"Man sieht nur was man weiss."
Goethe ("One sees only what one knows.")
I suppose it's fairly obvious that the more you know, the more you are able to see. Same thing appplies to listening to things, or educating any of the senses - even taste.
I've taken walks with people who didn't know the trees or the birds or the wildflowers, so all they could see was "green" or "bird" or "plants" or "rock" instead of "Oak" or "Scarlet Tanager" or "Milkweed" or "glacial erratic." I was seeing lots of things and lots of stories, and they were seeing little, as if they had poor vision.
My personal sensory weakness is in hearing music. I can happily listen, but I cannot really hear it all. To really hear what they are doing with music, I need to be lying down with my eyes closed. And awake.
I think a relationship with God is similar. We may be wired to connect, but our senses have to be trained, educated, to complete the connection. Otherwise, we can miss it. It's about illumination, how to light the lamp.
Another example that jumps to my mind is architecture: knowing what you are seeing helps you see the buildings around you. You can see the story, the meaning of the thing. I have had many experiences of illumination, of suddenly taking in things which I had never noticed or paid attention to because something or somebody informed me. To my mind, these are very fine moments in life - experiencing something with new eyes.
Maybe curiosity is the rare or fortunate personality trait which draws the mind and attention into things without having to be led to them - a component of intelligence. Being not very bright and afflicted with the dreaded curse of ADD (caused by too much schooling in youth), it tends to help me to be shown things: name it for me and tell me about it, and chances are that I will research it, and never forget it. One side benefit of working on Maggie's Farm (besides the big bucks) is that it prompts us to be actively curious if only to keep the "content" flowing and our brains activated.
I wonder what similar illuminations our readers have had, where learning or training helped cause you to be surprised by experiencing the world more deeply or richly.
(Photo is a Mayflower. You would barely notice one on a woodland floor unless you were looking.)