When I listen to you talk about Transcendental Meditation, I like everything about it. But I am a devout Christian, and Transcendental Meditation comes from a tradition totally different from Christianity—Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was a Hindu monk. I feel I’m ready to learn TM, but I can do it only I reconcile it with my beliefs.

I was raised Presbyterian. I respect people who are religious, and I

Most of your movies are full of negativity, violence—the more shadowy things in life. And yet you promote Transcendental Meditation, which seems to give you so much bliss. How are these opposites reconciled in your mind?

There are many, many dark things flowing around in this world now, and most films reflect the world in which we live. They’re stories. Stories are always going to have conflict.

You speak a lot about spirituality, and I heard that you were raised Christian. Did the Bible ever inspire you?

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

It’s easy to speak about success through Transcendental Meditation when you are a successful movie director. Do you mean to say that people who practice TM never fail?

You have to learn to find balance in success and failure. Success can kill you just as failure can. And the only way to have balance in success and failure is to function on that Unified Field level. There’s your friend. You can’t

You sound like a very responsible person, socially involved and aware of the needs of others. But you speak a lot about meditation, and I used to think that meditation is a way to achieve personal peace by withdrawing from the world, from other people, by dodging our responsibility towards each other and the society. I’d like to hear your point of view on that.

Meditation is not a selfish thing.

The David Lynch Foundation advocates “world peace,” and it seems you are planning to achieve it through Transcendental Meditation. I know so many people who would find the very idea of world peace ridiculous. What would you say to them?

People are so convinced we can’t have peace that it’s s joke now. Somebody wins a beauty pageant, and the joke is, she wants world peace. And everybody has a big

How does Transcendental Meditation get rid of negativity?

Picture it this way. You are the Empire State Building. You’ve got hundreds of rooms. And in those rooms, there’s a lot of junk. And you put all that junk there. Now you take this elevator, which is going to be the dive within. And you go down below the building; you go to the Unified Field beneath the building—pure consciousness. And it’s

My question is about the nature of Transcendental Meditation. I’ve studied many meditation techniques. I’m curious about the one you employ.

This Transcendental Meditation is what I employ. And you’re given a mantra, which is a specific sound-vibration-thought, and the mantra is the vehicle. The mantra turns the mind within. And what makes it so easy is: once the correct angle is given, the

Do ideas just pop into your head full blown and you just go with them?

One summer day, I was at a laboratory called Consolidated Film Industries in Los Angeles. We were editing the pilot for Twin Peaks and had finished for the day. It was around six-thirty in the evening and we had gone outside. There were cars in the paring lot. I leaned my hands on the roof of one car, and it was very, very

Where do you get your ideas from?

Ideas come along in the strangest way when you just pay attention. And sometimes things happen on the set that make you start dreaming.

When we were shooting the pilot for Twin Peaks, we had a set dresser named Frank Silva. Frank was never destined to be in Twin Peaks, never in a million years. But we were shooting in Laura Palmer’s home and Frank was moving some