Brian Kerr

David Lynch and Dr. John “Batshit” Hagelin made an appearance at the Power Center last Sunday as part of five-campus speaking tour / sales pitch for the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace entitled “Consciousness, Creativity and the Brain.”

David Lynch we all know and love, but Dr. John “Batshit” Hagelin perhaps merits introduction. He was the Natural Law party’s presidential candidate in 1992, 1996, and 2000; with the shuttering of the Natural Law party, he endorsed Kucinich in last year’s race. He did somewhat significant academic work in physics, which in the reality-based community is nullified by his subsequent reception of an Ig Nobel prize for “achievements that cannot or should not be reproduced.” (Hagelin earned his prize for research demonstrating that transcendental meditation reduced the rate of violent crime in Washington, DC.) He is also an administrator at Maharishi University of Management in Iowa, an outfit every bit as sketchy as it sounds. More recently, Hagelin was one of the subjects in sham documentary fuckup What the Bleep Do We (K)now?, which was outed by readers of Roger Ebert’s newspaper column as a opaque sales pitch for and by the Ramtha School of Enlightenment.

We only attended a portion of the event, but it was fun while it lasted. The event was disingenuously presented as a triumphal production of the U-M Program in Creativity and Consciousness Studies, with no mention made of it being merely one stop on the canned Lynch / Hagelin tour.

The portion of the event we attended involved Lynch fielding audience questions — perhaps half about his films and other creative work and half about transcendental meditation — and then entirely disregarding the questions by delivering non-specific statements about transcendental meditation. This was massively entertaining. After that, Hagelin began his Brother Justin Crowe imitation: a loopy conflation of terms from natural science with the amorphous rhetorical strategies of his style of transcendental meditation. Regretfully, I cannot report on the further proceedings, as we ejected our golf-ball sized consciousnesses from the auditorium at this time.

All this said, it is interesting that the transcendental meditation movement — for something apparently devoted to openness and tranquility — demonstrates such a remarkable lack of transparency. I grant that the sort of connections listed above are embarrassing to worldly types and that my personal history makes me undeniably too skeptical of “spiritual” movements, especially those involving massive amounts of capital being redistributed in opaque fashion. As Dracula so succinctly put it, “perhaps the same could be said of all religions!” Perhaps so indeed, but this does make it difficult to keep an open mind and consider the possibilities of an unfamiliar approach.