Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="vulcan_idic" data-source="post: 1718789" data-attributes="member: 19615"><p>I don't think there's neccesarily a conflict between the systems.  Anytime you begin to describe a system that encompases more dimensions than a human can directly observe simultaneously you have to fall back on metaphor in order to communicate such thoughts in a meaningful fashion and even the best metaphor breaks down at some point.  This is similar to the real world dilemma of trying to describe spacetime (by current theories) to average person.  It is generally couched in a metaphor making three dimensional space two simensional space to discribe the warping of sspace by gravitational fields and so on which, while useful, are only metaphors for something we can't directly communicate.  The D&D planes are similar, the way I see them.  The way they are described in cosmologies are merely metaphors attempting to encapsulate and communicate a reality beyond the human sphere of experience and beyond our ability to percieve directly - we only see it indirectly through its affects on other things.  Like the old story of the seven blind wise men describing an elephant (again a metaphor collapsing a more complex concept into a simpler one for the purpose of relating) each was limited to describing the portion it could observe while the whole of the elephant was outside of their ability to directly percieve it.  Thus one percieving a leg proclaimed an elephant to be like a tree, while one percieving the trunk proclaimed it a type of serpent, the one percieving the tail proclaiming it to be quite like rope in all actuality, and so on.  Thus both the Great Wheel cosmology and the Great Tree cosmology can be simultaneously true - and accurate though not neccesarily precise descriptions of a nature of reality beyond the ability of humanoids to percieve directly.</p></blockquote><p></p>

Verification