Possession by the Muse 2: Breaking the Chains of Digital Enslavement, David Lynch and the Infinite Freedom Won by Renewed Focus, Time Management and Energy Conservation.

An examination of David Lynch's fantastic book: Catching the Big FIsh: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity and how you can apply it to your own creative life.

Dear reader,

Today I am possessed by a Muse who wishes for me to tell you more about myself and impart what I have learned in the last year, which she is confident could help many of you out there. The purpose of this essay series is to promote "Substantive Positivity," which I define as long-form content that aims to promote positive habits and strategies we can employ to achieve our creative goals by examining various materials that renowned creatives have shared with the public throughout history.

These materials would be books, articles, and essays that focus on artists reflecting on their own creative process and the thinking and strategies they have used to great success throughout the years. I hope they will be of service to anyone intent on improving their own understanding of their creative process and using them as an aid in achieving their own goals and ambitions.

Whether you read this on the date of publication or some time in the distant future, whoever you are, dear reader, I truly want nothing more than to help you squeeze every last drop of lifeblood from the human experience, as I am now learning to do every day. I hope that I may spare you the time that for me is gone forever by giving you advice that would have saved me countless hours and years of frustration.

Time is a finite resource, and the digital prison you spend your time in is stealing that most valuable resource from you.

Let's back up a bit. Why am I so obsessed with how you spend your time or how I spend mine? What business is it of mine how you spend your resources?

"Time is a finite and precious resource."

Hmm yeah, sure looks good on the page, doesn't it? It is a nice, albeit overused, platitude we employ to explain quite a deadly serious dilemma and reality we must all reckon with: our own mortality.

We spend our entire lives running away from thoughts about that, but I must be the one to tell you, dear reader, that we can't run away from it forever.

Whether it is being invited to a funeral you didn't expect to attend and reflecting on the departed, seeing your kids grow older each year and realizing how fast your life is passing by with every lost tooth or inch of height or pound of weight gained at the yearly checkup—or perhaps even having a brush with death yourself.

The latter is what happened to me.

In January of last year, I was involved in an accident that could have been the end for me. Below is an image of one of the vehicles involved in the crash. As you can tell, it could have been fatal. Was I drunk? No. Was I speeding far beyond the limit?

No. I was simply distracted. I wasn't on my phone or anything like that—I was just disconnected from my own life. Just going through the motions of my everyday existence.

I hadn't had a substantial creative impulse or thought in at least five years. I would have died working a job that meant nothing to me, leaving behind only a long list of regrets of what could have been, what I could have accomplished. Miraculously, no one was seriously injured in the crash, but I will say that for me personally, that almost made it worse.

I felt immense guilt having survived the accident and wondered why I had been spared and seemingly faced no consequences for the damage I had done.

After months of seeking understanding and failing to make sense of it all, I had come to a crossroads of sorts. How should I move forward? What should I do with my second shot at this game of life?

How much, dear reader, would you regret if you died tomorrow?

What would you change about your life if you had that knowledge? What would you do with that precious time you had left?

As many of you know, we recently lost David Lynch, who in my estimation, was the greatest director of his generation and an idol and personal hero of mine.

Apart from anyone else, I felt he was the true artist in an industry that was fast becoming completely devoid of those types of artists. Coincidentally, about a week before he died, I was listening to a podcast about Twin Peaks, as it is my favorite television show—not knowing that soon, David would be gone from this earth.

As we all do when a hero of ours dies—or just someone we have always been curious or even ambivalent about—we tend to go on a quest of sorts in regard to their work, interviews, and quotes regarding their life philosophy, creative process, and so on.

When David died, I began that quest to understand him more since his work had moved me so strongly. What could he teach me about my own creativity? It turns out, quite a lot.

David has spoken at length about his creative process. I admit, I had read or watched an interview here and there but was not ready for what he had to teach me at that time and quickly dismissed it as "new age woo" and was sure he had more practical advice I could find that would allow me to logically understand creativity. However, now—almost a year after the accident—my path finally had aligned perfectly with being able to receive his wisdom.

