Articles on TM
Keeping Your Hair On– Sunday Independent, November 4th 2007
Confessions of a Peaceful Mind– Irish News, October 13th 2007
TM is Dr Ashley Dean’s Answer - People in Profile - (The Role of TM in Education) - The Southern Star, March 10th 2007
Keeping your hair on
The peace, bliss and abundance of creative energy David Lynch now possesses are a world away from the anxiety, fear and anger he once held on to. Barry Egan hears how transcendental meditation has helped the movie guru direct himself away from the grislier fates met by his fictional film characters.
Sunday November 04 2007
The czar of bizarre, David Lynch, has an unapologetic otherness. "My original image was of a man's head bouncing on the ground, being picked up by a boy and taken to a pencil facotory. I don't know where it came from," he once said of Eraserhead, the 1977 movie that first brought him to the attention of the world.
It is similarly difficult to work out just where David Lynch came from. Officially, he was born on January 20, 1946, in Missoula, Montana, the son of a research scientist for the Forest Service in the Pacific Northwest who was brought up Presbyterian. You couldn't be so sure watching any of his movies, however.
In 1980, Mel Brooks, who was executive producer on The Elephant Man, and gainfully employed Lynch to direct the classic movie, described Lynch, not inaccurately, as "Jimmy Stewart from Mars." Lynch's work on that movie earned him two Academy Award nominations: Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay.
Without him -- and his cosmic, nay Martian, detective movies like Eraserhead, Blue Velvet and Wild At Heart -- directors such as Jane Campion, Quentin Tarantino, Gus Van Sant, Tim Burton, the Coen brothers, Jim Jarmusch, perhaps wouldn't have had the artistic permission to do what they do. (Just as Bunuel, Couteau, Kubrick and artists like Francis Bacon did the same for Lynch, presumably.) Even Woody Allen, whose film Hannah and Her Sisters was nominated for Best Picture, said the best picture of 1986 was Blue Velvet.
I doubt there is another person walking the planet right now as bizarrely unique as Mr Lynch. And I'm not just talking about his gravity-defying hairdo which makes him look like Jimmy Stewart having had a row with a bottle of industrial-strength hair gel."My hair does this somewhat naturally," he says, with a beatific smile, "but I am not real happy with this last haircut. So I have been using some hair spray."
What about the ozone layer?
"That's Al Gore's thing," he jokes.
It is slightly surreal how normal and implacably straight he comes across when you first meet him. When he talks as he does in that mannered accent -- complete with a smile that is on full blast the whole time a la Bill Clinton -- it is easy to forget that this is the award-winning movie maker who created Frank Booth, the joyriding, Roy Orbison-quoting psychopath in Blue Velvet, who can only reach an orgasm with an oxygen mask strapped over his face.
Or that in Eraserhead, the chickens start to spout blood. Or in Twin Peaks when Special Agent Cooper realises who homecoming queen Laura Palmer's murderer is in a dream and then promptly forgets the name the next morning. Or. . . Listen, I could type until my fingers started to spout blood, giving you examples of Lynchian weirdness. But as the New York Times once headlined an interview with the director: "In a Weird Way, David Lynch Makes Sense".
He is here in Dublin as a guest of "Maharishi International University" (MIU Ireland) to give a talk on transcendental meditation (TM) at Edmund Burke Theatre, Arts building, Trinity College. In the front row, later that evening, you had Lainey Keogh, Alison Doody and behind them Harry Crosbie and wife Rita.
"Anyone who listened to him was inspired by his vision for a better society. We hope to see him back in Ireland soon," Noel O'Neill, the TM guru from Monkstown, told me after the talk.
His hope, through the David Lynch Foundation, is to bring stress-reducing meditation to at-risk children and teenagers around the world. "Negativity is like darkness," he says in La Stampa, "it goes away when you turn on this light of peace and unity. Bliss is our nature. Bliss."
He smiles so broadly when he says the word "bliss" that it would be rude not to smile broadly back, or at least try to.
I should reveal here now that recently I took up TM -- through Jack Lyons in Rathmines -- and it was Noel O'Neill who very kindly set up this exclusive interview with Lynch in Dublin. So I do have something of a vested interest in talking to David Lynch, who has been transcendentally meditating since 1972. His vocabulary is chocker with phrases like "bliss that includes unbounded, infinite intelligence, creativity, consciousness" and words like "light," "peace" and "bliss." If you didn't know better, or if you hadn't seen Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway or new movie Inland Empire, you would think Lynch and his TM buddy Donovan (who sang at Trinity later that night and is sitting on the hotel sofa with him) were two old hippies cryogenically frozen from the Sixties and defrosted right here in the suite at La Stampa.
