Magic

Subject: Magic

It's magic says the conjurer, as he pulls a rabbit out of the hat. My daughter used the term when trying to describe that "other world" which seems to lie just outside our perception. The question was, what of that world and of ours, can we understand and have faith in a world we can't see, where the assumptions are not based in laws of observation, no matter how complicated. 

Prince Charles is famous for his belief that plants can understand when we talk to them.

The concept of what makes a sentient being, dropped into the equation from my son, as we, in our own way, working within our own parameters tried to acknowledge what the other person thought possible.
Being older, more fixed in my ways, less flexible, more, stuck in the groove I argue that 'perception and memory' are the building blocks of learning and, coupled with books allow us to sample another's persons world of perception and memory. 
The encounters of others, include those of a para-normal experience, or a reasoning that there is a whole undiscovered world outside our own ability to perceive and that plants talking to plants, are only one area where the mind can make an assumption.
It's the assumptions which cause the problem. I can assume that there is nothing to exclude the possibility of ghosts or gremlins. I can assume that there is a person with a white beard sitting in the sky controlling our life on Earth, I can believe I will be born again after I die. These assumptions are part of the collective environment of thought which I chose to surround myself with. It can be part of some sort of optimistic transference from the pessimism which surrounds me in day to day life but at the end of the day it is a conceit which, as humans, we bundle ourselves up in to find alternatives to the reality we see in front of us.
There is no earthly reason to be constrained by facts and figures, there is no reason at all to be constrained by anything science or logic tells you since the question "what if" is the motive force which has driven our understanding from time immortal. But if, like magic there is a wish to believe what the magician has just done then reality becomes nothing more than smoke and mirrors, where anything is possible and even the most deranged mind can convince us that what we see, or are led to believe is true, and therein lies the danger of the cult.
Of course we would be stupid to ignore the limits of our perception. The limiting bandwidth which we sense the world around us, a world which we can only accept with instruments which detect it, a world outside our human design experience, a world outside that of sight and sound, a world where even time confines us in ever knowing. The quantum physics assumption of being in two places at once is a construct of a mind which cannot explain the phenomena of once focusing on an object in the sub atomic world the very function of observing, moves the observable to another place. 
The Mad Hatters Tea Party was relatively benign to the actual world but it's this danger and I mean danger that we allow ourselves to be carried away into a fantasy world and once therein we begin to see fairies. It's not to say fairies don't exist but we usually do.