What especially pleases me is to see the interwoven themes, the fuguelike relationships of images that exactly replay the way Dune took shape. As in an Escher lithograph, I involved myself with recurrent themes that turn into paradox. The central paradox concerns the human vision of time. What about Paul’s gift of prescience-the Presbyterian fixation? For the Delphic Oracle to perform, it must tangle itself in a web of predestination. Yet predestination negates surprises and, in fact, sets up a mathematically enclosed universe whose limits are always inconsistent, always encountering the unprovable. It’s like a koan, a Zen mind breaker. It’s like the Cretan Epimenides saying, “All Cretans are liars.”

Here’s something that may interest you:
http://www.moongadget.com/origins/dune.html
has lots of good stuff on Herbert, life and influences. Scroll way down & you’ll find a heading on
TAOISM
where you’ll find the comment:
Dune alludes to Taoism throughout. The very first line is “A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.” Compare with this fragment of chapter 63 of the Tao-te-ching, Consider Beginnings, as translated by Ursula LeGuin:
Study the hard while it’s easy.
Do big things while they’re small.
The hardest jobs in the world start out easy,
the great affairs of the world start small.

So the wise soul,
by never dealing with great things,
gets great things done.

there’s more, but this should give you the general idea.
thanks for the handedness info as well. I agree.

bett

loved dune since I was in high school. it was one of the things that got me interested in MA training, dealing with and approaching fear.

another writer that puts lots of taoist stuff into her fiction is ursa K leGuinn.

I particularly enjoy her series, the wizard of earthsea.

thanks for doing these posts, and I hope maui is treating you well.
it’s cold here in phx…

derek, i also saw a number of connections with taoism and meditation. without spoiling the book, a passage that i found interesting:

“there is in each of us an ancient force that takes and an ancient force that gives. a man finds little difficulty facing that place within himself where the taking force dwells, but it’s almost impossible for him to see into the giving force without changing into something other than man. for a woman, the situation is reversed…these things are so ancient within us…that they’re ground into each separate cell of our bodies. we’re shaped by such forces. you can say to yourself, ‘yes, i see how such a thing may be.’ but when you look inward and confront the raw force of your own life unshielded, you see your peril. you see that this could overwhelm you. the greatest peril to the giver is the force that takes. the greatest peril to the taker is the force that gives. it’s as easy to be overwhelmed by giving as by taking.” the main character then says he’s at the “fulcrum” where he cannot give without taking and cannot take within giving.

a parallel between yin/yang, the balance between the two, and dissolving the ego perhaps?