David Lynch seeks $7bn for meditation, world peace

United States film director David Lynch said on Wednesday he is seeking to raise $7-billion to fund a giant programme of transcendental meditation which he says will foster world peace.

The Oscar-nominated movie-maker famed for dark and disturbing films including Blue Velvet, Eraserhead and Twin Peaks on Thursday will launch the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-based Education and World Peace.

The foundation’s goal is to raise money to allow meditation to be taught in schools and eventually spread across the world by practitioners, easing global stress and tensions and promoting harmony, he said in an interview.

“I want to raise seven billion dollars,” he said of the launch of the foundation that aims to propagate what Lynch says is a proven method of improving health, banishing stress and tension and reducing violence.

“People laugh about that, they have a really good time with it. But the real joke is that we don’t laugh when the US government develops a bomb for two billion dollars that only serves to kill people.

“They spend billions of dollars on military projects and people don’t bat an eyelid. That’s a pathetic, sick joke,” Lynch, who has practiced transcendental meditation for 32 years said at his high-tech Hollywood studio.

The money raised by Lynch, who is planning a tour of the United States in September and October to help raise the funds, will be used to fund meditation in schools that wish to teach it.

Lynch did not specify why such a large amount of money was needed for the programme or how he planned to raise it.

However, the 59-year-old director said, he hoped that the seven billion dollars would ultimately sit in a bank account unused earning interest that would pay for the programmes.

The teachings that Lynch, a Hollywood outsider and free-thinker who also paints and plays the guitar, bases his beliefs on are those of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who became a guru to celebrities including the Beatles.

The Netherlands-based Maharishi, who became controversial in the 1960s and 70s, developed transcendental meditation 50 years ago to develop the “full creative potential” of a person and to “promote a peaceful world”.

With a corps of 8 000 people dedicated to meditating and pumping out positive waves, peace will gradually settle on earth, Lynch explained, citing the quantum physics theory of a “unified field” as the basis of the argument.

“This is real, it works,” Lynch said of the power of meditation.

“It’s abstract, but it’s very real.” - Sapa-AFP