"Transcendental Meditation is like a field of pure creativity," he says. "Ideas come from there, creativity comes from there. All these anxieties and fears and things that just kill us, all of those start going away. It becomes like a fluid, pure, open channel of ideas."
And just when you think he needs to draw breath, he continues: "Pure vibrant consciousness, bliss, intelligence, creativity, love, power, energy -- all are there within. At the base of mind, the base of matter, is this field. And it's there. Modern science has just discovered the unified field by going deeper and deeper and deeper into matter. And there it was: a field of oneness, unity."
As you are about to pass out with the bliss coming off Mr Lynch, there is yet more: "Any human being can go dive within through subtle levels of mind and intellect, transcend and experience this field," he says. "When you experience this deepest field, it's a beautiful experience, and experiencing it enlivens it and you grow in consciousness.
"You grow in creativity and intelligence. And the side effect is that negativity starts to recede. Things like hate, anger and depression, sorrow, anxieties -- these things start to recede and you live life in more freedom, [with] more flow of ideas, more appreciation and understanding of everything."
He says he had gone to see a psychiatrist for anxiety and depression. "I wasn't so depressed that I couldn't work, but I had plenty of anxieties and fears and anger." He quit the shrink and left the teachings of Sigmund Freud for those of your man, Maharishi. "The heavyweight negativity started to lift."
His anger lifted away. "I knew I had this anger, and I'd take it out on my first wife. Two weeks after I started meditating, she came to me and said, 'What's going on?' And I said, 'What are you talking about?' And she said, 'This anger --where did it go?' And I honestly didn't know that it had lifted. But she knew it had lifted. It just went away. I had anxieties and fears and this anger, and those negative things started lifting. And I started enjoying life."
YOU don't get angry? "It doesn't mean you can't get angry," he explains. "You just can't hold on to it. You can get sad -- you just can't hold on to it.
"When I heard my mantra, when it was given to me, my first meditation was --I cannot describe how -- I say in my talks, 'You're in an elevator and they snipped the cables and just, Boom!' You go so deep in bliss and it's so profoundly beautiful and I just said, 'Man, everybody should have this experience. Everybody. It's unbelievable!'"
I wondered whether sicko scumbag Frank Booth (played with chilling credibility by Dennis Hopper) might have been different had he meditated instead of sexually and psychologically terrorising Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet (Lynch had a long relationship with Rossellini.)
"Frank is a beautiful soul with a beautiful soul," David smiles. "With TM, his inner happiness would grow. His anger would go."
Would his sex-toy oxygen mask go too? "From time to time, he would look at the mask and laugh happily about it. He wouldn't need it any more. He wouldn't torment people. He would love them. And a joyride would really be a joyride. He would take Jeffrey out sometimes for a hamburger."
Is it true that Dennis Hopper rang you and said, 'You have to give me the role of Frank Booth because I am Frank Booth'?
"That's very true. There was a happiness on one side and a big fear on another. And what Dennis said was true," he adds, by way of explanation. "Dennis had to have been through experiences on the dark side to have owned that character. When Dennis called me and said that to me, he had been clean and sober for about a year-and-a-half, and had already made another film clean and sober, but he had held all that he had learned from his suffering. He could bring that now in a very strong way to characters without screwing everything up. He is a great, great guy."
I ask Donovan to describe Mr Lynch. "He is a painter who wanted to see the painting move. He is a renaissance man dabbling in many different acts -- and presenting extreme human conditions in a very compassionate way, not in an arbitrary way of showing the suffering as a mindless thing, but making the audience look at it in a certain way. He is a celebrated master of his art but a beautiful loving soul."
A beautiful -- and beautifully weird -- soul who has a sense of humour as gargantuan as his movies, it transpires. And he has the coolest laugh on the planet. "All relationships have to improve," he says. "Stress and anxiety and anger and all that kind of stuff starts dissolving -- relationships are affected by that. You can still get divorced. I have been divorced three times," he laughs, before steadying himself for the Groucho Marx-like punchline.
"But they are happier divorces!" Cue more laughter.
What's a happy divorce?
"Just understanding that we're moving on but not a lot of hate and anger, a mess. I always say, 'Maybe the events of our lives will be the same but how you go through those events will change for sure.'"
TM is taught in Ireland through an organisation called "Maharishi International University" (MIU Ireland). To contact MIU, ring 051 855950 or log on to www.tm-ireland.org to find centres where TM is taught.
