In today's Philadelphia Inquirer, Jerry Seinfeld discusses his new film, and his life, in which his lifelong practice of TM finally surfaces, in his own humorous way!

By Carrie Rickey

Inquirer Movie Critic

Promoting his new film, Bee Movie, Jerry Seinfeld, talks about his film and his life.

Fastidiously casual in black blazer, untucked slate-colored shirt, and jeans, the comedian exudes composure rather than ease. Is there a component in the Seinfeld hard-wiring that accounts for his Zenlike equilibrium?

"Any actor, writer or comedian is a close observer of human behavior," he says, more amused than appalled. "I am so offended by so much I see that I try not to do it."

To his professional answer he appends a personal one: "I've been practicing Transcendental Meditation most of my life. I think that does something to your nervous system," the eternal observer observes. "It has given me a calmness I don't think I had at 19."

Pause.

"But who's calm at 19?"

MONDAY, OCTOBER 1 2007

John Hagelin Interview

Byron Belitsos: Today I’m honored to be interviewing John Hagelin PhD a world renown quantum physicist, educator, public policy expert, who’s well known to most of us at IONS. John’s scientific contributions are well known, they’re extensive. They include some of the most cited references in the physical sciences today and in particular John’s own Grand Unified Field theory based on the superstring, but Dr. Hagelin is unique among scientists in being one of the first to apply this advance knowledge of physics for practical benefit. John had pioneered the use of Unified Field based techniques, scientifically proven, which we’re going to talk about that, proven scientifically to reduce crime, violence and the like and these techniques are derived from the ancient Vedic science of consciousness. John has published ground breaking research in this field, much of which was summarized in the most recent issue of Shift magazine which establishes the existence of long range field effects of consciousness that are generated through large groups engaged in collective meditation.

John, you’re currently the Director of the Institute of Science Technology public policy and many other things, but in particular we’re interested in the Invincible American Assembly which you formed and launched last year around this time. Well, John, welcome to the program.

John Hagelin: It’s good to be here, thanks for having me.

BB: Thanks for coming, very much. John, your demonstration project which we covered in the last issue of Shift has repeatedly shown that large meditating groups can diffuse societal stresses and actually, literally preventing future social conflicts and we’d like to ask you, in light of the fact that you’ve launched the Invincible American Assembly to update our listeners to your findings with special reference to the nature or power of intention as you understand it.

JH: Very good. First, the word invincibility, to me, means really in this day and age, the absence of enemies. There really is no conventional defense against terrorism or weapons of mass destruction except to be without an enemy, to reduce the acute societal stress, religious, political and ethnic tensions particularly against the U.S. in response to some of U.S.’s own actions. To diffuse enmity and potential adversaries so enemies just don’t rise against a country, that’s the only way any country today is going to be secure. That’s why I called this course the Invincible American Assembly, we could have called it the Peaceful American Assembly or Without an enemy American Assembly, that might have made more sense. This course began in last July, late July, and we have predicted in advance as we have in all our experiments what we expected to see based on the number of meditator’s that we hoped to recruit, and we’re pretty much at that number, and the effects we expected to see and predicted we would see, we have seen, and this is, again, a highly significant statistical finding in the different areas that we’ve done research already, some of this research is very much in progress, and anything we talk about on this particular program will be preliminary but off to be published.

BB: So in regard to the power of intention or the relationship of intention to the work of the actual meditation, the collective meditation, how can you characterize that as a physicist, what is the relationship between the two?

JH: Well, I have to define what intention means to me and I think I can talk about it afterword’s more coherently.

BB: Yeah, let’s go to that first.

