DJ: I was hearing something on the radio today about training the police and how the police have all these things and not that much training. They’re under trained. I think you could train in that stuff regularly, like continually if you’re a police officer.

Man: Some of the Police officers lift weights so they get pretty buff. Not every single one of them does that.

DJ: It’s not the same as being familiar with a collapsible baton, or whatever else they’ve got, whatever equipment or weapons they might have. They can train with a gun but the other.

Man: They don’t train much; they have to qualify once every month or once every two months or however often they have to do that.

DJ: Yeah, but I’m sure plenty of them go to the gym; plenty of them go to the gun range.

Man: That’s the nice thing about being a Police Officer. If you go to the gun range, you can shoot all the ammo you want. They’ll just supply it. The other stat was when they carried revolvers.

DJ: If you have whatever the police issued weapon is?

Man: Yeah, whatever the police issued weapon is. You can have all the ammo you can fire, and they encourage it. One of the statistics I heard from a retired Police Officer was that between the transition between revolvers and Glock, the autoloader, is that the pre-autoloader era, they were much better shots, because they only had six in their gun, and two speed loaders on their belt, for their whole duty, their whole hour, or their duty time, so eight or twelve hours, so they had to make sure that every shot was on target. The Glock that they were issues, like the autoloader thing Glock, the high capacity magazines. They’re not as good a shot. I don’t know if that’s because the gun is not as accurate, or because they don’t really care.

They don’t have to be on target. They can dump a whole clip into somebody and then pull another clip out.

DJ: And these are what, 20 round clips?

Man: Well 16, I think a 9mm, but they go for 40’s. I don’t know how many 40 would carry, but it’s more than 6.

DJ: It’s at least 10.

Man: So they have 10, 10, and 10, so that’s 30, for their whole duty time, so they have a lot of ammo that they’re carrying around.

DJ: When I was in the army, we used to have 10 round clips, standard issue. And then the banana ones, I think they were 30’s.

I don’t really have much to say about this. What I was coming up with was how to describe what’s going on. That’s what I was thinking about, like how do you describe it? So I’m thinking you should define it. The bottom notes are actually notes about public speaking and how to speak to people. You tell them what it is, you tell them who it’s for, you tell them why it’s important, and you tell them how it works a little bit.

Who, what, how, why, and when. Those are the things you tell them. “What if” is another one. That way you hit everybody’s way of sorting things out, some people sort by what it is, some people by how it works, or who it works for. You’re going to explain it to them in a way that hits all the buttons.

What are we explaining? In this, I’m explaining the nature of reality. This is really my focus. This is what I think about the most. What’s the nature of reality? What’s going on here? Why? What’s appearing? That has to be defined. You have to define the universe as it exists, in other words, mechanically, and the information we have visually and all that kind of stuff. We have to define not only that, but we also have to define what it means to have information that relates to something that.

Man: Relates to what, the universe at large?

DJ: Right, and to our perception, its expression, and what’s really going on here. So we’re trying to define what’s actually happening as opposed to what it looks like is happening.

Man: Okay.

DJ: There we go. So we have to define the terms and define everything about it, so that it starts to make sense, so that everybody knows what you’re talking about when they’re reading something. You’re not using a term that means one thing to one person and something else to someone else.

Then the location, where is it? That’s also part of the definition in a way, where is it, when is it, that sort of thing. Then we’ve got the realization and this this a little bit different. In here, what’s being described and encouraged is the acceptance of the realization. For this, the idea is to awaken the inner consciousness, the higher self if you will. We’re going to awaken that through observation and through mindfulness essentially. This is the technique that’s being used in this scenario.

Then there is the connection. The connection is all the other individuals who have the potential for mindful behavior, and really, when I say mindful, I’m also talking about the realization of the emptiness, which is at the core. This might actually be at the core of it, the realization of the emptiness. It is because when you get into the connection, which is the foundation of meditation, all meditation up to the point of the realization of the emptiness is preparatory.

Man: Alright.

DJ: At the time of the realization of the emptiness, then the work can begin.

Man: So do you have any words for the realization of the emptiness? How would I know?

DJ: I like the Buddhist definition okay, which is “All form is emptiness, and all emptiness is form.” Essentially what it’s saying is that everything is in the emptiness, even though it gives the appearance of being something. Everything is just kind of a reflection; everything that you see is not solid.

They did an experiment recently where they set up these four mile long laser beams, pointing in different directions, in two different locations. They saw that two black holes had collided, and the earth was effected by a gravity wave, these light beams bent, and they’re underground, and they know that this actually occurred. Maybe the light didn’t bend but the planet bent, the mirror bent. It was at a different angle. They recorded it. There was a sound to it. It went “bluup,” so that’s kind of interesting, but what that means is that the earth bent, like space and time moved. We got pulled just a little bit closer into that black hole, just at that moment, which means in effect that it affected time itself. It affected our movement. It affected everything, and did it in a ripple effect, going out throughout the universe.

