Catching the Big Fish

Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity is David Lynch's account of where his ideas come from, set out in eighty-four short chapters that move between film making and the practice of transcendental meditation, which he took up in nineteen seventy-three. The title carries the argument. Ideas, Lynch writes, are like fish, and if you want to catch little fish you can stay in the shallow water, but to catch the big fish you have to go deeper. Going deeper, for him, means reaching a quieter and more expanded state of consciousness through meditation, an experience he holds to be rare in ordinary waking life and to enlarge what an artist is able to do. He describes the practice itself, the effect he believes it has had on his work, and the way film ideas surface while he is meditating. Along the way he writes about casting, sound, working with actors, the discipline of finishing a film and the business of showing it to an audience. Asked often how the calm he describes sits beside the darkness of his films, he answers that stories are about the world, and that the world contains both.

Written from the wikipedia article on the book.

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