JH: Intention is, I would say, a localized beam of consciousness. Consciousness in its nature is unbounded, all pervasive, universal, pure being, pure subjectivity, pure self aware consciousness without an object. And that intention free, or even, object free consciousness is the simplest most fundamental state of human awareness, now considered to be a fourth major state of human consciousness, the meditative state, very distinct from normal waking attentive consciousness. As distinct from sleeping, dreaming, hypnosis, anything else that’s ever been studied, it even has its own brainwave signature. So consciousness is by nature a vast unbounded reality, but when we focus the intention through our senses, for example, to a particular object or a particular thought or a particular intention, that’s a localization of this non-local field of consciousness, a localized beam of consciousness, another analogy would be like a wave rising up on an unbounded ocean. So that’s an intention, intention is directed consciousness, I think you could say, and that’s how we pretty much all understand it anyway.

BB: Yes. So given that definition of intention, it would seem that, and also based on the conversation with some of your colleagues that was published in Shift magazine, in a way as the Assembly is practicing it, is not specifically focused in this way on a particular intention, but rather opening up to the all pervading consciousness, so in a sense there isn’t a specific intention, is there?

JH: That’s exactly right. It’s good to think of intention sort of a localized beam of consciousness can be very weak or very strong, just like you can have a flashlight with very weak on batteries and the lens, even though it’s a focused beam it’s a very dim beam, and what we’re really doing in the meditative state, we’re turning off the beam, if you wish, letting consciousness expand to become global, universal and in the process of expanding consciousness it’s like you’ve got new batteries now, if the intensity of the light is increased, now whatever you put your attention on afterwards is going to be more effective, more fruitful. Another way of understanding this is that intention can be very strong, the bible says, for example, through faith we can move mountains. It can also be extremely feeble and frankly often is. You can put some heavyweights together at a breakfast table, let’s take your favorite consciousness relative heavyweights that you find running around the country today and you can ask this small group to move a speck of toast across the table and they typically can’t do it. But why is that? These are not weak people, it’s just that they’re going about it wrong, in the sense that the deeper levels of mind, the more powerful intention becomes, and it’s exactly for the very same reason, it’s the quantum uncertainty principle.

The quantum uncertainty principle is the principle of increasing power at deeper levels, at fundamental scales. The reason that nuclear power is a million times more powerful than burning an object, chemical energy, because chemical energy involves molecular manipulation and nuclear power involves manipulation of the nuclear structure, which is a million times smaller than the molecule, a million times more fundamental, and therefore, according to the uncertainty principle, a million times more powerful. Literally the power of thought varies by factors of millions, between people and even for a given subject, depending on whether that subject is using the mind at a stressed and agitated state of consciousness, superficial level of consciousness, or whether they're using the mind at a very expanded, very deep level of consciousness, that’s where, that’s the nuclear level of thought, almost the Unified Field level of thought, which is pure, unbounded being, and on the course the reason we’re spending time in meditation, not necessarily thinking about peace, is because it’s taking the mind deep down into there, the maximally expanded state of comprehension, universal comprehension, field of being, that’s where thought is much more powerful. So it is really, in a sense, an exercise in intention, but it is intention that is entertained at the deepest, most expanded, most powerful level of consciousness, and that’s why a couple thousand people, which is what we’ve got, can literally change the trends in an entire country, as big as the United States.

BB: John if you could summarize that, let’s kind of go back to the top, if the conventional notion of the power of intention is that if we focus on a particular image, or idea, of something that one wants or something that one is praying for or visualizing to come into being is not going to be all that powerful because it’s at a superficial level of consciousness, right, I think you’d say…

JH: It is right, it’s a question of skill and desiring. There’s a technique in desiring, to desire at a very deep level. In the sense of prayer, you can go to a church where, you know, basically everyone is jumping around in the aisles, screaming out the name of God, that will provide a very excited level of mind, that’ll provide some emotional upliftment for sure, or you can settle quietly and feel God’s presence, and that will provide a practically more pervasive, subtle, but more powerful influence within the whole body, a healing influence in the whole body. Or you can identify with God, on the level of being on the level of cosmic awareness, His awareness or Her awareness, if you wish, where the separation is zero, and where thoughts are cosmically powerful, so intention can accomplish, it’s just a skill in desiring, that’s all, and the meditative training that we’re involved with here is learning how to desire at a deep enough level such that the fulfillment of desire comes quickly, and where relatively few people can produce a really global effect.

