Peace and bliss, from the man who brought you Wild at Heart: David Lynch speaks at NYU's Next Reel Film Festival (Photo: STV)

As promised, David Lynch dropped by NYU's Next Reel International Film Festival last night to contribute a few helpful pointers converging transcendental meditation with the creative practice of filmmaking. The Cantor Film Center welcomed a standing-room-only audience for the first of Lynch's two lectures (the crowd waiting for the second queued down East 8th Street and around the block onto Sixth Avenue), and I have to tell you: For the first time in my career, I was kind of starstruck.

I mean, forgive me and everything, but we are talking about 20 years of adulation and the guy is standing a few feet away—resplendent in his classic mock-FBI black suit and tie, tilting onto the podium as he wrung ideas from whatever miracle was happening behind his closed eyes. Seeing David Lynch speak—even for a few minutes—is like a religious experience in itself, if only for the way you can kind of see his brain work in the machine of his shaking right hand, an excess of spirituality or intellect or just plain nerves or whatever springing into the open. The point is that you cannot really know and do not necessarily want to, and the scene reminds you of David Foster Wallace's classic summation of Lynch's power (in reference to Blue Velvet): "It brought home to us—via images, the medium we were suckled on and most credulous of—that the very most important artistic communications took place at a level that not only wasn't intellectual but wasn't even fully conscious."

That point encapsulizes the phenomena about which Lynch spoke last night, and which may have crossed the line into hippy-dippy new-age mysticism if you did not know any better—but why distrust the man now? A few excerpts:

LYNCH ON MEDITATION: "It's physical, emotional, mental and spiritual happiness. And it's so beautiful. I wish everyone could have this experience of bliss. What they say is that if you have a lot of things you're thinking about, you meditate, and then many, many times when you come out solutions will swim in. It happened to me when I had the chance to turn Mulholland Drive into a feature. The day or day after I got the go-ahead to make it into a feature, I had zero idea how I was going to do it. And I was meditating and the whole thing rolled in. That doesn't always happen, but when it did, it was a beautiful feeling."

LYNCH ON MEDITATION AND DIRECTING: He keeps meditation out of it, especially when working with actors. "Some people I work with are meditators, and some aren't. When I am directing an actor, I'm trying to get them to tune in to the idea. And that's a process of rehearsal—talking through rehearsal until it gets closer and closer and it's there."

LYNCH ON MEDITATION AND WRITING: "Creativity is sorta like problem solving. And you just see more and more of a way to go in a blissful world rather than a world with a dark cloud on you. And the thing about meditation is that you don't become like everybody else. You become more and more you. You just love things more, and you just have more energy and you just enjoy the doing more. And for me, I think the ideas flow more."

LYNCH ON FISHING: When the ideas "swim in," cast your line. "The deeper that line can go, the bigger the fish. And there are a lot of things going on in the surface, but there's so much going on down below. And so many realms, and you can get down in there deeper when that consciousness—that mind—starts expanding."

To this moment, however, I still cannot reconcile the chain-smoking, coffee-guzzling Lynch archetype with the chill guy I saw last night who has meditated his way through 32 years of filmmaking. But the next time I see him, rest assured I will be able to shake off the unfiltered awe and get my own questions answered. Or you can ask for me if you want to drop $75 to check him out tonight at the Peninsula Hotel.