I can’t imagine what it would be like otherwise. Each day is so conditioned by all the days that have gone before. Any openness I have to a spiritual world has not suddenly happened. It has been developed for as many years as I can count. My comfort with walking in an unseen aspect of the world is no new discovery. This is not a recent development. It is the result of having visited that familiar place so many times and in so many ways since my youth.
Being able to be absorbed in to the unseen essence of things is a conditioned awareness. It is not the product of some mental construct, or figuring something out. It is a conditioned experience, a familiar encounter.
I have been in touch with a saved, unseen aspect of reality since I first smelled the scent of incense in a church. Now, when I light an incense cone in the morning before I meditate while sitting on a cushion, I know I am about to enter familiar territory. It is somewhere I have visited often since I was a young boy. My heart lightens up. This is a familiar place.
My open gesture to the world when I bow to others is anchored in and is a repetition of all the times I entered into an unseen reality with ritualized gestures as a monk. I often allowed my self to feel the hidden reality then and allowed it to penetrate and soften my heart. The path is well-worn.
Now it is becoming an easy and familiar thing to open my inner self, my vibrant heart, to someone else when we exchange a bow. It has become a gesture that is more deeply felt since I focused more on it during a retreat this past summer. The path to that intimate place now has deeper grooves.
These are not just learned motions I am able to make with ease, like having learned to ride a bicycle. It is more of a felt expression of openness to a familiar reality only implied and not so obviously present.
I have been conditioned to have an open acceptance, awareness and absorption with the unseen. I continue to be conditioned more day after day.