It helps to first recognize what gets in the way of wonder. I’ll call this impediment “knowing”. We generally consider knowing to be the opposite of ignorance, but the knowing I’m referring to is actually a form of ignorance in its own right.
The brain is lazy. It uses as many shortcuts as it can get away with. The kind of knowing I’m talking about is such a shortcut. It’s the substitution of a mental model for the experience itself. We do this way more than we realize.
If I mention “apple” to you, even in the absence of an actual apple you will conjure up your mental model of an apple. This is your “known” apple. It’s an approximation built from the composite of your experiences with real apples. The ability to do this is extremely useful. But here’s the downside: not only do we use these models for abstract reasoning and communication, we use them as stand-ins for actual experience even in the presence of the real thing.
This substitution is largely unconscious. As soon as you’ve identified the object in hand as an “apple”, the substitution kicks in. Provided that nothing in your sensory perception deviates radically from your “known” apple, you will tend to disengage your attention from the actual experience of this real apple, and your brain just fills in what you already know about apples.
There is a certain economy to this: it allows you to divert your attention elsewhere (typically to your thoughts) while eating the apple. But it also diminishes the experience of the real apple, transforming it into a flattened, schematic representation. Worse yet, it completely segments and segregates the totality of your experience into a collection of disconnected objects.
It can be very difficult to not do this. Zen uses terms like “not knowing” and “no-mind” to describe going directly to experience itself, without resorting to the mental models. Attention is the gateway to this not knowing.
When you begin to intentionally bring attention to bear on the ordinary aspects of your life, you discover that knowing and attention are somewhat antagonistic. Those commonplace things that you think you know well are very difficult to keep your attention on. This is because your brain would rather just substitute its model, since it isn’t expecting any surprises from that quarter. Real effort is required to keep the models from taking over. Knowing works against attention and, oddly, attention works against knowing.
That’s why Zen practitioners begin by learning to keep the attention on the breath. The breath is a prime example of something that you know; it’s so commonplace that most of the time you give it no attention at all. You know that you’re breathing perhaps, but you give no attention to what this inhalation is actually like in all of its nuance. Go deeply enough into the attentive experience of this inhalation and this exhalation, though, and knowing is seen to be hopelessly crude and restrictive. The breath, like all aspects of experience at this level of attention, is ineffable. In this ineffability lies wonder.
@tups makes a good point. This isn’t always a “nice” feeling. But at least its real.
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