Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity [Hardcover]

David Lynch (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 28, 2006

In this rare work of public disclosure, filmmaker David Lynch describes his personal methods of capturing and working with ideas, and the immense creative benefits he has experienced from the practice of meditation

Over the last four decades, David Lynch has created some of the best-known and widely discussed screen works of our time. This distinctive writer-director's art bears not only the mark of box-office success but also critical acclaim and cultural posterity.

Yet Lynch generally reveals little of himself, or the ideas behind his work. Now he provides a rare window into his methods as an artist and his personal working style. In Catching the Big Fish, Lynch writes candidly about the tremendous creative benefits he has gained from his thirty-two-year commitment to practicing Transcendental Meditation.

In brief chapters, Lynch describes the experience of "diving within" and "catching" ideas like fish-and then preparing them for television or movie screens, and other mediums in which Lynch works, such as photography and painting.

In the book's first section, Lynch discusses the development of his ideas-where they come from, how he grasps them, and which ones appeal to him the most. He then shares his passion for "the doing"-whether moviemaking, painting, or other creative expressions. Lynch talks specifically about how he puts his thoughts into action and how he engages with others around him. Finally, he discusses the self and the surrounding world -and how the process of "diving within" that has so deeply affected his own work can directly benefit others.

Catching the Big Fish provides unprecedented insight into Lynch's methods, as it also offers a set of practical ideas that speak to matters of personal fulfillment, increased creativity, and greater harmony with one's surroundings.

The book comes as a revelation to the legion of fans who have longed to better understand Lynch's deeply personal vision. And it is equally intriguing to anyone who grapples with questions such as: "Where do ideas come from?" and "How can I nurture creativity?

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Lynch blends biography, filmography, spiritual quotes and his philosophical perspective on the life-changing capabilities of transcendental meditation, all within two and a half hours. Having practiced meditation for three decades, director Lynch discusses how it has influenced his life and helped him to concentrate his energy. Listeners may catch glimpses of creativity and consciousness, but Lynch's rants lack cohesion and substance. Within the audiobook's short chapters, Lynch barely broaches a topic before moving onto the next, leaving listeners to question his emphasis to go "deep." The most interesting aspects arise out of his anecdotes and comments about his films, like Eraserhead and Blue Velvet. His dry rattling voice hints at the passion behind his statements, but more often comes across as insistent and almost whiny. He reminds listeners that authors do not always make the best voices for their books. However, on the sound production end, the lightly blowing wind for the quotes from the Upanishads and Sutras adds mystical air to their reading. It's unfortunate that neither his words nor his voice live up to that standard.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

From Booklist

Author David Foster Wallace once observed that, as a filmmaker, David Lynch seems to care more about getting inside the heads of his viewers than about communicating a particular message to them once he's inside. With this book, Lynch offers us a rare glimpse into his own head. A longtime practitioner of transcendental meditation, a set of meditation practices popular in the 1960s, Lynch is primarily interested in communicating to readers the powerful creative vitality that he has tapped through meditation. In 85 brief, airy chapters--many koanlike and some only a sentence or two long--Lynch discusses the techniques with which he expands his consciousness, catches ideas, and gives form to abstraction. (It's not all lofty stuff: milkshakes are, it turns out, a key vehicle for creativity.) In the process, he reveals just enough biographical information, philosophy of film, and general behind-the-scenes dirt (including the connection between Lynch's Lost Highway and O. J. Simpson)to keep the attention of those more interested in Lynch's films than in his consciousness. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Tarcher (December 28, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1585425400
• ISBN-13: 978-1585425402
• Product Dimensions: 7.2 x 7.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (87 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #111,854 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

73 of 77 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Secret to World Peace... Meditation?, December 28, 2006

By 

Adam Donaghey (Kemah, TX US) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity (Hardcover)

David Lynch's new book, "Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity" is creative, charming, brief and playful. Written in small passages that flow, despite uniquely defined ideas, and seem to jump right off the page and dance and twinkle in your mind as you continually turn the pages, Lynch takes the reader through a deeply contemplative--though subtle in description--journey into 'that which all things emerge.'

I actually acquired this for a friend of mine and when I present it to him, I'll promptly admit to reading it--in its entirety--before giving it to him. I'll tell him how Lynch touches on his films, but only chooses one or two interesting anecdotal items regarding these films and then moves on. Much the same with his life. I'll also share with him the positivity that Lynch exudes throughout and how important and real this state of mind is to him. How his whole aim is to be less and less and less restricted by anger and depression and sadness and hostility and all the other negative aspects of life.

