“To let understanding stop at what it cannot understand is a high attainment. Those who cannot do this will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven.”
Chuang Tzu
“I love this quotation. That’s essentially what happened to poor Dr. Haber. He is destroyed on the Lathe of Heaven. He’s taken on too much. You could call it hubris.”
Ursula Le Guin
Lathe of Heaven is a book about morality, power, and the tension between taking action versus stepping back and letting things run their course. This tension affects all of us, whether dealing with problems in our immediate life, problems in our communities, or problems at the level of our species.
The choice to intervene (or not) is embodied in two characters:
First we have George Orr – an average citizen. George has a peculiar power: his dreams literally change the world, even when he doesn’t want them to. For example, in one scene, George is manipulated to dream about fixing overpopulation. After the dream, millions of people are missing from the planet, and everyone’s memory is altered to believe a plague occurred. This power terrifies George – he doesn’t want it – he drugs himself and intentionally stays awake to avoid dreaming.
Second we have Dr. William Haber, a psychiatrist and sleep researcher, who is assigned to help George. When Dr. Haber sees George’s power however, rather than help, he uses him. Dr. Haber sees “man’s very purpose on earth—to do things, change things, run things, make a better world”. He is frustrated watching George squander this power, and works to extract it so it can be used outside of George’s mind.
George and Dr. Haber live in a time when there are several concurrent problems facing society: overpopulation, climate stress, resource scarcity, and geopolitical tension.
Good Intentions Gone Wrong
Each time Dr. Haber uses George’s dreams to fix societal problems, something goes awry.
To remedy overpopulation and resource scarcity, George’s dream creates a plague that wipes away most of the population. Society is more comfortable, but millions of lives have been lost.
To remedy racism, George’s dream turns everyone’s skin a shade of grey. There are no racial tensions, but diversity is lost.
To remedy geopolitical conflict and create world peace, George’s dream creates a hostile alien species on the moon. Humans work together, but only because a common adversary threatens their existence.
The catch with “dream power” is that while it respects Dr. Haber’s wishes, it achieves them in strange and unpredictable ways that create new problems in the process. Dr. Haber blames George’s dream power for these failures, but really, they expose how his overly simplistic intentions towards complex problems backfire spectacularly. The actual fault was his overconfidence – his blindness to his own fallibility and limitations. This culminated when Dr. Haber finally created his own dream device and turned the world into a hellscape – fires, lifelessness, and chaos.
Ironically in the final scene, it was George who took action, by shutting off Haber’s device, and restoring some stability to the world. “I did something. The only thing I have ever done. I pressed a button. It took the entire willpower, the accumulated strength of my entire existence, to press one damned OFF button.”
To Act or Not?
When confronted with problems – do we act, or not?
Haber poses a snakebite scenario to George:
“You’re alone in the jungle, in the Mato Grosso, and you find a native woman lying on the path, dying of snakebite. You have serum in your kit, plenty of it, enough to cure thousands of snakebites. Do you withhold it because ‘this is the way it is’—do you ‘let her be’?”
Haber is implying that when we have the power to act, of course we should!
Yet later in the book, George exposes the flaw in this overgeneralization:
“That analogy with snakebite serum was false. He was talking about one person meeting another person in pain. You have to help another person. But it’s not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you’re doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you’re right and your motives are good isn’t enough. You have to… be in touch. He isn’t in touch.”
Being “In Touch”
The book never explicitly says what this means, but it offers a couple clues.
It turns out the alien species wasn’t hostile, and they impart cryptic wisdom on George in key moments. When George asks the aliens if his dream power can be controlled, they struggle with words, but they say: “One swallow does not make a summer”, and “Many hands make light work”. They then offer George a Beatles vinyl with the track “A little help from my friends”.
The aliens suggest there is something inadequate about one person making decisions in isolation, or solving one problem but neglecting to understand many related ones. (One swallow). They further seem to suggest that cooperation and consensus lie at the heart of shaping the world. (Many hands, A little help).
Being TOO Passive
While a major caution in this story is against hubris, an equal caution is never acting at all.
At the start of the book, George knows his dreams are potentially dangerous, but he relinquishes control to the coercive Dr. Haber anyway. Even as Haber’s scheme continues getting progressively worse, George struggles to take a stand, and Haber’s brazen confidence minimizes George’s concerns.
This pattern is finally broken when George resists, and ultimately, shuts Haber’s control down (with a little inspiration from his friend Heather and the aliens).
Wu Wei
“Wu Wei” is a Taoist term that means “effortless action”. We might think of it as “the art of not forcing” – going with the flow and acting minimally as needed, especially when the situation invites us. Just as a sailboat leverages whatever way the wind is blowing, or a martial artist uses his opponent’s own momentum against him, or a jazz musician creates spontaneously in relationship to music happening around them.
It’s not being totally passive, nor is it being overly controlling. It is masterfully interacting with the flow of life when it feels right.
This way of living aligns with George’s eventual attitude.
A quote from Jon Kabat Zinn applies here.
“This is especially useful when you are feeling under pressure and blocked or stymied in something you want or need to do. Hard as it may seem, try not to push the river in that moment but listen carefully to it instead. What does it tell you? What is it telling you to do? If nothing, then just breathe, let things be as they are, let go into patience, continue listening. If the river tells you something, then do it, but do it mindfully. Then pause, wait patiently, listen again.”
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Reflection
When navigating the river of life, a little contemplation about its currents, prior to action, goes a long way. This applies to our actions towards personal circumstances, and further, to our collective actions toward collective circumstances.
Contemplation is both a solo and team effort.
This book was read and discussed as a group, and this summary is a reflection of that discussion. Big thanks to everyone who participated. To join these discussions, see here.
Discussion
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The Lathe of Heaven
byu/JesseNof1 inSelfInvestigation