Sunday Sermon #5: Going Fishing with David Lynch

Meditation, creativity and David Lynch, Spiritual Freak

Sunday Sermons are short essays on spirituality, delivered to your inbox every first Sunday of the month.

I was where I already assumed peace and serenity could be found: in someone’s living room in a posh Victorian terraced house in North London. It was early 2016. The sky was bright outside but the shutters had been drawn for maximum secrecy. I was surrounded by a dozen people of varying ages on sofas and chairs. We all faced a teacher—an older woman—who had drawn a childlike diagram of our expedition on a whiteboard. There was the surface, like water, and we would hopefully go (by way of treasure map dashes on the board) all the way down to the bottom, where a circle was drawn. It seemed like a long way to travel, just in our minds. I wasn’t sure whether I’d been there before. 

That year, I decided to dig deep into empty pockets to pay for Transcendental Meditation classes. I’d wanted to do them since university, which was when I got into Twin Peaks, as is the rite of passage for mentally suffering teenagers who love twisted shit. That TV show led me down a David Lynch rabbit hole; I watched more of his work, liked and disliked different projects (one viewing of Eraserhead was enough for me) but felt most drawn to the things he said about TM. “It’s the single most important thing I do,” he told Rolling Stone in 1990. “I love the stillness it brings, and it opens up an entire world of creativity. I believe it helps me get closer to my true self.” 

It was the link he made between TM and inspiration that intrigued me the most. “The thing is that when you dive into the deep, your consciousness is free. Ideas begin to pop out, and it’s like the best fishing hole ever. Ideas are popping up and they feel so good. It’s the perfect time to catch the big fish,” he wrote in his weird little meditation book, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity. I wanted some David Lynch ideas. I’d be lying if I didn’t also share that my favourite psychic drive was in the mix: ‘maybe this next hack is going to fix the existential problem of being alive, stop the uncertainty, heal trauma, etc.’ Did I think TM was going to change my life? Absolutely. Either I would become an artiste or a better me. Throw me a cigarette and toss me a fishing rod, I was going in.

Once we’d learned all the theory, we each had to wait for the final stage of our initiation. When it was my turn, I filed upstairs to meet the woman in a small, dimly lit room. In my memory, it looks like a church in an attic, but it was probably just a bare space. She gave me a mantra and guided me through using it—first vocally, then silently in my mind. It could’ve been done without the clandestine ceremony but I get it—sometimes something has to seem magical for it to feel real. 

By saying the mantra in my mind, I experienced for the first time something that I frequently access now in different ways: momentary transcendence. This is how it felt and feels to me: I’m very aware of my heart and the space around it. The quality of time changes: it’s as though I’m moving neither forward nor backward in any linear way. It’s not that I’ve lost control, it’s that the very concept of control has disappeared. The entire sensation is like slipping through a sliding door into the next room. A lighter, warmer room I’d rather be in. Then as soon as I’m aware of being aware of this happening, the experience starts to dissipate. I try to turn my thoughts off but I’m already thinking: god that was nice, can I make it happen again, I hope it happens again. And it’s too late, game over. 

If I was anywhere near as serious as David Lynch, I’d have continued with the TM regime: 20 minutes of meditation, twice a day. Even in the afterglow of transcendence, when I was told that was the order of things, I remember my response was: that much, for the rest of my life? You’ve got to be kidding me. It’s quite funny to me now because that no longer seems much to dedicate to a daily spiritual practice. But I didn’t appreciate the rigidity of a menu like that a decade ago. My logic was sound enough: how can something that’s supposed to be effortless feel like so much effort? 

It only took me years of failing to do TM to realise that this specific practice is not necessary to catch ideas in Lynch’s way. When he says he’s “fishing” for ideas by doing TM, he really is just creating stillness and receptivity, waiting for the right moment when the idea surfaces. You don’t need to meditate in some formal sense—that’s just what he was into, what worked for him once so he kept doing it, genius behaviour—you can daydream, hoover your flat, take a shower, go for a walk. Meditation is all about brainwaves: when you meditate your active brain state ideally goes into a passive brain state where you’re more receptive to ideas rather than seeking them out. You can genuinely switch brain states by doing any of the above. 

