The Justice office couldn't have been more peaceful on Tuesday, Sept. 27. Sunlight drifted through a window, editors milled about sleepily after a long night of production and I discussed inner consciousness over the phone with avant-garde filmmaker David Lynch. "I just say to people, if you want it-there it is!" he told me. "If you're a human being, transcendental meditation will take you there, and you can start unfolding that."The four-time Oscar nominee's distinctive Midwestern squawk seemed more passionate than the voice I'd heard calmly declining to dissect the intricacies of Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive in countless interviews.

"I had doubts," he admitted. "I thought meditation was baloney for a long time. Then, suddenly, something happens to us people. We're like detectives. We feel something is going on, some inner voice starts talking, and we have to decide, inside ourselves, what is right. I felt it was right to start, and I've never been sorry."

Transcendental meditation, based on the Indian Vedic tradition, involves a twice-daily, 20-minute routine in which practitioners sit with eyes closed, repeating a mantra until reaching a state of deep rest and relaxation.

The technique was popularized by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the late 1950s, who emphasized its health benefits. With time, the Maharishi said, transcendental meditation leads to increased intelligence, creativity and happiness. Lately, followers of the movement have also been concentrating on a larger objective than personal fulfillment: world peace through the mass removal of stress.

I didn't ask Lynch much about his latest projects, though I did beg for news of his upcoming movie Inland Empire ("Bless your heart; I'd never say what a film is about, except I did say it's about a woman in trouble, and that's pretty much it."). For the most part, I concentrated on the reason for his call: his lecture last week at Emerson College.

Lynch's nonprofit organization, the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace, is sponsoring a college tour entitled "Consciousness, Creativity and the Brain," designed to get students from dozens of universities to participate in a $20 million study on the effects of meditation on stress and behavior.

"The college students are just the perfect people to pick up this banner and get with the program, start expanding that inner consciousness and bliss and creating a kind of a wave of peace across this country," he said.

The student study is just the tip of an iceberg Lynch hopes will eventually lead to corporate funding for "peace temples" designed to spread Maharishi's teachings throughout the United States.

"I don't have anything to gain. In fact, it's a nightmare for me-I don't like speaking in front of crowds!" he said, laughing. "But everybody who's meditating and growing in that bliss and consciousness, and their life getting better, it's good for them, and it's good for the world.

"If enough people get going on this, I won't have to do anything! You will start helping me, Sammy will start helping, Jimmy will start helping... and it'll turn the world around! It's not me that's gonna do a damn thing, you know, it's everybody!"

Lynch has been involved with the transcendental movement since the mid-1970s, when his sister introduced him to it during the making of his first film, Eraserhead.

You'd think that Lynch, who studied as a painter in his youth, wouldn't have much room to grow in the way of artistic skill. Not so: "The enjoyment of doing has increased," he said. "Before I started, I enjoyed doing things, but the pressure and fears that I had were like a thick nightmare."

Lynch said these feelings lifted as early as two weeks after he began meditating. "I didn't even really realize it until my first wife asked me where this anger went. When you enjoy things ... instead of a narrow vision, a bigger picture starts forming."

He explained that frequently, meditation has allowed him to dip into a "strange, beautiful knowingness ... As you're working, it's knowing how to move forward, to make it feel correct. You start seeing people in a different way; not like a goofball, friendly way, but a love for all people."

"In terms of world peace," he said, "it just takes one group, called the Peace-Creating Experts, at least 8,000-the square root of one percent of the world's population-working everyday in a group, to enliven enough of the unified field that it could bring peace to the earth."

Lynch described the unified field-which Vedic language refers to as atma, or "the self of us all"-as being located at the base of all minds and matter. "You enliven that, expand that in the world, and it's peace on earth."

"No one has a peace plan that's worth a nickel! People think killing people will bring peace! This is one of the greatest absurdities of the world. It just brings sorrow and anger and all the different forms of negativity. [Meditation] is right there, ready to happen. It's an ancient technique, and Maharishi's just bringing it out for this time. It works, it's the real thing, and I'm interested in trying to just tell people about it. And then it's up to them."

What about Lynch himself, the





man responsible for Blue Velvet's helium-sucking, abusive fetishist Frank Booth? Lynch insisted that the darkness in his work isn't incompatible with bliss.

"You don't have to be suffering to show suffering," he said. "The more you yourself are suffering, the less likely you can do a good job showing suffering. When you grow in inner happiness, you don't start making films that are just happy from frame one till the end. You become more you. You still love certain things; it's just that you love them even more. You see ways of going deeper into a story and you catch ideas at a deeper level. It's so fantastic."

For more information on the David Lynch Foundation, visit davidlynch foundation.org.