A=A=A=A Do you believe in Magic?

[peter]

I for one am a wood worker and a carpenter. Believe me in my trades there are straight lines, and BTW, flat surfaces. Measured by thousandths of inches.

Soderqvist1: This may be truth for all practical means, but it is imperfect when it comes to the absolute!

Peter, I for one do understand that a straight line is only as straight so long as it begins to take on the curvature of the earth! But for practical sense, it will take miles before the straight line will begin to curve along the curvature of the earth... so this is way out there in practical terms.

Soderqvist1: this is also something approximate as your terms “practical sense” “practical terms” indicate!
So your straight line doesn’t go on forever, since it bends after some miles. Is it possible that the curvature is always there, but builds up incrementally, and imperceptible until you can see it after some miles or so? That can account for the phenomenon if we are sitting in the same boat on a calm sea and the sea’s surface seems flat, but in the horizon a ship appear, but we can only see the top of it for the moment, but more and more of the ship will be visible as it approaches us. This was one of the evidence in pre-scientific time that the earth is spherical, not flat. The evidence that the earth surface is nowhere flat comes from non-Euclidean Geometry and note the word approximation in the quote, as I have repeatedly used.

Wikipedia Non-Euclidean geometry
Euclidean geometry is modeled by our notion of a "flat plane.
On a sphere, the sum of the angles of a triangle is not equal to 180°. The surface of a sphere is not a Euclidean space, but locally the laws of the Euclidean geometry are good approximations. In a small triangle on the face of the earth, the sum of the angles is very nearly 180°.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Euclidean_geometry

[StevieRayFan]

Thank you Skeptic girl... I appreciate your response which rightly or wrongly is well founded in reality. And I vote rightly. That is to say, we can disagree or agree... and that is all I have ever expected... but that we can at least understand one another, IS to be expected. I'm not into the cryptic stuff which frankly there was a time while I was in I was guilty. Those days are many years over.

Peter:

I get your meaning but do not understand its application... hence my sort of could be possible opposition.

I still do not understand the meaning of this thread, nor the application to magic. No offense in any way, but it looks to me like this should have been a PM between those who "get it".

I've asked before if this could be explained in clear English (for the rest of us). Is this possible, or do we need to be educated in a particular conspiracy or something.

For those who may read here more than for those who post here.

(My apologies in advance. I don't post often)

ps- you did explain the straight-line very well.

[sekh]

"The Absolute" is a pure philosophical concept. In practical life it does not exist. That's why Euclidian geometry works in daily life.

To much looking for "the Absolute Truth" tends to drive people insane. Hub's bizarre concoction of Western psychology, Eastern philosophy and Golden Dawn occultism is proof of that thesis. He died as a raving lunatic himself.

Maybe he should have have stuck to writing science-fiction. It wasn't good, it wasn't real, but it was harmless, comprehensible and some people truly seemed to enjoy those stories. That's more than can be said of Dianetics and it's creepy offspring, Scientology.

[peter]

Soderqvist1: But Euclidean geometry is absolute too!
Everything in our everyday world has some length, and width and depth!
But Euclidean points have no dimensions, but a line has one, and a plane have two, and a cube three. A tailor’s thread of say 200 meters is a line but imperfect because it has some tiny thickness and width. In Munich in the year 1891 in Germany there was a boy in the school who told his teacher that Pi is not approximately 3.14 and the sum of angles of a triangle is not 180 degree. His father once showed him a compass, but he told his father that there must be something causing the needle to move, despite the apparent empty space. His teacher scratched their heads and couldn’t make head or tail of it. It would probably go on unnoticed and forgotten if it wasn’t for one disturbing fact that the boy’s name was Albert Einstein. And 1916 he proved his early intuition truth, that it was something wrong with Euclidean Geometry, because space is bent by gravitation and is Non-Euclidean, and thus the fifth axiom of Euclid is false, and time is the fourth dimension!

Wikipedia Euclidean Geometry
For over two thousand years, the adjective "Euclidean" was unnecessary because no other sort of geometry had been conceived. Euclid's axioms seemed so intuitively obvious that any theorem proved from them was deemed true in an absolute, often metaphysical, sense. Today, however, many other self-consistent non-Euclidean geometries are known, the first ones having been discovered in the early 19th century. An implication of Einstein's theory of general relativity is that Euclidean space is a good approximation to the properties of physical space only where the gravitational field is not too strong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclidean_geometry

[Wieber]

Soderqvist1: But Euclidean geometry is absolute too!
Everything in our everyday world has some length, and width and depth!
But Euclidean points have no dimensions, but a line has one, and a plane have two, and a cube three. A tailor’s thread of say 200 meters is a line but imperfect because it has some tiny thickness and width. In Munich in the year 1891 in Germany there was a boy in the school who told his teacher that Pi is not approximately 3.14 and the sum of angles of a triangle is not 180 degree. His father once showed him a compass, but he told his father that there must be something causing the needle to move, despite the apparent empty space. His teacher scratched their heads and couldn’t make head or tail of it. It would probably go on unnoticed and forgotten if it wasn’t for one disturbing fact that the boy’s name was Albert Einstein. And 1916 he proved his early intuition truth, that it was something wrong with Euclidean Geometry, because space is bent by gravitation and is Non-Euclidean, and thus the fifth axiom of Euclid is false, and time is the fourth dimension!

Wikipedia Euclidean Geometry
For over two thousand years, the adjective "Euclidean" was unnecessary because no other sort of geometry had been conceived. Euclid's axioms seemed so intuitively obvious that any theorem proved from them was deemed true in an absolute, often metaphysical, sense. Today, however, many other self-consistent non-Euclidean geometries are known, the first ones having been discovered in the early 19th century. An implication of Einstein's theory of general relativity is that Euclidean space is a good approximation to the properties of physical space only where the gravitational field is not too strong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclidean_geometry

And if anything stated above alarms you, stay away from any book written by Stephen Hawking, especially The Grand Design.

[sekh]

Quantum mechanics and non-Euclidian geometry have their (important) place in science and philosophy.

But in daily life it's better to stick to the simple, three-dimensional world we can see. For a carpenter who wants to make a decent table Euclides' geometry has worked perfectly for over two thousand years. Why should he bother with quantum states?

Our brains aren't evolved to handle extremes in size, like the vastness of the universe or those tiny sub-atomic particles. Some people who can envision things like that and think in more than three dimensions, like Einstein and Hawking (whose books I'm trying to understand), are more brilliant than most. I deeply respect the true genius, and know that I'm not one of them.

But neither was L.Ron. He was a scientific fraud. And, IMHO, real magic doesn't exist. Not in Ron's writings, nor in those of his predecessors like Crowley and Blavatsky. No magic, no science, just the technique of mind control. Dangerous stuff.