BB: So what you’re adding to this huge century’s long inquiry into consciousness is now the data showing measurable results from the techniques of meditation, in the current time, right now, your assembly’s actually engaging in, can you say more, John, about the measurability of the results of the collective effects.

JH: Yes, it’s a very good question. First let me just say the thing I think we’re adding to the century’s old discussion of the power of intention is that on the one hand something that is thousands of years old, at least, and that is this very very fine, very refined techniques of desiring, from the Vedic tradition of knowledge of consciousness, but then as you say we’re also adding something that is ultra-modern, and that is the scientific method. Can we make predictions and test those predictions as to what the changes are that we can achieve through collective meditation, and they really involve anything within in the realm of possibility becomes not only possible, but probable, even likely, if there are enough people entertaining an intention at a particularly deep level of mind.

Some of the things are very obvious, things like the markets, amazingly, the stock markets in particular, bond market secondarily, are remarkably sensitive to the public mood, they’re really sensitive psychological barometers. If people are feeling buoyant, confidant, optimistic about the future, the future of the economy, they’ll put money into the markets, take it out of cash, take it out of gold, they’ll put it into the markets and drive the stocks higher, and what’s so sensitive about that is once the stocks start to go higher, everyone starts feeling more bullish and they go higher still. It’s called a positive feedback loop, you can say, it’s a hyper-sensitive situation, similarly, if people are feeling a bit gloomy, pessimistic about the future, they tend to pull money from the volatile markets and put it into gold or cash, that drives the markets lower and that scares people to death, so that’s why you tend to get a boom and bust cycle in the economy, it’s an inherently unstable system, but it’s perfect for doing this sort of research, because even a relatively small boost in the optimism, positivity of the country really amplifies itself in the markets, where you have a very sensitive gauge, you can almost trace the number of people meditating on a given day by what’s happening in the markets, and since we started this thing, July 23rd of last year, there has been an enormous, of course there are ups and downs, but an enormous overall increase in the markets against everyone’s predictions, we predicted it in advance because we’ve seen it every time. There are over 50, almost 60 studies that have been published on this phenomenon of group practice in meditation so far, that I’m aware of. So we know pretty much what’s going to happen each time, it makes it easy to predict, that’s an easy thing. But then take something like the weather, we predicted in advance, and this was bold, this certainly raised a few eyebrows, I must say, that last year we would have no hurricanes, whereas the previous season had been the worst hurricane season on record and last year was predicted to be even worse. We said nope, there won’t be any and that’s exactly what happened to everybody’s astonishment.

BB: I remember that, an incredible job.

JH: Thank you very much, and that saved the country, well, hundreds of billions of dollars compared to the previous year, and how does that work? Well basically on a simple level it works on increasing the deservability, increasing the merit, increasing the karma, improving the karma of the country by producing very life supporting, life nourishing, and cosmically positive thoughts, you can say, in the deep meditations and the tremendous bliss that pours in from the meditations is all from the very very positive nature quality of thought involved. But from the stand point of a physicist, let me simply say that with the discovery that the laws of the weather obey what is called chaos theory, it satisfies the constraints of non-linear dynamical systems theory, that means the butterfly effect is in force, and we probably mostly know what that means, but it means that even the most minute change in the behavior of even one person, can literally either precipitate a hurricane or prevent one from coming. So here we have thousands of people who are in turn affecting the behavior of millions of people, and the slightest shift in human behavior can be enough to either deflect or even prevent the emergence of a hurricane, and we didn’t expect any, we predicted there would be none, everybody said that was impossible, it was also, as you can imagine, a very statistically significant effect.