In the introduction of his book on his lifelong reflection on the creative process, “Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity”, he states this about his conception of creativity and the role meditation plays in it:

"Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper."

He goes on to explain what "deeper" means in this context:

"Everything, anything that is a thing, comes up from the deepest level. Modern physics calls that level the Unified Field."

He then explains how you can access this deepest level:

"The more your consciousness—your awareness—is expanded, the deeper you go toward this source, and the bigger the fish you can catch."

In case you're thinking none of this sounds practical or sounds overly abstract and you don't understand what this has to do with Lynch's work—or like I did before, you discount it as an eccentricity divorced from his actual artistic practice—he assures us this is false when he clarifies:

"My thirty-three-year practice of the Transcendental Meditation program has been central to my work in film and painting and to all areas of my life. For me it has been the way to dive deeper in search of the big fish. In this book, I want to share some of those experiences with you."

So let's explore together, dear reader, how we can practically apply Lynch's methods to our own life and enhance our own creative practice. But I will warn you beforehand, in order to get the greatest amount of value out of those methods, it's going to require maintaining an open mind, relinquishing the negativity in our lives, suspending our modern reliance on irony and cynicism, and an ability to disconnect from the daily distractions we are surrounded by—particularly the digital ones.

Lynch recounts his struggles with his depression and anger and how it negatively affected his marriage before and during his first experiences with meditation:

"When I started meditating, I was filled with anxieties and fears. I felt a sense of depression and anger."

He then explains with a palpable sense of regret:

"I often took out this anger on my first wife. After I had been meditating for about two weeks, she came to me and said, “What’s going on?” I was quiet for a moment. But finally I said, “What do you mean?” And she said, “This anger, where did it go?” And I hadn’t even realized that it had lifted."

This is an especially potent observation which illuminates for us what we may be unaware of in our everyday experience in the modern world. We can walk around affected by the negativity that we are inundated with in an almost subconscious way—carrying it with us when we walk, speak, and interact with others, and they feel that through interacting with us even if we ourselves are unaware of it. We are so mired in the negative through outrage culture, sensationalized media reporting, partisan political punditry, among numerous others.

Often these sources are designed to appeal to our anger for engagement and monetary reasons as a business strategy, but did you ever stop to wonder if the exchange was equal or even close to equal?

Have you gained more than they are taking from you when you engage with that type of content? What if those digital distractions are robbing us of our creative gifts by creating stress, obscuring our mental clarity, and draining our energy—and we are completely unaware of it? In my opinion, your energy would be better utilized elsewhere to achieve your ambitions.

We lose much more than we realize by allowing a constant stream of negativity in our daily lives, and at the center of that is our ability to focus—which is, in my opinion, the foundation from which we can turbo-charge our creativity and productivity.

We only have so many hours, days, or years as artists or other creative personalities to realize our dreams and ambitions. As I mentioned earlier, time is a finite resource, but so too are our mental and physical energy reserves.

Anger and a hyperfocus on negativity drain us of both, and too many of us in the modern world expend both way too readily without considering what else we lose when those are stolen from us.

Lynch warns us of the dangers of negativity using a metaphor he called "the Suffocating Rubber Clown Suit of Negativity." He goes on to explain by writing:

"I call that depression and anger the Suffocating Rubber Clown Suit of Negativity. It’s suffocating, and that rubber stinks. But once you start meditating and diving within, the clown suit starts to dissolve. You finally realize how putrid was the stink when it starts to go. Then, when it dissolves, you have freedom."

He then explains how negative emotions can constrict and limit our creative potential:

"Anger and depression and sorrow are beautiful things in a story, but they’re like poison to the filmmaker or artist. They’re like a vise grip on creativity. If you’re in that grip, you can hardly get out of bed, much less experience the flow of creativity and ideas."

And then Lynch gets to the heart of the matter when he remarks:

"You must have clarity to create. You have to be able to catch ideas."

"Clarity"

If you want the freedom to create, you need clarity.

Clarity can only be achieved when you make a concerted effort to remove distractions from your life during the period when you want to be creative.

