An Edgy Filmmaker’s Surprising Crusade for Inner Peace

The “Evening With David Lynch,” held here several weeks ago in a rented conference room at the American-Scandinavian Foundation headquarters, had little to do with the enigmatic director’s 30-year film career.

The focus instead was Mr. Lynch’s fledgling foray into philanthropy: the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace. The two-year-old charity works to teach children and teenagers to “dive within themselves” through daily meditation as a means to reduce stress and improve scholastic concentration.

Specifically, the organization has raised more than $5-million to cover the costs of teaching Transcendental Meditation — or simply TM — a trademarked mental technique developed some 50 years ago by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (the white-bearded guru the Beatles famously visited in India in 1968).

The cause might seem an odd choice for Mr. Lynch, whose works include the films Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive, as well as the television series Twin Peaks — all dark, surreal, abstract, nonlinear tales that spool out like troubling dreams.

Yet Mr. Lynch says that after seeing the happiness and self-assurance Transcendental Meditation brought his older sister, Martha, he decided in 1973 to take a training course himself, and he has never looked back.

“I’ve been meditating twice a day for 33 years and have never missed meditation,” says Mr. Lynch, who arrived early at the event dressed in a dark suit sans necktie and sporting his voluminous sandy-gray pompadour. “I have no idea what my life would be like without it.”

When practicing Transcendental Meditation, a person closes his or her eyes and sits quietly for 15 or 20 minutes while internally repeating a mantra, a special, mind-relaxing word or phrase provided during meditation training. Adherents of the practice say it leads to a state of “restful alertness” as a person descends mentally into a wellspring of “pure awareness” sometimes referred to as the “unified field.”

Even amid the time-crunched chaos of the film set, Mr. Lynch says he finds time to slip away and repeat his mantra. He speaks of an “inner happiness” and an “ocean of solutions” that meditation delivers him from within. He speaks of peace, tranquillity, an end to anger, andwait a minuteis this the same man whose movies feature mutant babies, drug-addled sadists, and beheadings?

“People are always curious why my films are so dark if I’m talking about bliss,” Mr. Lynch says. “I give the same answer that’s in the book.”

The book is his autobiographical reflections on meditation and movie making, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, which was published in December. In it, he writes, “The filmmaker doesn’t have to be suffering to show suffering.” He also writes that the bliss he receives from meditation serves as a protective “flak jacket,” allowing him to creatively explore dark ideas without being consumed by negativity.

The director kept his meditation a largely private affair over the years and says his philanthropic activity was practically nil. This all changed in 2005 after he visited Maharishi University of Management, in Fairfield, Iowa, a college where the daily practice of Transcendental Meditation is a component of campus life.

“I met students who were part of consciousness-based education, where meditation is part of their curriculum,” Mr. Lynch says. “I saw students that were self-sufficient, strong, bright as a shiny penny — night and day from what you hear about and see in normal schools with so many problems.”

For the filmmaker and father of three, this was a revelation. The decision to form a charity to help more students receive TM training was largely an impromptu one.

“I found myself in this position to say, ‘OK, if I can help raise money to bring this to students, I’m there.’”

A board made up of movers and shakers in the TM world, including scientists and doctors, coalesced around the idea. Many were people Mr. Lynch had become friends with through his long connection with the technique.

Mr. Lynch declined to say how much of his own money he has put into the effort. (A charity official called it a “six-figure commitment.”) All proceeds from the sale of Catching the Big Fish go to the foundation, Mr. Lynch says.

The money is needed because Transcendental Meditation training is not cheap. The nonprofit Maharishi Vedic Education Development Corporation, also in Fairfield, controls TM training and keeps a close eye on how the practice is promoted or even mentioned in the news media; the charity’s Web site lists no fewer than 70 TM-related words or phrases it has trademarked.

The flat-rate fee for the four-day course to learn Transcendental Meditation is $2,500, which covers both individual and group instruction, as well as a lifetime of “meditation checkups” and access to a mentor.

Schools can arrange group rates as low as $600 a student. Mr. Lynch’s charity makes grants to cover the full cost of TM training for schools that opt to bring meditation into the classroom. Often the money goes directly to the local TM center providing the instruction.

A handsome booklet produced by the charity states that more than 600 scientific studies have been done to validate the mental and physical health benefits of Transcendental Meditation. Emphasized is the technique’s ability to help young people grappling with depression, attention-deficit disorders, and difficulty in school. A 14-year-old is quoted as saying, “Thank you for TM. I mean that from the bottom of my heart.”

But not everyone is so enamored with Transcendental Meditation. Some educators and sociologists regard it as a form of religion that shouldn’t be in the classroom.

Indeed, last fall Mr. Lynch’s charity withdrew a grant of $175,000 that was to bring meditation training to a public high school in San Rafael, Calif., after an angry parent (and a former TM teacher) denounced the practice as a “cult” at a public meeting. To date, private schools have received most of the charity’s grants.

Mr. Lynch has heard these comments and calls them “a nest of misunderstandings.”

“I don’t want to be a part of another religion,” he adds. “I don’t want to be in a cult or a sect. This is just a human-being thing.”

Although his films can sometimes be controversial as well, Mr. Lynch says raising money to pay for them is much easier than getting support for his charity.

“I don’t have to worry about the films,” he says. “I’ve been very lucky. I get an idea for a film, and there are people that will support me.”

When not behind the camera these days, Mr. Lynch is often out on the road. While he says that “a very good bunch of people take care of the technical side” of the charity that bears his name, his role is to be “the front man, out and about.”

The accomplished film director controls an army of people on a set and has told actors like Dennis Hopper and Isabella Rossellini how to perform, but Mr. Lynch is a reluctant public speaker. He is almost shy.

Nevertheless, he has made more than 50 appearances to discuss meditation, movie making, and his new charitable mission. Many appearances have been on college campuses, and Mr. Lynch is often accompanied by the veteran musician and fellow TM enthusiast Donovan (Mr. “Mellow Yellow,” the hippie-era stalwart who accompanied the Beatles on their visit to the Maharishi).

On May 25 through May 27, Maharishi University held its second annual David Lynch Weekend, where he, Donovan, and a host of other Transcendental Meditation enthusiasts were on hand.

Wherever he’s appearing, the one thing Mr. Lynch doesn’t do is give a speech, let alone make some sort of hardball fund-raising appeal. He is more comfortable just answering questions from the audience.

And what is the ultimate goal of the charity? Well, world peace, as the group’s full name indicates — a world peace that, Mr. Lynch feels certain, could be achieved if enough money were available so that many more students and others could take Transcendental Meditation training.

“We want to raise $7-billion, that’s the goal,” he says “Seven billion would be real good.”

The director nonchalantly throws around that figure, even though it would make many fund raisers flinch.

But here’s the thing: While Mr. Lynch’s inward pursuit of bliss seems at odds with the twisted imaginings he puts out on the screen, his low-key approach to philanthropy neatly mirrors his filmmaking career.

Mr. Lynch never tries to justify his cinematic offerings. The DVD releases of his films contain no director’s comments. He puts his celluloid ideas out there and lets viewers come to their own conclusions — thumbs up or thumbs down. And so it is with his meditation mission.

One newspaper credited Mr. Lynch with helping lead a “revival” of Transcendental Meditation. The director is not comfortable with that claim.

“I’m not really promoting it now as much as I’m giving people something to think about,” he says. “There’s not much you can do except talk about it, and then out of a group, one person will say, ‘You know what? I want to support this,’ and away you go.”