Jᴀᴄᴜʀᴜᴛᴜ - Tʜᴇ Cᴀsᴛ Oᴜᴛ

Demerzel wrote:..yet his own personal plans for humanity would not be accepted by general humanity at any single point of time, even though they are ultimately for the best.

Freakzilla wrote:Especially since no one knows what they really were.

Freakzilla wrote:Especially since no one knows what they really were.

Idaho316 wrote:So I was reading GEoD the other day and I had a really crazy thought. This is conjecture on my part, but what if Leto was simply Herbert's metaphor for the human condition? Leto's "pearls of awareness" fit in eerily with his already expored idea of ancestral memories, in which Herbert suggests that we all have the memoreis of our ancestors n each and evryone of our cells. The human body does pass on certain genes when we procreate, so those supposed ancestral memories could be termed "pearls of awareness"

Freakzilla wrote:

Demerzel wrote:..yet his own personal plans for humanity would not be accepted by general humanity at any single point of time, even though they are ultimately for the best.

Especially since no one knows what they really were.

Freakzilla wrote:Know how the Holtzmann engines work?

WM: I have said this to my classes that, in many ways as satisfying as “Dune” is, I find it unsatisfying because there are so many unanswered questions; you don’t tie up the loose ends of, say, Paul’s sister, unless you read…what is it?.. a “Huntress of a Thousand Worlds” (Laughter)…that marvellous little…little footnote of Princess Alia. But… or several other things. The whole question of the Spacing Guild itself and how it got to be the way it was is handled very…you know…
FH: Well, let’s…let’s examine something, as far as fiction in general is concerned…
WM: All right.
FH: Now there are other reasons why stories are remembered, and I’m talking about story in the classic sense of the knights who goes from castle to castle to earn his meal.
WM: All right.
FH: Entertainment…
WM: Sure.
FH: The stories that are remembered are the ones that strike sparks from your mind, one way or another. It’s like a grinding wheel. They touch you and sparks fly.
WM: Would this be something like the Miller’s tale of Chaucer or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, if you please?
FH: Yes, indeed.
WM: Or, well, we could adduce thousands of other examples up to, say, Treasure Island or what you will. There’s sparks there.
FH: OK.
WM: I understand your term.
FH: Now we all have stories that we go on with after we finish reading them. As children, we can remember playing Treasure Island…
WM: Or playing Tom Sawyer…
FH: Or Tom Sawyer…any of these. We remember playing these. The story stayed with us…the characters and their conflicts, their joys, their play all stayed with us.
WM: And it enkindled sparks in our own imagination, so that we were then active in creative play.
FH: That’s exactly right! We went on and told the story ourself…
WM: Yes.
FH: Now, I deliberately did this in “Dune” for that purpose. I want the person to go on and construct for himself all of these marvellous flights of fantasy and imagination. I want him to…you see, you haven’t had the Spacing Guild explained completely…just enough so that you know its existence. Now with lots of people, they’ve got to complete this.
WM: Yes.
FH: So they build it up in their own minds. Now this is right out of the story, though, you see…
WM: Yes. Or the whole…
FH: The sparks have flown.

Thunder wrote:

Idaho316 wrote:the epic vision struggle between Paul/Preacher and Leto II, which in my opinion, is the pinnacle of the entire Dune story.

harqalada wrote:I've been thinking how Leto II is a kind of ekstasis (something like an out-of-body experience, or a unity of something which exists OUTSIDE that something). He's a sort of summation of human potential; he actualizes that potential by being a particular "person" (sort of) at a particular time (sort of), fulfilling humanity by gathering all of it up into one force and using that force to transform himself, i.e., humanity.

Thunder wrote:

Idaho316 wrote:the epic vision struggle between Paul/Preacher and Leto II, which in my opinion, is the pinnacle of the entire Dune story.

Can you go more into this? Does Paul have a strict plan that could be put into opposition to the Golden Path, or is it more that he refuses the only options he can see and thus plays a kind of desperate waiting game? He's "trapped" because he only reacts to his visions, rather than choosing one and forcing it on the world?

I mean, Leto regards his situation as inflicted upon himself by Paul, specifically because his father was afraid to do what needed to be done, right?

Related to this, has anyone gotten the impression that one of the main way Dune prescience works is by actually determining the future and not merely predicting it?

Don't some Leto or Paul quotes (or some aphorisms at the beginnings of chapters) suggest this?

And does this suggest that Leto still actively controls events even after his death - if the "pearls" of himself in the sandworms descended from him still predict in some fashion, then they also still determine? They literally dream everyone else's reality (goes back to Leto as ekstasis - he is the dreamer and humanity is the dream)?

Freakzilla wrote:
The 'prescient trap' of Paul's comes from the fact that each time he used prescience to make a decision, the number of future possibilities was reduced until finally he was left with only one which he could not deviate from, for one, because he was blind and two, because the result would be devestating.

Paul didn't see it as a necessity, only as a way out of the trap and considered that option too terrible.

No, Leto desired a universe of surprises.

harqalada wrote:

Freakzilla wrote:
The 'prescient trap' of Paul's comes from the fact that each time he used prescience to make a decision, the number of future possibilities was reduced until finally he was left with only one which he could not deviate from, for one, because he was blind and two, because the result would be devestating.

Paul didn't see it as a necessity, only as a way out of the trap and considered that option too terrible.

What's the relationship between this path/trap and the Golden Path? Why doesn't Leto fall into it - is it just that he's a more powerful Kwisatz Haderach? Can there be KHs of varying "strength"?

No, Leto desired a universe of surprises.

Well, he could still have that. 1500 years isn't a particularly long period in his accounting. I think Odrade hypothesizes at the end of Heretics that Leto's plan included the secret reign of his worms for 1500 years, which transitions (finally) into the BG taking active responsibility for the Golden Path/humanity with the destruction of Rakis and all but one worm. The same events bring the Sisterhood to maturity and end (for real this time) Leto's tyranny.

harqalada wrote:

Freakzilla wrote:
The 'prescient trap' of Paul's comes from the fact that each time he used prescience to make a decision, the number of future possibilities was reduced until finally he was left with only one which he could not deviate from, for one, because he was blind and two, because the result would be devestating.

Paul didn't see it as a necessity, only as a way out of the trap and considered that option too terrible.

What's the relationship between this path/trap and the Golden Path? Why doesn't Leto fall into it - is it just that he's a more powerful Kwisatz Haderach? Can there be KHs of varying "strength"?

chuck_boris wrote:I like to think about it this way: leto II tried to save humanity from stagnation. his goal was The Scattering - diversity beyond anyone's grasp. Paul compared prescience to the Heisenberg effect: just by observing the future, one could alter it. and ultimately, seeing one future path blocked you on that path(because future is as much as a cause to the present as it is the other way around), as people around here have said before. one big part of leto's plan was to create an entire generation of invisible humans, therefore making prescience useless. infinite diversity -> unpredictable future -> survival.

think about the dinosaurs: life prevailed after the cataclysm exactly because it was so diverse. whatever scale a disaster might have, there will always be some creatures fit to live in the new conditions.

this is what leto wanted! humanity was doomed by it's own lack of variance. given the variance the future becomes invisible, therefore unable to affect the present.