Lathe of Heaven (LeGuin)

I have become a fan of Ursula LeGuin.  She is deep, philosophical, profound.  This morning while I drank my chai tea I picked up the Dalai Lama's treatise on The Heart Sutra.  I learned to chant the Heart Sutra in English and Japanese at a Zen Center.  I must have chanted it along with the pounding rhythmic drumming 100's of times.  There were phrases that really sank deeply.  Like a koan, it is not an intellectual understanding one is reaching for -or  "grasps" - but one that runs through to being's core, resonating with truth, needing no words, holding no doubt.  So I repeated phrases, and felt through the words for the resonating truth.  Many years separated the period when I chanted and this time when I simply read about the deeper teachings within the Heart Sutra.  The piece I read this morning was about understanding the concept of "no Self" - the impermanence of Self.  The phrase that tripped me the most years ago was "no eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind - no sound, smell, taste, touch, phenomena."  I attempted to "grasp" how there were none of these things and yet they were there - the opposite of the "no" existed simultaneously.  As I read about the concept of the absolute Self and the relative Self that is the puzzle itself, I remembered how I puzzled and attempted to "grasp" the experience of Orr (the dreamer) in Lathe of Heaven.  Whether LeGuin meant in any way to write a story that told of the experience of letting go of self/Self she did - for me at this time of a deep personal struggle.  A story that epitomizes the experience of "'waking up" to a new place of being, literally, and accepting what you find.  And a new personality as well.  For Orr, existing simultaneously for him was the knowledge that he (Orr) himself was responsible, unintentionally most of time time, for the change coming into true reality.  Something within his brain caused it.  So he was not helpless or truly just a victim of himself.  He was a part of the whole process.  He always remembered the old even as he knew the "new!"  His acceptance of what was - or the just thisness as the Zenies would describe it - was admirable.  Fitting quite nicely into the Dalai Lama's writings.  Interesting don't you think, to find resonating similarity between a science fiction story and the Heart Sutra?!