David Lynch – John Hagelin
Tour Inspires
Thousands of College Students
Brings Message of Consciousness-Based Education
and World Peace to East Coast Campuses
More than 8,000 students attended the David Lynch – John Hagelin “Consciousness, Creativity and the Brain” East Coast college campus tour this past week, with 5,000 signing up to receive additional information about the Transcendental Meditation program and the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace (davidlynchfoundation.com).
Award-winning film director David Lynch, Institute director Dr. John Hagelin, and brain researcher Dr. Fred Travis spoke to capacity crowds on every campus they visited, with hundreds of students turned away at each event due to lack of seating. Students responded with overwhelming enthusiasm to the tour’s message of enhancing creativity and creating lasting world peace through the Transcendental Meditation program.
The East Coast tour also produced three new DVDs that will be available soon for online viewing and for purchase (see below for more information, or click here).
The tour also attracted extensive media coverage—not only from prominent national newspapers such as the Ann Arbor News, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Hartford Courant, the Boston Globe, and the Providence Journal but also from a wide array of student newspapers in all cities on the tour. (For a listing of college-newspaper coverage, click here. For sample articles, click here.)
In November, after a month-long break, the “Consciousness, Creativity and the Brain” tour will resume on West Coast campuses and then continue on throughout the nation. (For an introduction to the East Coast tour, click here.)
Below are summaries and photos documenting the phenomenal success of the East Coast tour:
October 2, Brown University—More than 650 students packed Solomon Hall tonight at Brown University in Providence for the last stop on the David Lynch “Consciousness, Creativity and the Brain” tour. An additional 185 found seating in an overflow hall with video feed, but 350 more were turned away at the door.
New DVD: All the people who showed up were given a new two-hour DVD featuring an engaging interview with David Lynch about meditation, consciousness, and filmmaking, followed by Dr. John Hagelin’s powerful “Creating Peace” presentation given in Miami at the prestigious Prophets Conference in June 2005. This DVD, which has been distributed throughout the week to all students attending the tour presentations, will be available for general purchase very soon.
Saturday, October 1: The “Consciousness, Creativity and the Brain” tour arrived in Boston tonight for a 7:30 p.m. presentation at the Majestic Theater. On the previous Wednesday, when free tickets for the talk were to be distributed from the Majestic Theatre box office, the ticket line had already wrapped around the block an hour before the box office opened, and all 1,200 available seats were gone within two hours. Students from Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brandeis, Boston University, Boston College, and Emerson College (the host institution for tonight’s event) attended the presentation and responded very enthusiastically to all the speakers.
New DVD: Emerson College, which owns the Majestic Theater and is renowned as one of the finest schools for communications in the nation, videotaped tonight’s entire presentation with state-of-the-art, six-camera production equipment. The college will produce a DVD of the proceedings shortly, which will be available for online viewing and for purchase.
Friday, September 30—In New Haven tonight, more than 1,200 students—a standing-room-only crowd—packed Yale University’s Battell Chapel to hear award-winning director David Lynch, Dr. John Hagelin, and Dr. Fred Travis speak on “Consciousness, Creativity and the Brain.” An additional 200 students were turned away at the door due to lack of seating. University administrators said it had been two decades since any campus event had filled the Chapel to capacity. After the talk, over 40% of the audience signed up to receive more information about the Transcendental Meditation program and the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace.
Friday, September 30—Today the prestigious Peninsula Hotel in New York City hosted the First National Brain Conference for Business, entitled “Is the Workplace Bad for Your Brain?” Leading scientists and business executives, as well as David Lynch, spoke about the practical, proven benefits of the Transcendental Meditation program for improving creativity and success in business and industry. (For more information, see businessbrain.org.)
More than 60 business leaders attended the conference—as did an impressive group of top national and international business and health media, including Time, the New York Times, the Globe and Mail (Canada’s largest newspaper), Newsday, Fortune, Money, Fast Company, Psychology Today, Self, and Agence France Presse (the international wire service for French and English language newspapers). To read the first published article about the conference, from the Edmonton Journal (Canada), click here.