BB: Well, John, what I find amazing also is that there wasn’t a specific intention to change the weather and prevent hurricanes, was there? It wasn’t specifically stated as such…

JH: That’s a very good point, no there was no specific intention to do that, but the field of being at the source of thought, field of consciousness at the base of localized thought or perception, in the field of pure positivity, purely life supporting influence, it is in physics terms the unified field, the source of all the laws of nature, unified fountainhead of all the laws of nature governing the universe, it’s these laws of nature that gave birth to life on earth, billions of species, sustained these species in earth’s intricate ecosystems and sustains life throughout the trillions of galaxies across the enormous ever expanding universe, so that field of life, field of being, source of natural law is really the field of pure life, pure positivity, pure light, it’s the nourisher of all life, so simply by becoming that, by expanding human comprehension to experience and identify with that, huge positivity flows through the minds, thoughts, actions, speech, behavior, so it’s really an upsurge of positivity more than anything that we see as the result of this particular meditation practice, of this particular tradition, Vedic tradition, of transcendental meditation so forth advanced meditation techniques of TM, and it is therefore, you’d say, a non-intentional practice, but on the other hand, because you’re really contacting the field of pure positivity, so to speak, purely evolutionary field of natural law, then the effects you see from it are purely life supporting. Now we could take this same group, having developed their minds to this degree and focus on, for example, decreasing or increasing the counts on a number generator or on anything else and we could probably see an inordinately large effect because these minds have been tuned, really, and they’re very powerful, it’s a very powerful group.

BB: On looking at it, say, from the other side, as it were, John, can you say, you’ve almost said that the field has its own intention?

JH: That’s a very good point. It’s a subtle point; we could almost say that, the field you could almost say has some specificity about it because it’s always good, good, good, good. And even at the dawning of peace, increasing peace in the world surrounding these meditating groups, lack of crime in society, reduction of violence, war deaths, terrorism, all that you could say is the influence of pure positivity, reduced negativity, reduced stress, reduced hostility, but in some respects there is some quality to this field, just like, even though this field is the source of everything, source of good and source of evil, it’s nature is more good. It’s like light, light, a candle is a source of light, it’s also the source of darkness because without light there are no shadows, but the shadows don’t have much substance, they’re just the lack of light, evil doesn’t have much substance, it’s just the lack of good. So if you want to describe a candle you can say it’s the source of darkness, but probably better to say it’s the source of light, in that way the field of being is the source of good, pure life, not the source of death, even though it is, because without life there is no death, but what we’re enlivening is the life, the light, and that’s the sort of thing we see, goodness everywhere.

BB: Beautifully well said, John, we’re almost at the end, let me just ask you if you have anything else to say in closing to our listeners about the things we’ve been talking about, collective intention and the power of consciousness?

JH: First, a general congratulations for those who are attuned to this show and this program in general, because these are the people who are, I would say, seekers of truth, they’re awake, and in search of the deepest knowledge and those are the people who are going to change the world, those people, everyone of our listeners, everyone of our viewers, absolutely precious. Secondly, I would say, if anyone in their program for self development isn’t very efficiently experiencing this field of pure unbounded awareness, bliss consciousness, you might consider doing something that is more effective in at least one respect, there are lots of ways to develop the mind, there are lots of ways to develop the body, you can do muscle training to develop your upper body, you can do aerobics to develop your cardio-vascular health, and they’re all good, but if there was one thing that I’d like to see people do is to turn up the rheostat of consciousness, turn up the dimmer switch that determines how much life we’ve got, how much intelligence, how much creativity, how much good fortune, how much support of nature, how powerful is our intention, and for that, I think, you have to really contact, and enliven the field of being, so something that will take the mind to the transcendental level beyond thought, to experience being, that will strengthen anything you do, and whatever techniques you also do, do something that gives the experience of transcendental pure universal consciousness.

BB: On that note, thank you Dr. John Hagelin, and thank you to our listeners. Take care now, bye bye.

The Jerusalem Post Internet Edition

NATHAN BURSTEIN , THE JERUSALEM POST Oct. 18, 2007

'Am I mentally ill?' he asks. 'No.'