According to Lynch, it's all because of Transcendental Meditation and consciousness-based education. Lately, he's been giving many interviews and talks and whatnot to propagate his progressive thinking with regards to the many benefits of Transcendental Mediation. His foundation--the 'David Lynch Foundation For Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace'--is dedicated to introducing and maintaining this principle to young people and educators around the world.

In one passage of the book, Lynch says that Van Gogh "would have been even more prolific and even greater if he wasn't so restricted by the things tormenting him. I don't think it was pain that made him so great--I think his painting brought him whatever happiness he had."

I suppose I'm charmed. And I now believe in world peace.

65 of 71 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Get the audiobook!, January 11, 2007

By 

Mediahound (SF Bay Area, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 50 REVIEWER)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity (Audio CD)

Get the audiobook instead of the book (either on CD if you want to own the physical CD like me, or as a download). I got the audio CD and imported it into my iPod.

The audio CD (by the way, it's 2 CDs) works much better than the book because you get to hear David Lynch talking and it's like a conversation with him. It's also unabridged so you get all the same content as the book however in my opinion, it's better than the book and is a rare opportunity to listen to David Lynch talk about many of the ideas that make him tick.

David Lynch was my hero before and now he is my idol.

60 of 72 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good insights into the mind of a creative master; somewhat marred by its apparent aim to proselytize Transcendental Meditation, January 8, 2007

By 

Nathan Andersen "film lover, philosophy profe... (Florida) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity (Hardcover)

There are some remarkable insights to be gleaned from this short treatise on the process of creation, by one of our most creative and challenging filmmakers. It is very well written, in a simple and economical style that manages to deliver much more of interest than many much larger volumes on the subject of creation. The book consists of a series of apparently disconnected (but in fact well ordered) reflections on his own life, his work as a filmmaker, his practice as a meditator, and on the larger themes of creation and of human motivation and of relation between the conscious and unconscious mind and the role of art in revealing truth. Lynch is also careful not to limit the applicability of the ideas he develops to his own field of filmmaking, but (humbly) suggests ways in which the same insights can apply to other art forms, to business, to dealings with other people, and to life in general. The central metaphor of the book, suggested by the title, is that to catch the really big fish (i.e. to discover a profound truth, create a beautiful work of art, or develop a novel and powerful new way of doing things) one must swim in the depths (i.e. find some regular and continued practice, such as meditation, whereby your mind is opened up beyond its subjective limitations, a practice that encourages thinking to transcend its dependence on the narrow perspective of common sense and prejudice we inherit). He indicates a number of ways in which he has been able to do this in his own life, primarily through meditational practice. It is a quick read, but is the kind of book that would could be browsed repeatedly, with the reward of renewed insight.

What keeps the book from its potential of being a minor short classic on the creative process is its apparent attempt to proselytize on behalf of Transcendental Meditation. Despite their own claims to being superior to other meditational practices, Transcendental Meditation (as far as I can tell) offers nothing that can't be found in a variety of other approaches that don't carry the same kind of intellectual baggage as the TM organization, don't require you to spend several hundred dollars to be trained in, or to be given an "exclusive" and "personalized" mantra. It is wonderful that Lynch's discovery of meditation in this form has facilitated his own creative process and personal contentment, and I don't begrudge his allegiance to the approach that he learned -- but it is clear that at some level this book was written as a kind of testimony to the special benefits of an approach to meditation that has taken truths handed down through centuries as an intellectual inheritance and made them into the for-profit product of a large and fairly powerful quasi-religious organization. That emphasis dimmed my enthusiasm for what is otherwise a remarkable little volume. Having said that, the book is in no way a piece of propoganda -- it merely makes appreciative reference to TM in several places, in addition to "advertising" his own foundation for the teaching of TM meditation. The book remains well worth reading, especially for fans of Lynch's work -- but I believe a slightly more general emphasis on the power of meditation and a description of the methods he finds worthwhile (without reference to a specific organization that teaches these methods and claims falsely to offer benefits found nowhere else) would have given this work something of the more timeless and abstract appeal of his films. To use the metaphor from the title, I think this could have been a bigger fish.