Exploring “Unfolding the Crinkled Mind” with Benjamin Hohl this Sunday at Minneapolis Insight

Dear Community,

Sunday 10am Community Practice & Discussion

This Sunday Benjamin will lead an exploration of “Unfolding the Crinkled Mind,” based on this language and pointer by Ajahn Sucitto in his book Parami: Ways to Cross Life's Floods (freely available here). Below is the referenced passage, which you can find at the very beginning of the book (paragraphs three and four of the first chapter):

…we may have had an experience of aware stillness in which the concerns of the day and all those habitual inner activities stopped or abated. Perhaps it was in the presence of a natural wonder, or maybe it was in a temple, or under a night sky, where we felt for a moment lifted by awe. For a few instants or minutes perhaps our normal sense of who we are, a sense based on the movement and concerns of all that mental activity, dropped away and was replaced by a sense of greater breadth, or depth, or of feeling at one with the universe. In such an experience, the world around us changes to a place of beauty or spiritual presence. Maybe we framed the experience in the language of a particular religion, or interpreted it as a divine revelation. It could have triggered a whole range of such further activities. Or we could have surmised that there are other states of consciousness than the one we’ve called ordinary, and that the normal self that we experience as being in the world is not a fixed or ultimate identity. For a moment, without creating or rejecting anything, we experienced a shift both in terms of our self and the world around us.

Now if we were to find a method of experiencing such shifts and stopping on a regular basis, we could examine that sense of stopping and know that it’s anything but nihilistic — it’s not oblivion, but a vibrant stillness. It’s as if the mind had been crinkled and folded in on itself, and now it has unfolded. An underlying restlessness and tension that we hardly noticed because it was so normal, has ceased — and with it, our normal sense of what we and the world are has changed for the better. This ‘unfolding’ to a wider and deeper sense is what we call ‘transcendence.’ We change, and our apparent world changes…

All are welcome to join this exploration on Sunday! Registration and Zoom information available here.

With mettā,
Minneapolis Insight