Let's rewind a bit and talk about a more earthly concern we can all relate to rather than metaphors or poetic ways of describing the process of gaining more creative ideas. There are many concerns within modern life which make it especially difficult to remain creatively inspired consistently.

Those concerns are: time, energy, and the ability to focus.

Let's start with time.

How much time do you think you need to learn a new skill, continue working on your creative project, actually completing the book you bought with the intent of finishing it?

You may believe you need five or more hours a day on one specific task, but in actuality, you could be more productive and get more done in 30 minutes a day where you show up consistently than five hours on one day on the weekend or your designated day off. Numerous studies have shown that consistent practice every day for 30 or so minutes beats trying to cram for a few hours on one day.

According to this source (https://www.demandsage.com/smartphone-usage-statistics/), we spend on average six hours on our digital distractions per day.

You have at the very least 30 minutes a day of free time. Use them thoughtfully and you will be rewarded for your consistency. I can say at least for myself, I have made consistent progress on many different creative goals since implementing consistent practice for a short period of time every day.

A list of some of the things I'm currently working on: uploading writing on here for you, organizing a film club for my local community, learning piano, putting together a few music projects, attempting to read a few books a month—and I still am able to spend time with family and friends as well despite these other commitments.

The way to do that is to maximize the small windows of time you have available instead of waiting for that illusory large block of time we often tell ourselves we need to get a worthy amount completed. But as you and I both know, we often do nothing at all and definitely don't make consistent progress on our projects. You would be amazed at the amount of projects you can finish with no sacrifice in the way of quality when you are more deliberate with those small windows of time.

Where I draw that time from is not spending an inordinate amount of time and energy on social media platforms any more—particularly ones with an infinite scroll feature. When you ditch the digital distractions, you will be amazed at how much you can accomplish in the time you would have spent serving someone else's interest rather than your own. At the very least, you could gain back six hours of uninterrupted free time—but if you're more diligent, even more than that.

Now let's talk about energy. Energy is a finite resource just as time is. You only have so much of it per day, be that physical or mental. Mental energy is what I want to talk about with you, dear reader. If you spend your time and your attention on distraction, you will not have the necessary time or attention to catch the ideas.

Lynch says as much in the chapter "The Artist Life":

"You need at least 5 hours. But if you know that you’ve got to be somewhere in half an hour, there’s no way you can achieve that. So the art life means a freedom to have time for the good things to happen. There’s not always a lot of time for other things."

Now Lynch here is speaking about time in terms he understood—work responsibilities, life responsibilities, and his art. But if we tilt our heads a little and view it from another angle, we can see that in our own lives that five hours he's talking about is mostly spent on our screens, as mentioned earlier, and we can get those hours back and spend them working toward our goals with a little willpower and renewed sense of focus and purpose.

Finally, the most important resource—and really the foundation of our ability to keep our creative container full—is the need for focus and the role of meditation. Or if there is too much baggage attached to that word—simply allowing yourself uninterrupted time of sitting in silence to let ideas get in without having to compete with everything else stealing that focus away from them.

You don't need much time to do it either.

Lynch states:

"I have never missed a meditation in thirty-three years. I meditate once in the morning and again in the afternoon, for about twenty minutes each time. Then I go about the business of my day."

Again, we always have at least 20 minutes. I have gained so much creative momentum by simply shutting off the digital distractions and regaining my time, energy, and focus to catch those ideas swimming around inside of each and every one of us.

My recommendations for you, dear reader, to see these benefits in your own life and to regain your freedom and help you reach your creative potential are as follows:

1. Dramatically reduce your screen time.

I know this makes me sound like an old man yelling at a cloud, but seriously, just do it. No matter what you think, billions of dollars are invested in designing applications and social media sites to override your better judgment and keep you wasting those precious 5 to 6 hours. You don't have to become a Luddite necessarily, but you do need to dramatically cut down to 1–2 hours maximum per day at first, ideally less. There are apps that you can download which force a limit on your most-used digital distractions. Identify those and set your limits accordingly. Wouldn't you rather be in control of your time, energy, and focus for your goals rather than give it to some app that gives you nothing of substance in return?

