He doesn’t want to stop, even to the point of eliminating from existence all people who have any kind of genetic “defect”. He eliminates racial strife through turning everyone grey and introducing a drab sameness to the world.Įach change leads to an enhancement of Haber’s position in the world until he rises from the obscurity of his humble therapy practice to being head of a scientific empire consulted by world leaders. The dreaming moves on to end a dangerous war by uniting the world against an alien invasion. Furthermore, the consciousness of everyone living in this new world remembers only its altered history and their own experiences of loss and survival. The overpopulated world is reduced by plague to a fraction of its former burden. And under Haber’s guidance, Orr brings about cataclysmic change. While Orr is hoping that the psychologist will help him stop dreaming, Haber uses his machine to ensure that he will keep on changing the world. CHUANG TSE : XXIII The Lathe of Heaven, Kindle edition, page 26 Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven. To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those whom heaven helps we call the sons of heaven. The contrast is captured in this Taoist chapter heading quotation: All under the pretext of making the world a better place. Unlike Orr, he is never satisfied with what is, yet never wants to stop the change unleashed by Orr’s dreaming under his direction because he uses it to accumulate his own power. George Orr is content to be and to do, yet his therapist turns out to be someone vacant at his core who uses words and his skills of hypnosis and a strange machine called the Augmentor to force change upon the world. It’s the drugs that lead him to seek Haber’s help. He is intensely afraid of the effect of his dreaming and tries to stop it with drugs. He accepts being as it is, yet his dreams can vastly alter the whole context in which he lives.
He is repeatedly described as simple or normal or finely balanced on all the scales of psychological measurement. He certainly doesn’t want to change the world through his unique power. This dream logic may be hard to follow, but I think these elements of Orr’s dreaming foreshadow the earthshaking and life changing scale of what his mind can do.
And now, now the currents mislead and the waves betray, breaking their endless circle, to leap up in loud foam against rock and air, breaking… What will the creature made all of seadrift do on the dry sand of daylight what will the mind do, each morning, waking?” The Lathe of Heaven, Kindle edition, page 1 The shelves of gravel and the cliffs of rock break from water baldly into air, that dry, terrible outerspace of radiance and instability, where there is no support for life.
0 kommentar(er)