Reprinted with the kind permission of Barry Egan and the Sunday Independent
Confessions of a peaceful mind
Joanna Braniff talks to avant-garde, Oscar nominated film director David Lynch ahead of his visit to Belfast later this month on his belief that Transcendental Mediation can improve the world and his personal mission to spread peace and tranquility.
Calmness, relaxation and spiritual bliss are not words you would normally associate with auteur film director David Lynch. As an Oscar-nominated, yet avant-garde director, with a career spanning more than three decades, Lynch has changed the visual language of cinema and television forever.
More famous for directing nightmarish visions of collective consciousness like Eraser Head, Blue Velvet, Wild At Heart, Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive and The Elephant Man, Lynch's very name has passed into popular parlance to mean weird and disturbing.
So it may come as a surprise to many that the American director is currently on a global mission to spread the calming practice of transcendental meditation (TM), especially to young people in schools. Despite the fact that his schedule is best described as hectic, he took time out of setting up an important exhibition of his art in Milan to chat to The Irish News about his core beliefs.
In a post-conflict society such as ours, David believes that TM can have a positive impact on the lives of all and that is why he is keen to visit Northern Ireland. David is a firm believer in the ancient practice of TM and has been using its techniques for more than 30 years to improve every aspect of his life and work.
He has just released a fascinating and engaging book entitled Catching The Big Fish about his own life, his personal experiences of using TM and he will be in Belfast later this month as part of the Queen's Festival to spread his message that TM can improve the lives of all. He has set up a global foundation in order to provide publicity and funding to introduce TM into schools to set up a life long practice that can improve creativity and quality of life.
Popularised by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Transcendental Meditation involves twice-daily sessions in which practitioners meditate on a specific mantra to achieve inner peace although it is important to point out that it is not affiliated or based on any specific or religious practices.
Lynch believes that human beings have the capacity to "dive within" their own consciousness through the practice of TM to achieve 'full brain potential' and experience bliss and joy everyday. He is working with an organisation called Stress Free Schools in order to educate and implement programs for young people to help them cope with modern life through this ancient practice.
As his mission statement says: "In today's world of fear and uncertainty, every child should have one class period a day to dive within himself and experience the field of silence - bliss - the enormous reservoir of energy and intelligence that is deep within all of us. This is the way to save the coming generation."
When David visits Belfast this month he will be giving a lecture about the practice of TM and his own life experiences using its techniques. "Transcendental Mediation is a mental technique," David says. "It is an ancient form of meditation. In TM you are given a mantra and this is very specific sound or vibration or thought. These mantras are there to turn the mind or the awareness within. Always, our awareness is out. We look for happiness 'out there' and sometimes we find it. But because we live in a constantly changing world the happiness starts to change and we then seek happiness somewhere else.
"The mantra turns the mind within and you naturally dive into deeper levels of your mind, to a deeper level of intellect. It is a natural process because each deeper level of mind and intellect has more happiness. So you just dive within - it is beautiful, easy, and effortless. When you get to the deepest level, the border of intellect, this is called the unified field or pure bliss consciousness, you transcend and you experience unbounded happiness, intelligence, creativity.
"When you experience this deepest level of life you enliven it and it starts to grow so what you are doing is really, truly growing more consciousness, awareness, understanding, intelligence, creativity and power. It starts expanding day-by-day and then you notice that negative things like sorrow, anger, depression, tension, stress, depression and hate start to recede.
It is easy to tell that Lynch is passionate and committed to this cause and desperately wants to spread the techniques of TM to the world so that everyone can experience the benefits that it has brought to his life.
David was introduced to the practice in the early 1970s and based on his personal experiences, which are explored in detail in Catching The Big Fish, he has found a key tool for both his professional and personal life.
Science also supports the claims for the positive benefits of TM. Over the last 30 years hundreds of scientific studies, including those carried out at the prestigious Harvard and Stanford Medical Schools, have validated the benefits of TM. This research has shown that the TM technique produces physiological states of alertness - distinct from ordinary waking, dreaming or deep sleep. This deeply rested state of physiology can have long-term benefits for health and mental well-being.
Lynch is keen to offer this tool to young people in schools so that they can achieve their full capacity. It is through the practice of TM David believes that people can appreciate every aspect of their life on a much deeper level and therefore get much more out of their experience. If people can awaken their innate curiosity and enthusiasm for life on such a primal level they can experience the world on a deeper level and get more enjoyment and build their self-esteem more fully.