The director David Lynch cuts a striking figure as he makes his way to the stage, his black suit and tie reminding onlookers of a mortician - or perhaps of Special Agent Dale Cooper, the FBI officer investigating a murder in Twin Peaks, Lynch's quirky early Nineties TV series.

As offbeat as it often was, the critically acclaimed, short-lived mystery series was nevertheless among the more conventional projects ever to bear Lynch's name, and the question hanging in the air as the director is introduced is much the same as before a screening of one of his films: Just how strange is this going to be? The answer, in the context of his movies, is weird but not too weird, a Q&A equivalent closer to Mulholland Drive than Blue Velvet, more like Wild at Heart than Inland Empire.

Still, it's an unusual event, with the director drawing uncertain giggles early on as he talks about his meeting that morning with President Shimon Peres, an encounter he describes as "a tender meeting. It felt very good." Later in the session, he starts an answer by repeating his questioner's query: "Am I mentally ill?" he asks. "No." Lynch's audience, several hundred film students crammed into a theater at the Jerusalem Cinematheque, cringes collectively at the questioner's indelicate phrasing, embarrassed that one of their own would say such a thing to the four-time Oscar nominee standing in their midst.

But at the same time, the question isn't an entirely unreasonable one: Lynch, after all, is the creative force behind many of the strangest, most hallucinatory movies of the last three decades. Reviews of his work often require a lesson in code-breaking themselves, with critics making tortured and frequently tenuous attempts to analyze his movies and figure out what, precisely, they're actually about. An article in The New York Times may have put it best earlier this year when it described much of Lynch's oeuvre as "just plain weird."

The man himself also proves an unusual figure, having arrived in Israel Sunday evening to meet local fans and discuss what he considers his most important activity - "transcendental meditation," a practice he promoted in separate meetings this week with Education Minister Yuli Tamir and with Culture, Science and Sport Minister Ghaleb Majadle.

As he explains at a Monday press conference at Jerusalem's Sam Spiegel Film and Television School, Lynch believes many of Israel's problems could be solved - or at least significantly diminished - were the country to find "250 advanced meditators working day by day to bring harmony, peace, happiness and creativity, and to dissolve this [regional] enmity." Along with references to concepts like "eternal knowledge" and "supreme enlightenment," the statement draws a wave of barely concealed skepticism in his audience. At the Jerusalem Cinematheque that evening, a film student from the Sapir Academic College in Sderot wonders aloud about the extent to which meditation would have helped her this summer, when editing on her most recent project was delayed by warning sirens and Kassam attacks that often ripped through the air just moments apart.

THE 61-YEAR-OLD director gets his point across somewhat more effectively in a more intimate setting the next day, speaking about his work as he gazes at Jerusalem's Old City from a terrace outside his hotel. "People say, 'David, you're so naive,'" he says. "This sounds like some New Age thing. But it's eternal, ancient."

He's not suggesting peace will arrive merely as a result of meditation, he goes on, but instead advocates the practice as a way of changing the country's emotional and spiritual balance. "Keep everything the same, keep your defenses the same," he says. "Just add this group [of meditators] and keep them protected and working."

It's a practice that's clearly made a difference for him, at any rate, leading the filmmaker to establish the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace, a mouthful of an organization that promotes meditation primarily as a boost to children's education. ("Now our education is a joke," he says, speaking of the American school system. "Education is learning facts and figures under stress. It's horrible, and grades and learning improve when meditation is added to the curriculum.")

He says he discovered the practice during work on one of his early breakthroughs, Eraserhead, about a man whose first child is a reptilian creature who never stops crying. As production began on the film at a massive Beverly Hills mansion, he remembers realizing that "it should have been the happiest day of my life," but says that he "looked inside and saw that I was hollow." He began to practice meditation after learning about it from his sister, saying he "heard a change in her voice" after she began to meditate.

