David Lynch on Dissolving the ‘Rubber Clown Suit of Negativity’
Corbin Black
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The apocalyptic California wildfiresmay have had a part in the departure of director David Lynch after he evacuated his home during the Sunset fire. And so he tragically left the world in a dark, surreal chain of events reminiscent of one of his films.
At 78, Lynch was living with emphysema that restricted him to living at home and conserving his oxygen.
“The already-dodgy air quality in LA has been positively apocalyptic since it suffered warring wildfires last week — and Lynch being exposed to it could well have contributed to his death, linking it in a grim way to the climate and energy crises also implicated in the deadly California fires,’ reported Futurism.
David Lynch’s Big Fish
As the wildfires still raged, Donald Trump blamed them in part on efforts to save a fish, the Delta smelt, as shared days ago. To him, the fish was “worthless.”Days later, news of Lynch’s passing on January 15, 2025, arrived, adding further injury to insult. But among the countless people who paid tribute to his astounding life were those who noted his profound way of viewing the world.
One of the stories that appeared was about a fish and Lynch’s creative process, an interesting synchronicity. To him, the creative process required going on a fishing expedition. In his 2006 autobiography and self-help guide, “Catching the Big Fish,” Lynch discussed how his lifetime of practicing Transcendental Meditation helped him catch these fishes. He practiced meditation daily since starting in the early 70s, so over 50 years!
The title, Catching the Big Fish, referred to his awareness that life-changing ideas arrive from somewhere in our deeper subconscious. In a flash, they swim into view and just as quickly disappear again. These deep-consciousness swimmers may be akin to what others call the Muses. It’s mysterious how they guide so many legendary creative people, but they do! Perhaps this is one example of why human art will never be fully replaced by AI.
Image by Corbin Black/The Cosmic Web. Feel free to share.
“Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water,” the introduction reads. “But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper,” Lynch wrote.
Writing down ideas as they come was critical for Lynch, who said otherwise, you might wake up the next day, devastated to have lost it forever.
“If you lose a great one [idea] it hurts so bad,” he said in an interview.“Money in the bank: Safety to write it down.”
Below is a video complication about David Lynch, which shows him talking about catching ideas like fish.
Video by cosmavoid:
Lynch Found Pure Bliss with Daily Meditation
Like another genius, Nikola Tesla, Lynch was inspired by ancient Vedic mystical teachings. For Tesla, a meeting with an Indian Hindu monk, Swami Vivekananda, inspired his ideas about “luminiferous ether.” After Lynch’s introduction to Transcendental Meditation in 1973 through his sister, he began experiencing states of life-transforming bliss. Eventually, he went on to meet the founder, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, in 2003.
He described the process like this for Belief.net:
“You sit comfortably, you close your eyes, and you start your mantra. And that mantra, word, thought, vibration, turns the mind within, and you start to experience subtler levels of mind, intellect, and then, there, at the source of thought you transcend, and you experience that ocean of pure consciousness—sometimes called “pure bliss consciousness” or the “absolute” or “being” or “divine being.” Pure consciousness there, at the source of thought, and the source of thought also happens to be the source of a tree, a fish, a star, a universe. It’s the source. It’s the self. In Vedic language, that pure consciousness—that ocean of pure consciousness—is called “atma,” meaning, the self, the self of us all. And when you experience this pure consciousness, you enliven it, you unfold it, and it starts to grow in the individual. So whatever consciousness you had when you start this process, now that consciousness is growing.
Image by Corbin Black/The Cosmic Web. Feel free to share. Ra via Wikipedia.
“You’re really and truly expanding your consciousness. You go beyond the field of relativity and you experience the non-relative absolute. You go beyond duality, and you experience oneness. You go beyond boundaries, and you experience the unbounded, infinite, eternal, unified field, pure bliss consciousness. And also, this field has the qualities of pure intelligence, pure creativity, pure love, pure energy, power, pure harmony, pure coherence, dynamic peace. It’s all there, and you can unfold that and grow in that.”