What TM does is train you in three qualities essential for more fishing in your life, however it happens: discipline, ritual and quiet. Once you have those three elements of your life down, I’m convinced you can do everything he’s ever said about finding ideas. You need to show up and do it when you can’t be bothered, enough times that something good happens. You want to make it easy to slip into that routine, with a sense of purpose. And you need the quiet to be able to listen to yourself, the fish, God, whatever. 

When Lynch died last month—after being evacuated from his home in LA as the fires raged, a scene so Lynchian he may as well have co-created his own exit—people reflected either on the impact of his work or how he had introduced them to Transcendental Meditation. Imagine people eulogizing you after your death, and your legacy was literally to bring others closer to both art and spirit.

If you’ve never meditated or explored the spiritual side of life, it might seem confusing that someone so in tune with a higher consciousness created such unsettling, sometimes disturbing work. But David Lynch was undeniably a spiritual freak—the most “normal” alien, having unearthed so much of his own humanity and shared it with the rest of us.

His TV shows and films are scary, shadowy, and off-putting. To me, though, they feel like one long meditation session. Both meditation and dreaming are ways of connecting with the subconscious mind, which is where our hidden fears, suppressed desires, and unresolved trauma reside. These elements often present themselves symbolically. Lynch is a master of symbols, and his films are a kaleidoscope of them—colours, telephones, dance floors, roads, and fire. He’s said repeatedly that films are humanity's attempt to tap into the unconscious, which is filled with fear, love, confusion, beauty, and horror.

Big fish—big ideas—don’t come in one go, he wrote. Ideas usually come in fragments. You get one and then another bit and then another bit, until you’ve got a movie, or a book, or an album. So it tracks that at its most basic and important level his work involves viewers on a fishing expedition, to bring us on that trip with him down, down into his subconscious. 

By doing this, Lynch instinctively revealed the uncanny coexistence of good and evil, light and dark, in everything he creates—without passing judgment on either side. When Laura Palmer is murdered in Twin Peaks—a character who embodies both angelic and darker qualities—we go on to see how these dualities are woven into both society and the individual’s DNA. There’s something equally alluring and horrifying about the strangely-paced idyllic Americana of Twin Peaks when the dark desires and corruption of its inhabitants simmer just beneath the surface. I want to visit and buy the fridge magnet and I want to forget it forever. 

Like most great artists, Lynch just said the same thing again and again and again for a lifetime, much like a mantra.

The key to understanding his work, like meditation, is persistence and receptivity. Whether you find it too creepy or not depends on how much you’re willing to look. The longer you observe, and the less you try to force it into making sense, the more you start to feel how everything is stitched together. It has to be that way—because life, because the brain. As Lynch said in the Guardian in 2013, “There’s light and dark in the world and in every person. I don’t think people want to look into the dark parts, and that’s what makes the work feel dark. But the truth is in that darkness, as well as the light.” 

The older Lynch got, the more surreal his work became. And given how closely his creativity seems linked to his access to the subconscious through TM, I really attribute that growing strangeness to his years of meditation practice. I’m very familiar with the TM process nearly ten years on from learning it but for the past few weeks I’ve been wondering how deep he managed to go; what did it feel like to be down there in the subterranean space? 

In an interview in 2014, he was asked for clarification on this fishing business: How does an idea come? “It comes like…on a TV in your mind,” Lynch said and laughed. He probably laughed because it’s hilarious that it’s that easy. You sit back and let the television show you what it wants to. Brains aren’t so different from TV and films: they’re both mediums stuck in the past. Just as the nostalgic brain tortures us all day with images of what happened, when we go to watch a show or a movie, we see flashing images that have been and will never be again. It’s why cinema can feel so intimate, so real.

There’s so much to say about David Lynch and at the same time, nothing to say at all when he’s best taken at face value. Like most great artists, he just said the same thing again and again and again for a lifetime, much like a mantra. If you keep saying it enough times with the right amount of pressure, it’ll take you somewhere else.

Meditations 

Do your ideas come in fragments or whole? 

Do you meditate for ideas without realising you’re doing it? 

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Congratulations on surviving January. Celebrate by buying yourself something on my gift list. I’m still getting through Chris Corsini’s tarot forecast and astrology calendar for 2025 and loving it - can’t recommend it enough. <3

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