Amy's Robot

David Lynch hearts Sexy Sadie

Since the day I found out that Giovanni Ribisi was a Scientologist, I should have known it was only a matter of time before more of my favorite famous people started publicly embracing embarrassing cultish celebrity religions. Today in Page Six, David Lynch discusses his love of transcendental meditation and his devotion to John Lennon's old friend the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

And much like Doug Henning before him (whose plans for a TM theme park called Veda Land would have cost $1.5 billion,) Lynch says he hopes to open a number of TM schools, and will raise $7 billion to run them through the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace.

I've loved David Lynch for a long time, particularly his reported frequent use of phrases like "okey dokey" and "I'll be ding-danged" while making great and unsettling movies about all the dark sick stuff of life. So reading a passage like this in the New York Post... well, I hardly know what to think: "Despite 'hating speaking in public,' Lynch, 59, says he decided 'to stop being quiet' about his passion for the 47-year-old Hindu chanting technique after observing the sad state of education in U.S. schools. Today's students 'are even more stressed out. Their schools are hellholes. They're getting pathetic educations. They're not going forward with full decks of cards.' [OK, true enough, but just wait. -Amy]

"Students who meditate will start shining like a bright, shiny penny, and their anxieties will go away. By diving within, they will attain a field of pure consciousness, pure bliss, creativity, intelligence, dynamic peace. You enliven the field, and every day it gets better. Negativity recedes.'"

OK, I like doing some yoga on a Sunday afternoon after a particularly toxic Saturday night, but DAVID LYNCH? The man who put white makeup on a weirdly beautiful Dean Stockwell's face and guided him in mincing around with a lamp lip-synching "In Dreams", a perverse image that will haunt me forever?

Pure consciousness and DYNAMIC PEACE?! For crying out loud.

As a side note, the unifying element of celebrity religious/mystical institutions such as TM, Scientology, and Kabbalah seems to be that they are all unbelievably expensive.

categories: Celebrities, Movies, Religion
posted by amy at 9:42 AM | #