Speakers at the conference included:
- Gary Kaplan, M.D., Ph.D., Associate Professor of Clinical Neurology, Hofstra University School of Medicine; formerly Associate Professor of Clinical Neurology, New York University School of Medicine
- Fred Travis, Ph.D., Director of the Center for Brain, Consciousness, and Cognition at Maharishi International University
- Andrew Newberg, M.D., Director of Clinical Nuclear Medicine, Director of NeuroPET Research, and Assistant Professor in the Department of Radiology at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania
- Jeffrey Abramson, Partner, The Tower Companies
- Arthur “Bud” Liebler, former Senior Vice President of Marketing and Communications at DaimlerChrysler; Principal at Liebler/MacDonald
- David Lynch, three-time Academy Award-nominated film director of Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire (now filming)
New DVD: The conference, sponsored by New York Professionals for a Stress-Free Workplace, was webcast to business leaders and press across the country. A DVD of the conference proceedings will be available soon for purchase.
Thursday, September 29—New York University’s Cantor Film Center hosted two presentations of the “Consciousness, Creativity and the Brain” tour tonight, with over 1,000 students in attendance. Speakers David Lynch, Dr. John Hagelin, and Dr. Fred Travis enthralled the crowd with their discussion of the relationship between consciousness, filmmaking, the unified field, and the latest findings on brain development, and more than half the audience signed up for more information.
 
Wednesday, September 28—More than 800 students—a standing-room-only crowd—jammed Harrison Auditorium at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia tonight to see David Lynch, Dr. John Hagelin, Dr. Fred Travis, and Penn brain researcher Dr. Andrew Newberg speak on “Consciousness, Creativity, and the Brain.” An additional 600 students were turned away at the door, but university officials acted quickly and ran wires from the Harrison Auditorium stage to large outdoor speakers so that the overflow crowd could sit outside on the ground and listen to the presentation.
To read The Daily Pennsylvanian’s excellent coverage of this event, please visit
www.dailypennsylvanian.com
Tuesday, September 27—Students at American University in Washington, D.C., had only two days’ notice about the David Lynch tour that arrived on campus this evening. Yet 550 students poured into Bender Arena, the campus basketball arena, to hear David Lynch, Dr. John Hagelin, and Dr. Fred Travis speak.
American University is considered to be one of the top universities in the country for training students to be government leaders and state department diplomats. This small private college will be the site of a major two-year research study on the effects of the Transcendental Meditation program for improving mental and physical health of college students. Five hundred students will learn to meditate to form the core of what will soon be a peace-creating group of 2,000 college students in the nation’s capital.
Sunday, September 25—Here’s how the Ann Arbor News (Monday, September 26, 2005) described the scene on Sunday night as David Lynch, Dr. John Hagelin, and Dr. Fred Travis took the stage at the University of Michigan to speak on “Consciousness, Creativity, and the Brain”:
Packed Crowd Hears David Lynch
Filmmaker shares zeal for Transcendental Meditation
If you arrived on time to see filmmaker David Lynch talk about Transcendental Meditation last night at the Power Center, you were already too late. The venue was packed to capacity.
Harried Power Center employees with walkie-talkies loudly stated, again and again, that there were no available seats anywhere in the building, but dozens of people nonetheless lingered at both ground floor entrances, hoping a spot would miraculously open up. (Despite earlier reports that equipment had not been set up to provide video feed of the talk, those who stayed did eventually get to hear and see most of Lynch’s presentation by way of television monitors in the lobby.)...
For the full story, click here. (PDF of full article)
More than 1,400 people attended the presentation, with another 400 people turned away because the hall was not large enough.
Students in particular were profoundly moved and inspired by the speakers. Here’s an excerpt from just one student’s email after the talk:
I attended David’s presentation last evening, and walked away in a daze.... It is now 2:54 am in the morning. I just woke up, and had a terrible realization. I had possibly just walked away from my life calling....
I had understood David and John's philosophies ever since I was a freshman in high school. The paradigms of meditation, spirituality, quantum physics, interdependence, consciousness, and practicality were core to my being as I grew up and moved to Michigan for college....
I would like to inquire if there is any way possible (of course there is!) for me to become deeply involved with the foundation. I do not wish to be a mere member or benefactor. I would like an active role and help establish and develop consciousness-based education in schools in the United States, as well as abroad. I know that I have the abilities and resources to be successful. I would genuinely appreciate if you can provide guidance to how I can become connected with your foundation.
Faculty, too, recognized the significance of Sunday night’s event:
The event last night was extremely powerful for me in many ways. Something is in the air. The world is in such a twit that folks may be beginning to look inside for emerging approaches (self-awareness>>creativity>>engagement in that order, rather than the other way around). ... Most of my adult life has been in service to the dream/scheme portrayed last evening.
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