David says: "Through TM the student learns to know their self. A great self-assuredness, inner happiness and a brightness comes and they become very creatively powerful and strong - real happy human beings. They are shedding stress like a dog coming out of water and shaking stress off."
There must be something in the miraculous claims of the techniques of TM because Lynch is best described as a true renaissance man having excelled in art, music, photography, writing and film making. Unbounded by convention, he has been an artistic pioneering over his long and illustrious career. While his movies and art could never be described as calming or peaceful works, Lynch says he reflects the world outside and around him, but within he experiences bliss everyday.
"Bliss takes off where happiness ends. Bliss is intense, complete happiness. You can vibrate in it - its physical, emotional, mental and spiritual happiness. This happiness is natural and it grows and grows and the things that used to kill you don't get you so much."
Through the work of his foundation, David hopes to spread the benefits of TM to the next generation. "My foundation is there to give TM to students if they want it. More and more schools want it now for all their students and those that have taken it have seen a huge transformation - a giant change! "Some of the schools that have taken it were hell holes filled with violence and anger and then things start changing for the better through TM.
"It's like at night - the sunlight is missing so it's dark. But when the sun comes up, without even trying, just by its nature, darkness goes away. So negativity is just like darkness - it's really nothing - it's just the absence of something. So just as sunlight removes darkness, this light of unity removes negativity. When anybody stays regular in the practice of TM their life gets better - it's a real phenomenon!"
David, who has Irish roots, is really looking forward to his first visit to Belfast and he hopes that the message he is bringing can have a positive effect on our society as a whole and specifically help children and students achieve their full potential.
"TM offers a way for people to experience the deepest level of themselves and that holds the promise for peace, individual enlightenment and the full potential of the individual."
* David Lynch, along with singer/songwriter Donovan, will give a talk as part of the Belfast festival at Queens on Sunday, October 21 at 2pm in the Whitle Hall. To buy tickets for this event or for more information call 028 9097 1197
For more information about David Lynch's foundation see www.davidlynchfoundation.org or see his new book Catching The Big Fish.
For more information about the implementation of transcendental meditation in schools see www.stressfreeschools.org
Reprinted with the kind permission of Joanna Braniff at the Irish News
TM is Dr Ashley Dean’s answer
“IT is really a tragedy what education does to our children – it stifles their desire to know,” maintains Ashley Deans, PhD, a quantum physicist and director of an award winning school in Iowa, which uses transcendental meditation to help ease students through the stresses of the system.
Dr Deans has just completed an educational seminar tour in Australia and New Zealand and also went to India and China. His ten-nation tour includes Ireland and he is due to come to Cork next week to give a talk at a conference.
“I was in Cork in 1969. I loved it. I went to Kinsale, so I am really looking forward to coming back,” he stated.
The internationally renowned education expert was born in England and now resides in Fairfield, Iowa, with his family. He went to Toronto in 1970 to do his PhD at York University and, while there, he learned about the transcendental meditation in 1973. Then, he became interested in all of the research that was being done on the brain.
After he finished his PhD in physics he became a teacher of transcendental meditation. Since then, he started looking at the research and teaching of TM. He was subsequently invited to join the physics faculty at Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa, and then in 1991 he was invited to become the director of the Maharishi School, which he accepted.
Since then, he ‘really has been enjoying teaching at the school and running the school, as well as seeing the effects of having the transcendental meditation programme in the curriculum.’ He maintains this gives so many benefits to the students.
“Both of my boys went from pre-school all the way up through high school and then they went to Maharishi University of Management. My eldest boy, Bryon, graduated from there with a double major in electronic engineering and physics and my younger boy graduated with a degree in Maharishi Vedic Approach to Health,” he said.
Deans is married to Jane. They met in Canada, where she also was a teacher of TM, and they got married in 1980.
According to Deans, one of the hazards to modern education is that it is stressful to the students because of the emphasis on constant evaluation and constant testing on memorisation, on the information-based system that is prevalent. It really involves trying to cram as much information into the student as possible and obviously for many students this is very stressful.
“What it does is it damages the brain because it focuses the mind on specific, narrow, fragmented channels of knowledge and that results in fragmented narrow brain development. It also stresses the physiology in ways that create anxiety and depression and it creates a situation where many students turn to alcohol as a stress management technique.
“We have to remember that all the criminals in the jails went to a high school somewhere, so obviously the high schools failed to prevent crime,” he maintains, going on further to say that they failed to prevent disease; that they actually create disease through stress, because we know that 90% of diseases are stress-related.