In the early 2000s, he founded The David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace to promote the merits of the meditation program as part of education for kids. Mainstream sites like the Guardian referred to such ideas as “beloved of hippie celebrities since the 1960s.” But in actuality, such spiritual practices, now most often called Yoga, go back to the dawn of civilization.
Interestingly, Lynch’s foundation logo is a circle within a circle, like the one that represents the Egyptian Ra, one of the early symbols of tapping into universal consciousness. In many cases, Ra was depicted as a golden circle within a circle.
“They say there’s a collective consciousness and every single thing that people think, and feel, and do feeds into this collective consciousness,” he said in his VICE interview.
In an interview with Mo Rocca, he described the result of Transcendental Meditation as “pure gold coming in from within and garbage going out.” And he humorously said the process frees the mind from the “suffocating rubber clown suit of negativity.”
Who might that image immediately make you think of as we approach January 20, 2025? (see video below)
“I call that depression and anger the Suffocating Rubber Clown Suit of Negativity. It’s suffocating, and the rubber stinks. But once you start meditating and diving within, the clown suit starts to dissolve. You finally realize how putrid was the stink when it starts to go,” he wrote.
In 2011, Lynch even released an album called Crazy Clown Time with the enigmatic stream-of-consciousness lyrics you’d expect. Describing the partiers in the video as having what they consider “fun,” Lynch said they probably wouldn’t be very high on the ladder of consciousness. They seem to be examples of people wearing rubber clown suits.
The accompanying video is about what Lynch called a familiar “American Story.” A visibly disturbed young man in a red shirt pounds his fists repeatedly while a naked woman moans for no apparent reason. Nearby, a man with a mohawk sets it ablaze only to spit on the woman in the next scene.
Viewed in 2025, these people are quite familiar in our society. Yet, consider this was done well before the rise of the MAGA cult almost as a premonition, it seems. In general, these characters could represent the lower evolved consciousness on display in a large segment of America. But in a wider scope, it applies to anyone who focuses on the ego, violence, negativity, hate, misogyny, bigotry, or base instincts.
Scenes from the video for Crazy Clown Time with a VICE interview by Noisey:
As for what to do about the clown suit, he found that meditation guided by a genuine teacher could make it dissolve away.
“You start meditating with a legitimate teacher, and that clown suit will start dissolving, and you’ll feel so good,” he explained.
As we say farewell to the one-of-a-kind artist, his words seem especially potent and relevant in the chaotic climate we find ourselves immersed in.
Video by CBS Sunday Morning about David Lynch and Transcendental Meditation:
Being a David Lynch In A World of Materialistic Mediocrity
As Lynch’s fans honored his life online, many noted that part of what was so shocking was that his films aired on network TV. Somehow, his fish swam into the mainstream despite being driven by experimental, unconventional, and non-commercial ideas. In today’s world, we face the possibility of being supplanted by AI as an oligarchy takes a firm grip on the country. Meanwhile, a corporate monolith of materialistic mediocrity abandons human rights and the planet.
David Lynch’s legacy as a film legend and visionary artist is secured because he rejected such a false paradigm. He committed to remaining true to his ideas, which he intuitively knew required nurturing and defending to fruition. Profits notwithstanding, he resisted being lured away for any reason. That kind of artistic integrity requires a higher level of consciousness, perhaps.
Even though daily meditation led him to experience an “ocean of pure love” and “pure peace,” his art reflected the darkness of the real world. He observed the characters in his films from a detached perspective without seeing them as a reflection of his deeper self. In mystical terms, it’s doing the “shadow work.”
“There are many, many dark things flowing around in this world right now, and most films reflect the world in which we live. They’re stories. Stories are always going to have conflict. They’re going to have highs and lows, and good and bad.”
Having left the material realm to swim with the fishes of deeper consciousness, we are left in a world that seems like it’s out of one of his storylines. For example, a Volkswagen van called Azul or “the Magic Bus,” was the only thing untouched when fires destroyed a Malibu community. After appearing in the news, it became a “beacon of hope” for Azul’s former owners and everyone who saw the news of it.
It seems like the the world of reality and David Lynch’s surreal films have, for the present moment, blurred.
