So this second guessing: a lot of this comes out of fear. And that kind of, you know, just lets up, lets up, lets up. And I call this negative thing the “suffocating rubber clown suit.” And it starts to dissolve; it starts to dissolve. And it’s so much freedom for the filmmaker, for the human being. It’s so beautiful. 

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