His own first meditation experience was "euphoric," he says, "like zooming into bliss." He's been a devotee ever since, meditating twice daily even as he's shot another seven feature-length films and watched them rack up 12 Oscar nominations and two prizes at Cannes. (Four of the Academy Award nominations have been for him, three for directing and one for co-writing the screenplay for The Elephant Man, the 1980 drama about a severely deformed London man.)

His films - to the extent that they deal with any consistent theme - are often about innocence's ugly death, with characters ranging from a restless college student (Kyle MacLachlan in Blue Velvet) to an aspiring young actress trying to make it in Hollywood (Naomi Watts, fittingly enough, in the Mulholland Drive role that made her a star).

He's worked with A-listers and icons including Anthony Hopkins and Isabella Rossellini, but the star of his films, ultimately, is always David Lynch.

And how could he not be? The writer, director and producer of nearly all his films, he's also occasionally acted and composed music for them, including several of the numbers in his two most recent efforts.

As a result, the director may come closer to achieving his own vision than any other filmmaker, meaning credit for all the weirdness is unquestionably his due.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy made the director an officer earlier this month in France's Legion of Honor, with the filmmaker recalling the induction ceremony this week with a smile and glimpse back at Jerusalem's Old City.

It's "pure luck," he says, that his films have been so embraced, claiming that "lots of people are making good work, and they don't get the same green lights I have." Asked if anything's been missed, or perhaps misunderstood, over the course of his three-decade career, he's suddenly back on message, reiterating his hopes for the country he arrived in two days before.

"I want Israel to have a peace-creating group," he says, referring to the meditation team he's already described.

He's off for an appearance at the Haifa Cinematheque, but he wants to be sure to get in a final few words. The meditation group, he goes on, should work "on a permanent basis, radiating a glorious field of unity every day."

He shows off a bit of the local language while waiting to leave, perhaps aware that his great concern is the same as Hebrew's standard farewell.

"Shalom," he says, giving a small wave.

ARTS CULTURE

November 04, 2007 Est 1999 Scotland's award-winning independent newspaper

By Peter Ross

When David Lynch discovered transcendental meditation it changed his life. Now he wants it to change yours

DAVID LYNCH strides into the hotel room, his heavy black overcoat billowing like a pirate sail, and cocks a finger at me. "Coffee?" he asks with the gleeful intonation of one who expects an affirmative reply and will be real glad to hear it. He is a great advocate of coffee and drinks around 20 cups a day. This is surprising given his calm demeanour, though no doubt there is a rich brew of ideas percolating perpetually inside his mind.

Lynch, the director of art cinema milestones including Blue Velvet and Eraserhead, and creator of the television series Twin Peaks, is in Scotland to talk about transcendental meditation; he has practised it for much of his adult life and says it has helped him make his films.

Dressed in a dark suit and tie, a sprig of lucky heather in his jacket pocket, he has an air of weighty paternalism mixed with callow charm, as if he were, simultaneously, a retired president on a global speaking tour and a youngster excited to be away at summer camp. At 61, his Mount Rushmore face is topped by a sheer quiff that appears to have been dug out of a Welsh mine and beaten into shape by a guild of silversmiths fixated on Elvis. His eyes twinkle with the kindness and mischief of a 10-year-old boy; that's the age he says he feels inside.

We are meeting in Edinburgh. The day before, Lynch visited Glasgow for the first time. "I felt there was a real good energy," he says in his hypnotic, nasal voice. "It was like an art feeling. There was a creative energy. I was in the drama and music school and I felt really good in that place."

Lynch particularly appreciated the solid architecture of Glasgow and its industrial heritage. He grew up during the 1950s in America's rural northwest - "pretty close to heaven" - which meant the sound and fury of big cities were unknown to him; as a result he has come to fetishis furnaces, heavy machinery and thrumming electrical power.

