Should you trust David Lynch with your children?
This section of the site is addressed to parents of school-age children. My children are out of school but it hasn't been that long. It will never be too long for me not to be able to share what you feel towards your children. You love them and want all the best for them. If the David Lynch Foundation is offering to do wonderful things at your child's school then it will be made to sound extremely attractive. However, while it may be attractive on the outside, under the covers a very real risk to your child's psychological health has been raised.
David Lynch is a successful and much admired film and television director. He is also an ardent proponent of Transcendental Meditation. He has established the David Lynch Foundation For Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace. If you read the web site then you'll see that the goals of the foundation are quite noble and quite grand.
As the parent of a school-age child, however, you only need to know three things about him:
- He wants your child to learn TM.
- He'll pay for it.
- He's wants to do this within the authority and moral auspices of your child's school.
The man has wonderful intentions. I know this because so did I when I was a TMer. He believes very deeply that TM will do wonderful things for your children.
And he has research to "prove" it. And lots of celebrity endorsements. And endorsements from educators. The problem is that none of those celebrities and educators know what is behind the facade of the Transcendental Meditation organization. They only know what they've been told.
So when the DLF pitches their proposal to your school's principal, they don't tell the principal everything. And when the principal calls a parent's meeting and lets them pitch it directly to the parents, the DLF folks don't tell you everything either.
You're the parent, so you be the judge: does Lynch have a stable view of reality?
Before continuing, I want to give you an idea of how very very far Lynch has fallen down the TM rabbit hole. First read this "Time Magazine" article. Then watch this video.
What's happening in the video is that Lynch is lending his prestige to support the "Raja of Germany" at a news conference held to promote the building of a "Tower of Invincibility" in Germany. The mere building of such a tower will make Germany literally invincible against its enemies! Lynch believes this! Furthermore he wants your children to believe it too! And some of them eventually will!
There's more to the invincibility thing though. In order to achieve invincibility the Tower must be staffed with "yogic flyers"! David Lynch believes that the people in this video are literally physically levitating! (While the music is a bit whimsical that video is not a joke - those guys do think that they are actually levitating!) Your kids will find out about levitation in the TM Clubs. They won't be taught how to "levitate" in the clubs but they will be indoctrinated via trance and suggestion so that it is something that many of them will end up strongly wanting to learn when they get old enough.
Picture your child in that video sometime in the future! It's highly possible. Those are somebody's children, and I guarantee that these young people didn't learn in grade school like your kids will. They weren't exposed to TM trance and suggestion indoctrination until after age 18, and they still ended up there! Grade-school kids don't have much of a chance against the type of powerful indoctrination they'll be exposed to for years in school.
Yes, I said Raja, as in "King." Lynch believes that the guy in the Burger King crown and white sheets really is the Raja of Germany! He's "Raja of Germany for the Global Country of World Peace", and is therefore the spiritual leader of all of Germany!
The guy in the Burger King crown in the video is "Raja Emanuel." He is a sort of "assistant" Raja. He's "only" the Raja of Germany instead of Raja of the entire world, but he's still a "Raja."
He went to a real live "Raja Training Course" to attain this height. I'm dead serious, a course that he paid a million dollars for in order to train to be a "Raja." If you'll replay the video above you'll hear Lynch mentioning the power of the Raja Training Course to the audience. By the way, I'm sure that Emanuel Schiffgens was a fairly normal guy too before Mahesh broke his mind and turned him into the blathering robot you see in the video.
Are you with me so far? There is a chief raja, a Maharaja, the "Maharaja Adhiraj Raja Raam", "Ruler of the Global Country of World Peace"! Here he is as a proto-Raja receiving his weight in gold from Mahesh. And his coronation ceremony is here.
Poor Tony Nader was just an ordinary guy (an accomplished scientist but he still put his pants on one leg at time) until Mahesh broke his mind to the point that Nader believes all of that about himself.
Lynch believes that all of this stuff about the "Maharaja of the Global Country of World Peace" makes perfect sense and is literally true! He really thinks that Tony Nader is the supreme spiritual figure in the world! And this is what he wants your children to ultimately come to learn! And some of them will end up believing it
Would it bother you if your children became just as deluded?
Lynch doesn't just believe that these guys are literally spiritual kings. He believes in the entire TM fantasy universe. Lynch is completely unbelievably nuts! It takes nothing away from his being a great artist. And it's nothing personal, I was unbelievably nuts too. Lynch is a nice guy, I was a nice guy, it doesn't matter. Lynch is incredibly brilliant and creative, I'm pretty smart but not remotely as creative, it doesn't matter. We both put our pants on one leg at a time, we both have human psychologies, which does matter, and we were both just as helpless.
Lynch wants to teach your children to achieve the same delusional state he is in! For their own good, of course.
David Lynch knows what the total agenda of the TM organization is, but he won't say anything about it at the parent's meeting (which he may very well attend). He won't tell you that your daughter could quite easily end up as a celibate TM nun, or that your son could quite easily end up as a celibate TM monk. He won't tell you that they're very likely to end up in TM crazy-land (of course he doesn't see it as that). He probably doesn't think that crashing and burning can even happen (he's not a "full-time" TMer and probably hasn't seen it) but it does happen, and it could happen to your child.
