David Lynch, who has made a life, and living, of offering, quite irresistibly, his eccentricity and nightmares to the rest of us, is an unlikely guru of bliss. So it’s a bit Lynchian (is there a greater accolade for an artist than the right to claim a common adjective derived from his name?) to see one of Hollywood’s greatest surrealists as an apostle of absolute happiness through transcendental meditation. But that’s precisely the hat Lynch wore when he landed in Bulgaria on November 9. He arrived in good company, including: Donavan Leitch, the legendary Scottish singer, poet, guitarist and composer of the 1960s; Dr Bevan Morris, president of Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa; Dr John Hegglin, a world-renowned quantum physicist; and Dr Alarik Arenander, director of the Brain Research Institute in Iowa. They were here for the groundbreaking ceremony of the School for Invincibility in Bulgaria, an educational institution that, along with the regular curriculum, teaches techniques that “address individual and societal stress and develop the full intellectual and creative potential of students”.

There was a time when the word “harmony” would make Lynch puke and he’s the first to admit it. “When I heard ‘meditation’, I thought it was a total waste of time,” he told the audience in the packed Lumiere cinema last Friday. “Anyone sitting with their eyes closed is wasting their time, I thought. And I wanted to work.”

But here was Mr Lynch, resident of a studio in the American Film Institute, a 55-room mansion in the fanciest part of Beverly Hills with access to all the equipment that strikes his fancy, thinking that that should be enough for him to be the happiest person in the world. Except he wasn’t. That’s when the adage “Happiness lies within” first rang true. In 1973, Lynch discovered meditation, which, he says, allowed him to quiet his inner demons and unplugged his creativity like nothing before. He claims to not have a missed a day of meditation since.

Transcendental Meditation is a trademarked mental technique introduced by Maharishi in 1958. According to it, a practitioner, by repeating a private mantra throughout two 20-minute sessions a day, can arrive at a state of “restful alertness” and, theoretically, tap into a “unified field” of energy.

So if the state of bliss is a jumping board for utter creativity, does this mean we have to bid goodbye to the notion of the suffering artist genius? Yes.

“Suffering is just a way to get chicks,” Lynch said. “Girls fall for artists who are a little sad, a little melancholy. Artists need not suffer. The less suffering there is, the more creativity there is.”

To think of Lynch as a spokesperson of anything might seem like a stretch, but he has, indeed taken the message to the masses. His autobiography-cum-self-help book, “Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity” (Tarcher/Penguin), was released this past winter and a few months later its Bulgarian translation hit the local market. In 2005, he founded the David Lynch Foundation, financing transcendental meditation scholarships. There are about 1000 Transcendental Meditation centres worldwide and the course costs about $2500.

There are obviously those who’d like to hear more. People from the audience asked questions about the relationship between Transcendental Meditation, lucid dreams and, say, religion. But, it seemed, most were there to ask questions of the man behind Elephant Man (1980), Blue Velvet (1986), Wild at Heart (1990) and Mulholland Dr. (2001), most notably; Dune (1985), sadly; Inland Empire (2006), lately; and the TV series Twin Peaks (1990-91), mostly. (When Twin Peaks ran on Bulgarian TV in the 1990s, it had a firm grip on the entire nation’s imagination, earning a cult following.)

Asked about favourite movies of his, Lynch erred on the side of safety. “Films are like children,” he said. “Imagine them all lined up with their shiny shoes, and someone says ‘Which is your favourite?’ The safest answer is I love them all.”

It may be the safest, but it’s not necessarily true. Lynch-lovers who’ve had a hard time swallowing Dune (“Yeah, Dune sure is the runt of the Lynch litter but there are still aspects of it that I really love, even for all its cockeyed, club-footed awkwardness,” one fan said on imdb.com) would be relieved to know that so had the director himself. “Dune is a huge sadness in my life,” he said. “Not the film I wanted to make. I was not working in freedom. I tell filmmakers, make sure you always have the final cut. If they don’t give you that, say ‘Thank you very much’ and walk away.”

That’s about as revealing as Lynch would like to be about his movies. He repeatedly refused to discuss the intended effect of his choices, symbols and demons, despite some questions that included a shot-by-shot break-down of particular scenes, only to end with a hopeful, “What did it mean?”

“I can’t tell you that,” Lynch would say, adding that he’s said what he wanted to, and the end result is his movies. What you make out of them is up to you. “In our days, as soon as someone finishes a film, they want to start talking about it,” he said. “Why walk the way back to words, when you’ve put it on film?”

Still, one hour spent with Lynch certainly makes one feel she knows the filmmaker better than one-and-a-half hours spent watching the documentary by the same name, screened earlier the same day, and as part of Kinomania 2007. More an homage than a documentary, the film, compiled of more than two years of footage, is something like a footnote to the director’s film Inland Empire. It reveals few solid facts about its subject, despite the seemingly enviable access and trusting relationship the filmmaker, who goes by the pseudonym Blackandwhite, had with Lynch. The documentary does capture the production process of Inland Empire, and on several occasions Lynch admits to not being sure what he’s doing (that seems to be a comfortable work style for him), which might soothe those who felt the same when watching the film. When Inland Empire played in Bulgaria this spring, as part of the Sofia International Film Festival, it was greeted by a packed Hall 1 of the National Palace of Culture (NDK), but only a handful of people stayed through the end. A very fine handful of people, though.