“Elaborating on the central theme of his work, Dr Deans stated: “It is really a tragedy what education does to our children. Then, even more than that, it stifles their desire to know, because if you go into any school anywhere and look at the kindergarten children, you will find that they are absolutely overwhelmed with the desire to know everything; they never stop asking questions.
“But if you go to talk to a group of fifteen-year-olds or sixteen-year-olds, you will be lucky to get a question at all although they will probably ask you ‘is this going to be on the test?’”
He maintains school itself stifles that desire to know everything. There now is a system of consciousness-based-education that develops the whole brain physiology. That is what is so exciting about this system of education.’
The modern scientific research, which uses EEG and PET scans to look inside the brain during the practice of transcendental meditation, shows the whole brain becoming enlivened as a result of this practice.
“When the researchers look at the outcomes in terms of education, they find that these students are growing in terms of intelligence, in creativity, in psychological stability, in emotional maturity, in higher states of consciousness – all of the qualities that are essential to become a good student and that are completely not developed at all in modern education. “Modern education doesn’t make you more intelligent,” he maintains. “In fact, research clearly shows that intelligence rises until about the age of eighteen and then it slowly begins to go down.”
According to Deans, the core principles of education should be to go back to the roots of the word education and education comes from the Latin educo, which means I lead out. What education does today is it crams in.
Dr Deans believes there are three components to education. There is the knower (student), the known (knowledge, facts, etc.) and the process of knowing. TM develops the knower by expanding the conscious capacity of the mind.
Deans maintains that all the processes of modern education is on the known. A book is really ‘just fossilised thought and students spend their whole career studying the fossilised thoughts of other people. They never get to experience the full range of their own thought.
“Thoughts are always coming and knowledge comes from thoughts. Ultimately, every book in the library has originated from human thought, so what TM consciousness based education does is it allows a student to experience finer and finer levels of the development of their own thought until they can transcend the subtlest impulsive thought and experience that field of pure consciousness at the source of thought and this is the source of total knowledge.”
He maintains that, at schools today, we give students partial, fragmented knowledge and that give rise to partial fragmented brain development, but through consciousness based education we are now able to give the student the experience of the field of total knowledge within themselves.
He said the research shows that this gives total brain development. In a nutshell, education should lead to total brain development and should unfold the inner genius of every student.
Dr Deans alluded to William James, who said a hundred years ago that we only use a small fraction of our full mental potential, “so if that is five or ten per cent, that is not a very good advertisement for modern education because you could turn that around and say that education fails to develop ninety per cent of our potential, whereas consciousness based education unfolds a hundred per cent of the child’s potential.
“It is a completely new insight into education and should be applied in every school immediately,” he urged.
Deans commented that when students are beginning to develop their whole brain physiology, they are also able to dissolve the harmful effects in the physiology and they become more alert, brighter, more intelligent and they become happier and more at ease. They also have better social relations.
He said that there are some schools in Washington DC that specialise in children with learning disabilities – in particular ADHD. Sarina Grosswold and Dr William Stixrud have been doing research there and they have just started a project at the Kingsbury School of Washington DC with about a hundred students.
“What they found is that there is a dramatic decrease in stress levels immediately with the students and then the brain wave research shows highly significant increases in brain wave coherence in the first three months. That brain wave coherence is very interesting, because it involves the frontal and pre-frontal cortex.
“It is that area of the brain that is really the thinking brain. The pre-frontal cortex is becoming engaged or becoming enlivened. That correlates with these children’s experience, so they are able to concentrate better and are able to pay better attention in class.
“They feel happier they are calmer and they don’t get violent so often,” Deans said. What is apparent is that many of these learning disorders are actually stress-related. They are related to the fact that modern education does not develop the whole brain.
He said that, when film director David Lynch visited Maharishi School, he was so inspired that he decided at that time that he wanted to start a seven billion dollar endowment fund, so any child in the world who wanted to avail of consciousness based education could do so.
“He is now building up that endowment. It is David Lynch, with the help of Cork’s singer-song-writer Donovan, who are inspiring donors to give to the David Lynch Foundation and they are funding these schools.”
Meanwhile, for those interested, Dean’s book, ‘A Record of Excellence,’ chronicles the extraordinary success of consciousness-based education.
Dr Ashley Dean’s Cork conference is on Wednesday next, March 14, at 7.30pm at Jury’s Hotel, Western Road.
Reprinted with the kind permission of The Southern Star and Aingeal Ní Mhurchú
