Lynchian Thoughts

"Transcendental Meditation allows any human being to dive within. Why would we want to dive within? Why would we want to experience suddler levels of mind and intellect? Because at the suddlest level of intellect we transcend and we experience the unbounded ocean of consciousness.  The home of all the ideas; modern science's unified field--where anything that is a thing is at its origin. And it's a field of pure creativity. You grown in this and life gets better. Ideas flow. Intuition grows. Negativity begins to recede. Anger, fears, sorrows, depressions, anxieties--all these things that restrict the flow of creativity and are like a heavy heavy weight on us begin to lift away. That is what I'm interested in."

~This is from an interview with David Lynch as part of bonus material from his latest film "Inland Empire." I have watched The Secret and attended Lynch's and Dr. Haglin's lecture tour when they came to UO in 2006 and talked about the effects of TM. I am fascinated by Quantum mechanics and theories, and David Lynch and his films. Not only is he also from Idaho, but he started off as a painter. He still makes paintings and has showings, apparantly. Like him, I have been drawn to Eastern practices and spiritual wisdom, had a strong sense of something greater and a source that I can tune into easily and freely which is the same source of my artistic perceptions, inspirations and being as well as my spiritual being. I feel a passageway through the visual world, much as I imagine he has. When he lectured at UO, he spoke about how he got into film making. He said he was a painting in the studio at school in college, and suddenly it began to move. He said he wasn't "on anything" (i.e. psychedelics). That was basically all he said, with words, but the way he said them I grasped more of what he was relating--that he had had a sort of otherworld experience where this mundane reality began to melt away, so to speak. Painting can do this, as it is like a deep meditation. When I am working often, this is the state that I go into--a sort of otherworldly state. I pick up on it in other people's art and great artists relate this most effectively. It is something so powerful, that absorbs you, that takes you into that otherworld that is so much beyond our mundane day to day realities. It gets you in touch with the greater reality and your own spiritual being, your own soul essence. To make art that does that, you have to be in that state where you are attuned to that source, I believe, and your expression is coming from that place. You begin by listening to yourself and allowing yourself to feel whatever you are feeling, and then go beyond that to your soul and what is experiencing and feeling. This is what I try to do with my art practice. It is not so much unlike a yoga or spiritual practice, in fact very much similar. It reminds me of a Swami Vishnudevananda quote that I read long ago, something like: "There are many radii to the same center".