These things won't happen to your children while they're minors, of course, but having them go down the TM rabbit hole is very likely after they have been stewed in TM juices (there will definitely be subtle but real TM religious indoctrination in these school "TM clubs") during their formative years, and they then achieve majority.
And this will happen to some of them (maybe yours) even if they are "intelligent." People think that cults prey on stupid people, but they don't. Even very high intelligence is no barrier to cult recruitment. Is your child smarter than David Lynch, for example?
Picture you child ending up with a dissociative disorder and induced psychosis as described here.
Lynch is deceiving you (for your own good of course)!
Why doesn't he want you to know the whole story? Because you "aren't ready" for the information. I've already discussed how TMers employ "mental reservations". They won't tell you everything during the introductory lectures either. A mental reservation is a form of deception. It is not deception by giving false information, it is deception by not giving all of the information. I was explicitly told in my TM "Teacher Training Course" that I should withhold information from the public that they "wouldn't understand". All TM advocates do this with the public! In particular, Lynch is doing this! But for beneficent reasons, so that people won't receive information that they "aren't ready" to understand which might cause them to miss out on the "benefits" of TM.
This deception-by-withholding is done for the good of your child! If you knew that your child could very well eventually end up as a TM monk or a TM nun, or if you knew that that your child may very well end up in a totally delusional state thinking that they are "levitating", or if you know about any of the many other things that the TM organization doesn't think you're ready for, then "you wouldn't understand." And then on the basis of your misunderstanding you might deny your child the benefits of Transcendental Meditation!
And that would be awful. Lynch wants the best for your child. He really does.
Just because Lynch is brilliant and creative it doesn't mean that he's not also completely Looney-Tunes!
The thing about David Lynch is that all of his fabulous achievements don't change one particular thing: they don't change the fact that he is a human being with a human psychology And they don't change the fact that every human psychology comes with a standard set of weaknesses.
This means that David Lynch is as vulnerable as anyone else to falling under the sway of a cult. Again, even very high intelligence is no barrier to cult recruitment, because the psychology of cult recruitment bypasses the intellect. And artistic genius actually makes one more vulnerable because of the fantastic imagination that comes with it.
Cults just love intelligent and creative people. This is because they are just as easily recruited as anyone else, and once recruited they make fantastic tools!
Lynch has completely lost himself, literally, in TM. And in his obvious innate love and compassion for his fellow human beings, once he conceived of a TM crusade then he ran brilliantly with it.
But he's only human, folks. Don't trust your child's happiness to his judgment. He wants your child to end up just like him.
Some facts
- The DLF tried to get into a school in San Rafael, California. Unfortunately for them one of the school's parents, Gina Catena, was a former fully-involved TMer who knew everything found in this web site and more. Here's her letter to the School District. Even after that the principal and school district wanted to continue with the program! However having gotten wind of this the DLF withdrew their offer . I can only think it's because Gina is very well known in the TMer community and knows where the bodies are buried, and the DLF knew they were in for some bad publicity.
- They will tell you that TM is a "simple natural relaxation technique." That's all they say about what your children will learn. This is "mental reservation again", i.e. a deception. The TM technique is never taught alone, it is only ever taught combined with instruction in TM-the-religion.
- This isn't the first time that TMers have tried to insinuate themselves into public schools. They tried it in the 70's. What Mahesh did was to recast TM religious doctrine in the guise of a "science", which he dubbed the "Science of Creative Intelligence." All of the dogma was still there, it was just enrobed in pseudoscientific babble. Since many people seem to think that anything that sounds like science is science, a lot of people fell for the "SCI" approach. However, the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey found that SCI is religious doctrine. Your kids will be learning the exact same doctrine.
- The DLF will have already preemptively prepared the principal and the school district with defenses against your objections! The principal knows that you are coming, and has been prepped. You will have already (without knowing exactly who you will turn out to be yet) been cast as "ignorant" of what TM really is. And you will have been cast as a bit of a religious fanatic if you have religious convictions (TMers don't like the First Amendment much). In the art of rhetoric this strategy is called poisoning the well. It will allow the principal and school district to rationalize dismissing you out of hand without really considering the merits of your arguments. Remember, the principal and the school district have already put themselves out on a limb for this and they are very likely to fight you, as was the experience in San Rafael. When the parent meeting was called there the establishment of a "TM Club" in school was presented to the parents as a fait accompli which they were being informed of, not being consulted on! It's only because parents, including Gina, made themselves informed and then stood their ground that it was stopped. Don't be cowed. Even if the program gets ramrodded in you can still fight it.
- You will be told that the DLF is giving a "grant to the school". This sounds great, except that the grant money does not go to the school. It goes to the TM organization.
- There have been no longitudinal studies on the effect of this dissociative mediation technique on the developing psychologies of children. The few studies that have been done on children and youth consist of study samples too small to be statistically significant.
- If the DLF has your school in their sights, or if they are already there, then you are not only dealing with a highly respected and admired public figure, you are also dealing with highly polished full-time professional TMers who have dedicated their whole lives to this. They'll fight you with some very slick "mental reservation", and unless you know what they're hiding it will be hard to counter them. I'd be happy to give you advice on countering their arguments. You can also write to Gina (the San Rafael mom) And you can visit her blog " comingtolifestories.com."
