is the essence usually "not seen"?

More on essence:

"I think of what Doris lessing wrote in The Four-Gated City: 'In any situation anywhere there is always a key fact, the essence. But it is usually every other fact, thousands of facts, that are seen, discussed, dealt with. The central fact is usually ignored, or not seen.' And a sentence of Yukio Mishima's in Spring Snow: 'To live in the midst of an era is to be oblivious to its style.'" - Michael Ventura, in We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World's Getting Worse by James Hillman and Michael Ventura.

What I think: even if we don't see the essence of a thing or person or moment or our own self, or understand it well enough to talk about it, we can still feel it, and it sure can still come through us. Maybe devotion and practice help to make way. And for some people, an essence pours into and through them even when there are all kinds of obstacles. I know that for me, the more noise and distraction there is, the harder it is to catch a glimpse or let it through: this makes me suspect that continued practice in listening with every sense, and subtle attunement, would be helpful.

(Something about this lovely stained glass (detail from Laura Fuller's Tree of Life) connects to this - maybe simply because I tumbled across each of them, quote and photo, on the same day as these thoughts came to mind.)