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" Rick Rubin, a prolific producer of very loud rock music, could pass for a holy man of almost any affiliation. A lifetime of meditation will do that. The surrealistic film director David Lynch looks more like Samuel Beckett with an ulcer. You wouldn&amp;#039;t know it, but he has also meditated for decades. A devotee of transcendental meditation, or TM, he works tirelessly, through the David Lynch Foundation, to teach the world how to take it easy. He and Rubin may be the most unlikely of spiritual messengers, but, then, there was a time when they were also unlikely, even reluctant, Angelenos. Lynch lives on a big compound in the Hollywood Hills. He is known for certain eccentricities and obsessions, like the daily weather report on his website (which essentially says the same thing every day, this being Los Angeles) and his dedication to a strong cup of organic coffee (his own David Lynch Signature Cup). He moved to L.A. in 1971, from Philadelphia, where he had gone to art school. &amp;quot;It seems like a huge sameness when you first come. It did to me,&amp;quot; says Lynch, who hails originally from another huge sameness, Montana. &amp;quot;But the more I was here, the more I discovered different areas, and each had its own feel. And some areas still felt like the Golden Age of Hollywood. I might look over and see Gary Cooper driving his Duesenberg.&amp;quot;  Lynch is a fan of routine. For example, every afternoon for seven years the director went to Bob&amp;#039;s Big Boy on Riverside Drive at 2:30 and drank a chocolate milkshake. He really likes milkshakes. But he has also meditated twice a day for 41 years, and that can only mean he enjoys TM that much more than chocolate milkshakes. Think about it. In his book Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, which is dedicated &amp;quot;To His Holiness Maharishi Mahesh Yogi,&amp;quot; the creator of TM, Lynch writes, &amp;quot;When I first heard about meditation I had zero interest in it. I wasn&amp;#039;t even curious. It sounded like a waste of time. What got me interested was the phrase &amp;#039;true happiness lies within.&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; That, plus a well-timed phone call from his sister, who told him she had been meditating for six months. So Lynch, who went on to direct the somewhat-to-very-\u00ADdisturbing films Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive and create the TV series Twin Peaks, dropped in to L.A.&amp;#039;s TM center one day in 1973 and met an instructor. &amp;quot;I liked her,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;She looked like Doris Day.&amp;quot; Lynch was led into a small room and given a mantra to repeat for 20 minutes. And then: &amp;quot;Boom! I fell into bliss\u2014pure bliss.&amp;quot; According to Lynch, most of us go through lives wearing a Suffocating Rubber Clown Suit of Negativity. Log enough meditation and that suit will &amp;quot;dissolve.&amp;quot; He started the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace in 2005 to teach the technique to &amp;quot;at-risk groups,&amp;quot; including prisoners, soldiers with posttraumatic stress disorder, Native Americans, and underserved students. Beginning in 2007, with Visitacion Valley Middle School in San Francisco, the foundation has introduced meditation programs in a number of schools around the country, four of them in Los Angeles. To emphasize the secular nature of the program, they call it Quiet Time.  Rubin\u00AD\u00AD\u2014whom Lynch connected with six or so years ago over their shared interest in TM\u2014discovered meditation in 1977, when he was 14. He had gone to the office of his Long Island pediatrician to complain about a sore neck. Another doctor might have prescribed painkillers; this one suggested meditation. &amp;quot;I remember thinking, My parents are not going to like this,&amp;quot; Rubin says. &amp;quot;But they said, &amp;#039;Well, whatever the doctor says is what we do.&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; Rubin is possibly the most influential rock producer in America. His credits include the Beastie Boys&amp;#039; Licensed to Ill, Slayer&amp;#039;s Reign in Blood, the Red Hot Chili Peppers&amp;#039; Blood Sugar Sex Magik, Johnny Cash&amp;#039;s American Recordings series, and Kanye West&amp;#039;s Yeezus\u2014loud, aggressive music that suggests heavy breathing more than mindful inhalation. But Rubin has never had a problem with experimentation, and back in 1977 he already had an open mind about meditation because it was Beatle-approved. Like the slice of avocado in a California roll, the band made something from the East palatable to the West. Maharishi-mania had been around since the Beatles went to India in 1968; that trip got the guru onto the cover of Life and on The Tonight Show. But he had been teaching TM all over the world since 1959. And not only is it still here; six years after his death, at 91, it&amp;#039;s now Oprah-approved. Rubin meditated through high school but stopped when he started college, in 1981. (Def Jam, the rap label he co-founded with Russell Simmons\u2014another avowed meditator\u2014was originally headquartered in Rubin&amp;#039;s NYU dorm room.) In 1987 he flew to Los Angeles to work on the soundtrack for the movie Less Than Zero, and, as with Lynch, it took him a while to develop a taste for the place. &amp;quot;I didn&amp;#039;t really like it,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Compared to Greenwich Village, where I had been living, L.A. was very suburban. I had come from the suburbs and moved to the city, so it felt like I was going backward\u2014like I was going home, which I didn&amp;#039;t want to do.&amp;quot;&amp;#039; Still, when his partnership with Simmons ended, Rubin brought his new company, Def American, to L.A., and he soon found himself making more favorable comparisons. &amp;quot;I went to Book Soup a lot. I liked that it was open late. And being able to have dinner and go listen to rock music was really an unusual thing, because back then the nightlife in New York was all about European dance music. On weekends the Sunset Strip would be packed with kids, and even though the outfits and music were different, it felt like the &amp;#039;60s\u2014like a youth revolution. It was exciting.&amp;quot; Rubin found a house he liked in West Hollywood. Eventually his possessions followed. He started meditating again, and this time he never stopped. He meditated with Tom Petty during the sessions for Wildflowers and with assorted Chili Peppers throughout the recording of Californication. &amp;quot;TM has trained me to be a very good listener,&amp;quot; Rubin has said. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a big part of the job.&amp;quot; Lynch and Rubin don&amp;#039;t exactly hang out\u2014they are both fairly reclusive\u2014but their passion for TM has gotten them into the same room. In 2007 and &amp;#039;09, Rubin won the Grammy for Producer of the Year in absentia. They could name him Producer of the Century and he would still probably stay home. But he showed up at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in February to accept the David Lynch Foundation&amp;#039;s Lifetime of Harmony Award. Even though he didn&amp;#039;t go near the podium. Read more of our L.A. portfolio. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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