LIKE LYNCH, COOP delights, wholeheartedly, in the odd. Like Lynch, he believes in the power of dreams and intuition. He marvels at the mysteries of the natural world, and he's fascinated, lovingly, with human beings and what makes them tick. As such, Twin Peaks can be argued to be a meditation on life, death, good, evil, and identity as seen through Lynch and Cooper's shared vision.
Also like Lynch, Coop is a meditator, as is confirmed in episode #28. (He reports to his assistant Diane that he's been meditating in lieu of sleep, which has not been coming easily what with the goings-on in Twin Peaks; what's not said is whether or not he has ongoing meditation practice.) So, he shares with his (co-)creator an active interest in how he can better perceive Reality by first looking closely at his own mind. More important, though: Agent Cooper seems to be a fine Dharma-friend to his colleagues at the Sheriff's Department. Whether any of them know it, or care, or not.
Unashamed of his intellectual and spiritual sides, it's not long before Cooper's got the entire Department not just tolerating his ways, but playing happily along. In an early episode, he gathers them in the woods for an experiment. Employing a blackboard that he's dragged into the great outdoors, he gives the TPSD crew a summary of his admiration for His Holiness the Dalai Lama, as well as a quick Tibetan History lesson. Then, he asks them to indulge his beliefs about "deductive technique, Tibetan method, instinct, and luck" with a session of absolutely unorthodox, dream-informed mind-storming meant to sort all the wheat from the chaff in the mystery of Laura Palmer's murder.
Though initially skeptical, his colleagues warm to Coop's unusual ways; they suspend all they know -- or think they know -- and instead trust and affirm their new partner-in-crimefighting. In a following scene, we even see Lucy Moran, the supposedly ditzy Department receptionist, reading a massive hardcover book marked, simply, Tibet.
Now, Dale Cooper never declares himself to be "a Buddhist." But that too is of no matter.
What matters is the way he connects with and inspires the people around him; the way he lives every moment as truly and deeply as he knows how.
He lives in exactly this way even when his methods have clearly failed him.
At one point in the series (I'm doing my best to exclude any spoilers here!), Coop is, at least temporarily, stripped of his FBI badge and gun in response to what the Bureau sees as a cavalier and dangerous attitude. But the former Special Agent is nonplused. While he feels that his dressing-down is the result of Washington's short-sighted- and closed-minded-ness, he goes with the flow even as bureaucratic justice goes unserved. He's come to love Twin Peaks -- the people, the town, the unanswered questions that seem to reproduce like dandelions -- and so he takes his ex-agent status as an opportunity, forgoing the G-man outfit that he wears so nattily for more region-appropriate duds. Cooper, it seems, is just as comfortable in a classic flannel shirt as he is in his old standard-issue black-jacket, white-shirt, black-necktie outfit. He evens starts investigating local real-estate offerings, thinking that he might just have found his home. Right where he is.
And what is it that could fill the gap in his life now that his career -- to which he has been so dedicated -- might be going the way of Twin Peaks' endangered pine weasel? Coop, unashamed and calmly excited as ever, states his new priority himself:
"Seeing beyond fear, and looking at the world with love."
DHARMA-BURGER ARCHIVE 