"I love industry and shipbuilding but now it's gone," he says. "I came to the north of England on a photographic trip in the 1990s and they were destroying one smokestack a week. The old factories were going and that was a sadness to me." He is a great fan, too, of fire and feels some regret about being away from his home in LA while California is burning. "I hope someone is filming it," he says, wistfully.

On a cold night in late October, Lynch appeared at the Glasgow Film Theatre (GFT), the first half of a double-bill that also featured a performance by his friend and colleague Donovan, the Scottish singer-songwriter of Mellow Yellow fame.

Outside the cinema, someone had chalked the shape of a fallen body on the pavement. If Lynch saw that, it may have taken him back to Philadelphia, the city to which he moved in 1965, aged 19, to attend art school. He and his first wife Peggy, from whom he split in 1974, lived in a bad neighbourhood and kept a sword beneath the bed for protection. One day a kid was murdered just down the street and the chalk outline made by police forensics remained on the pavement for almost a week, a visible reminder of the violence and horror Lynch sensed around him at all times; this dread has seeped into his films like blood into a shroud.

"Philadelphia was my biggest influence," he says now. "It was unbelievable. Such a contrast to what I had known before." One night he visited the morgue across the street, curious to see the bodies. "That was a huge experience," he tells me, but won't elaborate.

Although fascinating, Lynch is in some ways a frustrating interviewee, reticent and reluctant to go into detail. I ask him 53 questions in an hour, which is way more than average. "David isn't very articulate," his colleague Mario Orsatti told me. "He's an artist, so putting things into words isn't what he does best." He shakes with nerves before he goes on stage to talk.

This lack of fluency and specificity, this antagonism towards words, is entirely in keeping with most of the films Lynch has made in the last decade; with the exception of The Straight Story they have abandoned linear narratives in favour of atmosphere and suggestion. They are films to be felt rather than followed, and his conversation is the same.

At the GFT, he was articulate enough, taking questions for an hour from an audience of around 400. The first seemed hostile, the actor Tam Dean Burn demanding that Lynch justify his recent trip to "the apartheid state of Israel", a question he didn't quite answer, but the rest were respectful.

Lynch didn't reveal much about his life beyond a couple of interesting details; we learned that he watches Billy Wilder's The Apartment every New Year's Eve.

Mostly, the audience seemed keen to hear about meditation and other esoterica. "I was wondering," asked one young woman, "whether you had any thoughts about the relationship between dream imagery and the creative dream consciousness on the one hand, and ordinary waking life on the other?" You can bet Eli Roth doesn't get asked that stuff.

Lynch talked at length and with evangelistic passion about meditation, and how much it has helped children in certain American schools that had previously been blighted by stress, violence, drug abuse and suicide. Two years ago he formed The David Lynch Foundation For Consciousness-based Education And World Peace with the aim of funding the teaching of transcendental meditation in schools. One of the reasons he has come to Scotland is to announce the establishment, probably in Edinburgh, of a new university based on the technique and named after Donovan.

As Lynch spoke in the GFT, he raised his hands near his face and moved his fingers around. By chance, a spotlight projected the shadow of his right hand on to a white wall; when he pinched his thumb and index finger together, a rabbit's head appeared and seemed to waggle its ears.

Someone wanted to know why his films are so dark if he is full of bliss. "I get asked that a lot," he replied. "All great stories have conflict and contrasts - highs and lows, darkness and light, all kind of torment and suffering. But the artist doesn't have to suffer to show suffering. You just have to understand suffering. And when you experience this transcendent level, understanding grows."

In Edinburgh, Lynch tells me that he began meditating during the summer of 1973. He meditates for 20 minutes every morning and again in the afternoon. His sister got him into it. He was suspicious at first. "I thought it was a total waste of time. People sitting with their eyes closed doing nothing? I just wanted to work and work and work."