2. Allow yourself at the very least 20–30 minutes of uninterrupted, complete silence per day—and I do mean complete silence.

No background music, no podcasts, just your own thoughts. You will be surprised at what bubbles up to the surface when you actually allow yourself to hear what's hiding within you.

Your own thoughts will entertain you by coming up with ideas. Silence is an invaluable tool to be able to access those ideas. Lynch reminds us of the importance of focus by stating:

"You need the ability to focus on things as a group. You need to concentrate on one thing at a time and not have a million different things distracting you. This capacity grows when people start meditating and diving within. There’s an expression: “Where the attention is, that becomes lively.”

If you focus your attention on your goals and express your creativity instead of digital distractions, those elements will naturally become stronger and livelier.

3. Relinquish as much negativity from your life as possible.

There is nothing romantic about being the tragic artist. Those people succeed despite their condition—not because of it.

Lynch continues to reiterate this most important truth when he says:

"Some artists believe that anger, depression, or these negative things give them an edge. They think they need to hold on to that anger and fear so they can put it in their work. And they don’t like the idea of getting happy—it makes them want to puke. They think it would make them lose their edge or their power.

But you will not lose your edge if you meditate. You will not lose your creativity. And you will not lose your power...

If you’re an artist, you’ve got to know about anger without being restricted by it. In order to create, you’ve got to have energy; you’ve got to have clarity. You’ve got to be able to catch ideas. You’ve got to be strong enough to fight unbelievable pressure and stress in this world."

This is what I mean by saying that you shouldn't let the trap of outrage culture combat your ability to achieve clarity and retain the energy you need to be creative.

I believe David Lynch was one of the most misunderstood filmmakers of all time. David Lynch was a positive person and deeply spiritual, and when you read his book, you will clearly see that. Even his surreal masterpiece Eraserhead was inspired by his spiritual practice. He reveals that when he says:

"Eraserhead is my most spiritual movie. No one understands when I say that, but it is. *Eraserhead* was growing in a certain way, and I didn’t know what it meant. I was looking for a key to unlock what these sequences were saying. Of course, I understood some of it; but I didn’t know the thing that just pulled it all together. And it was a struggle. So I got out my Bible and I started reading. And one day, I read a sentence. And I closed the Bible, because that was it; that was it. And then I saw the thing as a whole. And it fulfilled this vision for me, 100 percent."

Who would have thought? Spiritual practice was absolutely central to David's work, and through exploring him after his recent passing, I can say that definitively. Whatever you personally believe, that is ultimately up to you, but we can all learn a lot about stoking our creative fires through his methods. Many other renowned artists have spoken about meditation or silence—and even boredom—as being essential in kick-starting their creative process.

I have found that to be true in my own case, and I hope this article helps you, dear reader, in a similar way to consider trying it in your own life. I highly recommend purchasing Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity yourself. It is a wonderful and invaluable insight into David's life philosophy and the key to understanding his work and creative process. Behind all of his work was a warmth, light, and beauty that he wished to share, and he will be deeply missed now that he is gone.

Rest in peace David, and thank you for all of the wonderful works of art and creative wisdom you have shared with the world that has consistently inspired me and has now revitalized my own creative practice. Explaining just how much you have done so, is something I am incapable of putting into words but this was my best attempt.

I know you are now a part of that sea of bliss you wanted us all to experience.

Thank you for guiding me to that sea in this lifetime.

I hope this helps you dear reader in your quest to find that sea of bliss in your own lifetime.

Thank you for reading.

Your writer,

—DJMP

If you like what you've read here, please consider subscribing as I am motivated to make long-form posts about topics I feel deserve wider conservation and could provide meaningful discourse for a restoration of positive pro-intellectual culture. This is the second in a series of posts that will be known as the "Possession by the Muse" series. Which will be essays or long-form critiques that attempt to drum up conversation or controversy that will ignite in others the passion that served as the inspiration that ignited my desire to publish these pieces. This series will ideally be inspired by what I am currently reading for my own creative inspiration and I hope will serve as valuable insight and inspiration for you as well.