THINK ON IT David Lynch gets his bliss on BY IAN DONNIS

It made for a, well, Lynchian scene when David Lynch, the force behind such dark works as Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, touted the power of transcendental meditation (TM) to a packed Brown University audience on Sunday, October 2, clad in a rumpled black-and-white suit-and-tie ensemble while three associates, including John Hagelin, a Harvard-trained quantum physicist, were turned out in understated beige. The auteur, who recently created the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace (www.davidlynchfoundation.org), faced a few tough questions — including one about the merits of ontologically privileging transcendentalism over other states of consciousness — but mostly charmed the crowd with his humor, Midwestern twang, and enthusiasm for TM.

Lynch spoke with the Phoenix by telephone a few days earlier.

Where do you get your best ideas?

Well, they can come at any you moment, any place, anytime. I’ve found that ideas hit me when sometimes I least expect them, but you can sit down and focus on a thing and the focus seems to work to sometimes bring in new ideas

How did you become interested in TM?

I started meditating in 1973 . . . True happiness lies within, and that makes me think we’re all kind of like detectives. We all kind of look at the world and feel there’s something more going on that meets the eye, and this thing within, I wondered where the within was, and if there was a within, how would you get there? And then it stuck me that mediation was the place to go within.

How has TM influenced your interest in the subconscious?

When you experience the intellectual knowledge of this, it’s not the same. It’s the experience of this deepest level — there are all kinds of things between the surface and that level, but that’s the level you want to experience and unfold. That’s the level of bliss, creativity, intelligence, pure consciousness, universal love — it’s the home of total knowledge. It’s the same field that total creation emerges from.

Where did you get the idea for Blue Velvet?

I would picture red lips, a blue belt, and a green lawn at night . . . and then I got the idea of an ear in a field, and this would sort of be a ticket into another world, and one thing led to another.

How would you describe the broad potential impact of stress-reducing meditation?

World peace . . . We could have peace within a year, if you know of anyone who has even $1 billion [to promote TM]. [Lynch says various tests, including one in Washington, DC, have shown that mass use of TM reduces crime and violence.] The police even admitted it was a fantastic crime-fighting tool, and trips to the hospital went down. But it has to be now on a permanent basis. That’s how come I’m out on the [national] tour.