He was in the middle of making Eraserhead, his first feature. He had begun preparing for the film in 1971 and it wasn't released until 1976. It was a slog. Lynch had no money but didn't want a regular job because that would prevent him from making the film, so he began a paper round. There he was, a 27-year-old husband and father, doing a schoolboy job, and obsessed with completing a film which had absolutely no commercial prospects. "I looked inside one day and I'm hollow," he recalls. "There was no real inner happiness. I could feel it."

Meditation seemed like it might make him happier. In his book, Catching The Big Fish, Lynch describes the anger and depression from which he suffered at that time as the Suffocating Rubber Clown Suit Of Negativity. He says he was a fool, an angry man who fought with his wife, the person he was supposed to love. Beyond "my situation in life" he's reluctant to explain what was making him so angry, though later, when we talk about the bohemian existence that was his ideal, it's clear that feeling trapped by marriage and fatherhood was at least one element.

"The art life means you don't get married, you don't have children, you live in total freedom, the number one thing is your work," he says. "Art life is you smoke cigarettes, drink a lot of coffee and work. You have girls but they must stay far, far away mostly."

He laughs. "That didn't work out."

Lynch meditated for the first time at the Transcendental Meditation Centre in Los Angeles and remembers that it was like being in a lift when the cable is cut. He plummeted through several levels of intellect and splashed down into "the ocean of pure consciousness" - the level from which he says all creativity, happiness and intuition emerges.

Lynch believes that all humanity is connected at this deep level of the mind and agrees when I suggest that this is why he is so good at disturbing audiences with his films; he is able to provoke unease and fear because his frequent meditation gives him access to a primal part of himself and all of us. With meditation came success. Despite, or perhaps because of, the shuddery weirdness of its subject, a man becoming the reluctant father to a mutant baby, Eraserhead was a cult hit. Lynch could easily have spent his days as an entirely marginal figure but instead found he was in demand. He had a great success with The Elephant Man, George Lucas asked him to direct Return Of The Jedi (sadly, he declined) and Dino De Laurentiis asked him to direct Dune (sadly, he agreed).

He has never been career-minded, though. Over the years, Lynch has established himself as a film-maker who puts the contents of his head on screen and hopes, though not too hard, that people will be willing to pay to see what's been going on in there. The trend in Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2006) has been a growing abstraction and a concern with shifting identities; the latter, he says, is inspired by living in the unreal zone of Hollywood.

Lynch's recent work has been criticised for being incoherent but he says that's missing the point. If you watch his films in expectation of a beginning, middle and end then you will be frustrated, even annoyed.

Lynch started as a painter, and continues to work in that medium, and it is perhaps more useful to consider his films as you would paintings. He mentioned at the GFT that Francis Bacon was a great hero and influence, so I ask about Bacon's famous 1944 triptych, Three Studies For Figures At The Base Of A Crucifixion (which, by the way, is worth looking at as a possible inspiration for the look of the baby in Eraserhead).

Bacon's masterpiece - like, say, Mulholland Drive - has characters and seems to contain some sort of narrative, but it's not entirely clear what that is. "Yeah, yeah, yeah," Lynch smiles, delighted by the comparison. "If you had those paintings on the wall and 100 people came in and you said, Tell me the story that you get from that triptych,' you'd get 100 different stories. But there could be some beautiful stories."

There also seems to be a common mood between Bacon's paintings and Lynch's films. "Sure," he agrees. "A kind of lonely despair and sickness." He laughs. "Yeah."

We are almost out of time. There are so many things still to talk about, but it's impossible to guess what Lynch would discuss. His erotic photographs of fetish shoes? The time he visited Fellini on his death-bed? Why he keeps a friend's uterus in a bottle at home? Flustered, I say something dumb - is it true that he carries a rubber ear around with him? "What? No, I never carried that around. People send me ears sometimes. I guess people think since Blue Velvet that I would be happy to get an ear, but it's not really true." He looks a little perplexed and wants to clarify something. "They don't send me real ears." Lynch has to go. He leaves behind an empty mug, a bewildered journalist and his customary detritus: a whole bunch of unanswered questions.