Podcasting from New York City, where there are countless humans, bumping into one another, day in & day out, creating their own realities. I wonder if any of it is real. To me it looks like countless worlds colliding into being, then dissolving, right before my eyes. It looks like the three characteristics of mindfulness, alive and well on the streets of New York: an object lesson in impermanence, stress, and emptiness. Sound interesting? If so, please listen.
Podcasting from New York City, where there are countless humans, bumping into one another, day in & day out, creating their own realities. I wonder if any of it is real. To me it looks like countless worlds colliding into being, then dissolving, right before my eyes. It looks like the three characteristics of mindfulness, alive and well on the streets of New York: an object lesson in impermanence, stress, and emptiness. Sound interesting? If so, please listen.
Hi everyone, it’s Judi Cohen and this is Wake Up Call #320, on October 7th. I’m still in New York, ancient home of the Lenape people. I’ve been studying this small, packed, island of Manhattan and am going to diverge from the Dhammapada to talk about it today. And I’m going to borrow Billy Joel’s phrase and call this talk, “New York state of mind.”
I’m not sure what Billy Joel meant. Looks like he meant being in the buzz of the city, something like that. I can sort of understand that, even though I’m no native.
But there’s not just one buzz. There are tons of different buzzes, different worlds, happening on this island. There are the worlds of food, art, politics, theater, shopping, gardens, biking, mindfulness…and a million others.
But also, there are all of the humans, alone, in pairs, and in groups, interacting with one another…each, “in their own worlds.”
And not just “in,” but creating their own worlds. A human walks up to another human and it’s like striking a match: a conversation sparks. And not just a conversation, but a whole world, springs into existence, and the humans slip into that world together. When they part, that world fades away.
I’ve been loving watching this. I watched a young woman with a baby asleep in a snuggly, come out of a café and see a group of friends sitting at an outdoor table. A conversation sparked, then they said goodbyes and the woman moved on. When she did, her countenance changed. Maybe she was thinking about being a mom, being a partner, being a lawyer if she’s a lawyer, planning, regretting, somehow identifying with the world she had just co-created or the world she was in as she walked away. Or, maybe she was feeling her feet hitting the pavement, the warmth of the baby against her chest. Who knows?
I walked by two men yelling on a corner. One was trying to calm the other one down. I couldn’t hear what they were saying but it felt volatile. Then one man walked off, shaking his head, and the other began wiping tables with a towel. Maybe they were both identified with being right, still inside the world they’d co-created by their argument even as it dissolved. Maybe the table-wiper was thinking about being a café owner, or the walker was thinking about being a wholesaler or server. Or maybe one was feeling the damp cloth in his hands, the other, the hard surface of the sidewalk beneath his shoes. Who knows?
All I could see was that in both cases there was a collision of humans, on purpose or by chance, and a world sprang into being, and then the humans separated, and the world fell apart.
This is happening billions of times a day: all 7.7 billion humans on this small planet, colliding with each other day in and day out, and into the night, creating worlds that exist, then fall apart.
It’s something I’ve known – I’ve studied it, I’ve had some of experiences of it. In New York I’ve been witnessing and experiencing it over and over – colliding, a world getting created; separating, a world falling apart. That’s what I mean by a New York state of mind.
It’s been a kind of object lesson for me in the three characteristics of life: impermanence, stress, and emptiness. Ruth King names these differently and I love her names. She says our lives are not permanent, not perfect, and not personal.
Impermanence is the simplest piece for me to see in all this: world after world come into being and dissolving, moment after moment after moment, each world only lasting as long as the convergence between two people, or in other wrods, as long as the conditions that support it. You can check this out for yourself today – you don’t have to be in New York: does a world come into being when you read an email? When you text with someone? When you enter a zoom room? When you’re having dinner with someone? And does it dissolve when you’ve replied, ended the text stream, closed the zoom room, finished dinner? In one way of understanding it, impermanence is nothing more complicated than this.
In another way, it has bigger implications. Each matter, each case, each class, will one day end. Our work will one day be over – my husband just retired and is done practicing medicine – it’s big, by the way, in case you’re headed there anytime soon. Relationships end because one day, one person or the other will either turn away, or die. We will all die.
I like to understand impermanence on its own but also as a characteristic that creates the second characteristic, of stress, or we sometimes say, “suffering,” or the Pali word is “dukkha.” Impermanence creates stress if we try to deny it. Moment by moment I catch myself wanting something back that’s already gone, or wanting something that’s working, to never end. Or wanting some likeable aspect of myself to not change or to get even better; or some aspect of myself that I’m not fond of, to disappear. That wanting: that causes stress. Can you relate?
But the biggest cause of stress and suffering is getting identified with all this coming & going. It happens for me all the time. I got identified as someone who had a sense of the “best” West Village sushi after zillions of hours of research and getting great recommendations. I got identified as someone into the art scene. I was “fit” when we rode our bikes around Central Park – never mind that I was darn sore the next day. I was “smart,” discussing politics over breakfast; “caring,” visiting my ex-mother-in-law; open-hearted and not racist, looking up and going to Black-owned businesses. I was “a mindfulness teacher” in a program on Tuesday, and now I’m, what, the “leader” of the Wake Up Call.
But really, it’s all an illusion. In truth I “am” none of those things; those are just worlds, taking shape and dissolving. There’s no one Judi Cohen, there aren’t even any versions, there’s just taking shape and dissolving. It’s empty – it’s alive and joyful and sorrowful and confusing and full of love, but it’s also completely empty. Nothing is actually sticking, as long as I don’t grab ahold.
When I forget that, and attach to a version, a world, it’s painful because…impermanence: it’s going to dissolve! Or someone will challenge me because of course I don’t actually know bupkiss about West Village sushi. When I remember that this human called “me” is just taking shape and dissolving, it’s incredibly freeing. That’s what Ruth King means when she says, “Not Personal.” None of the worlds arising and dissolving are personal. Nothing is personal. Everything is in motion. If we forget that, it can be really painful. If we remember to just let go, it can be incredibly freeing.
Let’s sit.