The first episode of Season Two of Twin Peaks finds FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper lying on his back in a pool of blood on the floor of his hotel room. He can’t move, but he can talk, and, since his tape recorder is voice-activated, he talks about what it’s like to be shot. He says that all things considered, being shot is not as bad as he always thought it would be, “as long as you can keep the fear from your mind. I guess you can say that for most anything in life: it’s not so bad, as long as you can keep the fear from your mind.”

I’ve always loved this series, and I was happy to finally pick up the second and final season on DVD. Twin Peaks certainly has its flaws, most noticeably its often repellent characterization of women, but it also has some rare virtues, found most clearly in agent Cooper’s struggles with a demon named Bob.

Cooper is an FBI agent like no other. He’s brave and brilliant and sublimely compassionate. He comes to Twin Peaks to solve the vicious rape and murder of a troubled teenager named Laura Palmer. He learns that she was killed by her own father, Leland Palmer. Leland acted under the influence of Bob, a possessing spirit from the Black Lodge, a terrifyingly inscrutable otherworld that exists in the eternal dreamtime of our collective unconscious. Bob embodies patriarchal lust and cruelty, and he passes from one person to another like an infection spread through violence and sexual exploitation. Once Leland is apprehended, Bob flees his host, but not before restoring all of Leland’s memories. Recalling the full measure of his crimes against his daughter, crimes that included not only her murder but also years of sexual abuse, Leland smashes his head against the door of his cell, fatally wounding himself. Most television dramas would indulge in vengeful schadenfreude at this point, but Twin Peaks takes a different track. As Leland dies, Cooper cradles him and, using imagery from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, gently gives him guidance on how to leave his life and return to the light of his essential being. Cooper isn’t just an agent of the government; he’s also a mystic bordering on sainthood.

David Lynch, the creator of the series, uses the FBI—the “Feds”—as stand-ins for the Divine. FBI Director Gordon Cole, a man who’s nearly deaf and who can’t speak a word without shouting, takes the place of God, while his agents are flawed angels striving to restore love to a world imperilled by violence and suffering. In Twin Peaks’ cosmology, the Black Lodge plays the role of Hell: its doors are opened by fear, and fear traps people’s souls inside it, letting Bob take control of their bodies and their minds.

As long as Cooper keeps his fear at bay, he has a chance of navigating the labyrinth of secrets surrounding the Black Lodge, and of stopping Bob before he kills again. Tragically, in the last episode of the series, Cooper, having entered the Lodge in search of his kidnapped beloved, succumbs to his fears. He loses his ability to understand the logic of the Lodge, and, in his panic and confusion, Bob captures his soul.

The series is only superficially about Cooper’s battle with Bob; on a deeper level, it’s an exploration of the relationship between fear and clarity. Cooper’s courage and kindness, his extraordinary capacity for love, come from his preternatural clarity, his ability to see patterns where others behold only bedlam. As long as his clarity remains intact, he can respond to the worst horrors decisively and compassionately. Inside the Black Lodge, Cooper needs to keep his clarity in order to rescue his beloved, thwart his enemy, and retain his soul. Once fear enters his mind, he loses his clarity, giving cruelty the chance it needs to claim him as its own.

The Black Lodge has its opposite number in the White Lodge, a spiritual realm whose doors are opened by love. It seems initially that viewers will never get to see the White Lodge, but its identity is hinted at by the patterns on the floor of the Black Lodge. Depending on how you look at it, the pattern is either one of thick black lines on a white background or thick white lines on a black background. While Cooper’s beloved is dragged into the Black Lodge in a state of terror, it’s Cooper’s love for her that lets him follow her inside, and not all of the spirits he encounters there are malevolent. It seems likely that the Black Lodge co-exists with the White Lodge, that indeed they’re the exact same place: it’s the attitude of those who journey within that determines which expression of the Lodge they encounter. The Lodge, of course, simply reflects the world we inhabit, in all its depths of matter and mind, in all its dangers and dysphoria, in all its infinitely complicated strangeness. The more clarity we have about the world, the more we can love within it, and the stronger we become. The more we’re afraid of it, the more we serve cruelty’s interests rather than our own.

The Lodge we perceive depends on which part of our brains we’re relying on. The amygdala, which processes raw emotions like fear and rage, is, in evolutionary terms, a very primitive part of the brain. The neocortex, or higher brain, is a more recent evolutionary development. This is the house of clarity, the White Lodge, while the amygdala is the Black. The more activated the amygdala becomes, the less influence the neocortex has over our actions. Unfortunately, while it takes only 12 milliseconds for the thalamus to process sensory input and signal the amygdala, it takes the higher brain 30 to 40 milliseconds to process sensory input. This might sound like an infinitesimal difference, but in neurological terms it’s enough to ensure that the amygdala will always mount the first response to incoming stimuli, and that the neocortex can only challenge that response after the fact. If our amygdala has been overly sensitized by repeated bursts of fear, it becomes ever-more difficult for the neocortex to maintain sufficient influence over our neurological functioning. Perhaps the true goal of all our spiritual practices is to soothe the amygdala and to stimulate the neocortex.

As our world becomes more chaotic—or, more accurately, as the chaos of the world becomes more obvious—our clarity, and with it our capacity for love, will be sorely tested. Our global demand for energy will soon far exceed our supply, while climate destabilization and the pollution and over-harvesting of our natural resources will produce ever more ruinous catastrophes. Subjected to unending ecological and energy crises, our economies may implode. Political struggles will likely become more desperate, as will conflicts among states. The doors to the Black Lodge are opening, Bob is roaring loud enough to deafen the nations, and I have to remind myself again and again, “It’s not so bad, as long as you can keep the fear from your mind.”