About two years ago I was introduced to a form of Tai Chi called Tai Chi Chur. And I took on the process with an open heart. And what I discovered was that after meditating for periods of weeks, off and on for months, I noticed an incredible amount of negativity come out in me. In fact, I noticed events in my life becoming more chaotic. And I’m wondering: What is this stuff that you start to

Meditation sounds like being selfish. It sounds like it’s all about the individual, and it doesn’t matter what the rest of the world is or wants.

No. It’s opposite of selfish, because we’re like light bulbs. And you go into a room where a couple has just had a violent argument: you can feel that. You can feel that; it’s not pleasant. You go into a room where someone just finished meditating,

I’m curious about consciousness. From what I heard, when we engage in Transcendental Meditation, one goes through layers of the mind and achieves unity at the bottom. I’m curious to know what impure consciousness is. It sounds like we’re going from a world of diversity, with difference, down to a world of no difference. But the world is full of difference, and that’s not necessarily bad.

No,

I have a kind of a two-part question. One: I have heard how much dreams influence and inspire your work, but I heard somewhere that it’s not the dreams that occur while sleeping as it is, say, daydreaming—dreams while conscious. Okay: so that’s true enough, I suppose—that was the first part, whether that was true or not. And the second part is, how much that can be related to your practice of

Does meditation help you get ideas for your movies?

I made Mulholland Drive, as some of you know, for a continuing story on television. So Mulholland Drive was going to be—this particular thing was going to be—the pilot: open-ended, and make you want to see, you know, more and more. And so ABC saw this, and I heard this story: the man who was making the decision saw it at 6:00 a.m.—watching