RIP David Lynch: Filmmaker, Meditator, 9/11 Truth-Seeker

No wonder "they" never gave him an Oscar

Ron Unz recently noted “the sharp decline in quality of the New York Times.” He might have added that we can still learn things from the Times by reading between the lines, the way Soviet-era Russians read Tass and Pravda.

That’s a good way to read today’s David Lynch obituary. The Times, like the rest of the American Establishment, views Lynch as a crazy artistic weirdo with entertainingly offbeat views—perhaps a great filmmaker, but hardly to be taken seriously in terms of getting at the most important truths about our world. The obit writer, a certain J. Hoberman, seems amused by Lynch’s “manichean” juxtaposition of extreme Capraesque innocence with equally extreme beyond-Kafkaesque suspicions of depravity. From the Establishment point of view, the fact that Lynch was a 9/11 truth-seeker seems par for the course. Of course his legendarily paranoid imagination would wonder what was crawling around beneath our perfectly-manicured American lawn.

But Lynch wasn’t just some carnival-barking visionary lunatic. His films teach us how to see. That Frank Capra innocence was no pose. Lynch once pushed back against a typically decadent Hollywood schmuck by describing himself as “Eagle Scout, Missoula, Montana.” He wasn’t being ironic. Unlike the Hollywood producer who is said to have wisecracked “I have the heart of a small boy. I keep it in a jar on my desk,” David Lynch knew how to rigorously study the world with the heart of a little boy, through the eyes of innocence. That’s how you come to see the depravity. If you allow shades of cynicism to darken your heart, even a little, you lose the ability to discern darkness from light. That’s why professional mainstream journalists, the most cynical people in the world, can’t bring themselves to see the blindingly obvious truth that the official 9/11 story is an evil psy-op.

Lynch’s method of studying the world through pure eyes with a child’s spotless heart, and reporting honestly on both the beauty and horror that he saw, was not only evidenced in his films (and presumably his paintings, though I don’t know much about those) but also in his meditation. When one meditates, one travels through peace and childlike simplicity towards a blissful state of absolute oneness. If that pure, peaceful meditative state, the Nafs al-Mutma'inna, is akin to childlike innocence, the various spiritual currents that disturb it—some intentionally—can be pictured as the bizarre and sometimes monstrous manifestations that erupt in Lynch’s films, which attempt to exorcise them by maintaining the undivided purehearted attention of the meditator/viewer with the kind of non-attachment to ego that allows divine barakah to manifest.

Lynch embraced a secularized, quintessentially American style of meditation, TM, describing his practice, and its benefits for his mental health and creativity, in Catching the Big Fish. It’s an interesting read even for we traditionalists who advocate for spiritual practices grounded in the millennial great religious traditions.

“Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji'un”: "Indeed, we belong to Allah, and indeed, to Him we return." Returning at least partway toward God via a regular path of prayer and meditation prepares us for the full journey that awaits us, and that David Lynch has now undergone, Allah yarhamuh.

-KB

Transcript of David Lynch’s Legendary 9/11 Interview

Interviewer: The theory about Marilyn Monroe is relatively small, but it is a theory of conspiracy. There also are conspiracy theories of huge proportions. And you suggested we show a part of a clip of the documentary Loose Change by Dylan Avery. And it was a film that has been watched by million viewers because you could see it through the internet. No charge. And the film sums up in a way all the theories about US government having planned the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center. But let's first watch it. What do you think? Do you think it's convincing what they tell in the film?

David Lynch: It's not so much what they say, it's the things that make you look at what you thought you saw in a different light. And those things for me that bother me is the hole in the Pentagon being too small for a plane, the lawn isn't messed up, and the government's not showing the plane hitting when many cameras photographed it.

At the World Trade Center three buildings came down like demolition. And two of them were hit by a plane but the third one they said "you want us to pull it? and they pulled it." And it looked just like the other two. Those things bother me.

In Pennsylvania the plane that went down, it was just a hole in the ground. There wasn't any wreckage. There wasn't any skid marks. There wasn't any tear in the earth.

And no one's ever really found out about that. So every place there's questions coming from this documentary. And you don't have to believe everything in the documentary to still have questions come up, and you look back and you remember what you saw and what you were told, and now you have questions.

And the event itself, did it change your life or did it change your view of...

No. Now it's just an event that has many questions and no answers. And the suggestion that the American government is behind it? That's too big for people to think about. It's too big.

What do you mean?

It's just, you know, it's like something no one wants to think about.

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