So nothing is solid. If it did that to the rock, like if that flexing happened to the rock because of a gravity wave, then we’ve got nothing solid anywhere around here. Imagine, if a gravity wave will do that to rock, it’s entirely feasible that something less powerful could do it to, say, wood or plastic, a brain, an eye, or an ear. Change the perception in that way. You can say, “Well that’s just a slight change, it’s not important,” which is true on the one hand. On the other hand, if that’s what’s going on here all the time, then nothing is really solid at all. It might be good to get to a really good understanding of that. That’s the path that I suggest for the realization.

So bear in mind that nothing is as solid as it appears, and we know from quantum physics  that particles are appearing and disappearing.

Man: All the time.

DJ: Right. I don’t know how much it happens, so I don’t know what percentage of the particles are changing in this room at any given time. It might be that such a low percentage of it happens that I could stay in this room for a year or more and it would never happen. I don’t know. I don’t understand that part of the science.

Man: Right.

DJ: I know that they can observe it in certain settings.

Man: They don’t know where it goes or where it comes from.

DJ: Do they have any idea how much this is happening? At any rate, basically at this level, what you’re saying is, okay, reality is a suggestion in a way. It has a dreamlike quality to it, because it is not as solid as it might have been. This is the realization; they say that all minds have the seed of enlightenment in them, the seed of the enlightened mind within every brain  and within every mind.

What I suggest is that really you’re constantly in some form of this awakened reality. No matter how awake you are, there’s some level of awakeness. I think that awakeness can really sprout and bloom in an individual, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s there for everybody, all the time. What we’re not doing is paying attention to it. We haven’t learned to pay attention to it, or gotten used to the idea that this has happened.

We largely are distracted with the show. We’ve got the show going on and there’s this whole thing. This is where Christianity comes in. It’s an interesting idea here, but there’s this whole thing about being cast out of the garden of Eden, because of the eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. It’s a very weird way of describing something. What they’re saying is this is what keeps us focused on the show and keeps us from understanding the actual nature of observing and existing and of life itself.

We have that within us, but we don’t focus on it. We’re not taught to focus on it. We’re not taught what it is. Most people don’t own it, and they pretend it’s something else. They poo-poo it, they put it down, they run from it, and they start wars, whatever.

Man: They carry guns.

DJ: In a way, because the gun is all about the individual for most people, they’re so focused on the individual, and this is where the problem comes in. We totally focus on our own individual. We don’t in this western culture focus on the whole. In the East, it was all about the system, there’s a society, there’s a community, and we exist within it. Here it’s like, “Yeah we built the society to support us.’ It’s a different kind of approach all together. People aren’t looking for their place in society. They’re looking to change society to make it more the way they want it. It’s a whole different approach.

Man: Yes, in the East, everyone has a role, to think as one’s self as an individual is heresy.

DJ: That’s a pretty extreme review, but that probably does exist, yes.

Man: The heresy in the West is to think that one is part and parcel of the all.

DJ: Right, there might be a god, but you’re not it, and you’re not going to be in touch with it. The whole idea of Jesus being the son of God and inaccessible to any followers because of that, you know, why even try and be like that? You know you can’t. You’re not the son of God.

Man: They miss the point. The humanity of Jesus connected humans to Jesus and Jesus’ divinity connected us through him with the deity. Once again, they’ve stepped away from that.

DJ: Where is the direct observation and the direct experience, and you know, at any rate.

Man: Oh, and the other thing was that Judas came and was here to teach us to be compassionate. That God is ultimate compassion and humans aren’t, and Jesus was to link our own human compassion with God’s compassion, throughout his death, to feel that compassion. That’s one way of thinking about it.

What would be the motivation to do anything, if everything is empty? It’s just a show.

DJ: That’s the whole thing is that it is a show, and you’re the player in the audience, so what kind of show do you want? That’s really the thing. Do you want a show where you believe everything is nothing and you commit suicide over it? You can have that kind of show if you want, but you are a co-creator of the show, and you get to decide a lot of the things that happen in it.

That’s the point. They call it nihilism, when you think that there’s no point and everything’s an illusion, and it’s not an illusion at all. It’s very real in the way that it is, but it’s not solid real.

Man: Like the Robert E. Howard Conan character, his quote is, “Philosophers teach that all is an illusion, well if that’s true then I am just as much an illusion as anything else, it doesn’t really matter, I’m going to continue on.”

DJ: That’s exactly right.

Man: “I’m as much the illusion as anything else.” I think that’s how it went. The Conan character was accepting what they were teaching and being proactive to being involved in living fully and completely.

Some people poo-poo the whole Conan character as just a barbarian sword singing fool, or just a barbarian blood lusting rapist. However, the character, over the time of the storytelling, developed a high philosophy in his travels, because he travelled to every country of the map that was drawn by Robert E. Howard, for that part of the world.

He was very well educated, because he needed to be. He needed to know the language and the culture that he was participating in, like being a captain, or stealing from, or trading with, or being in the kingdom of, or any of that stuff. It is because his very survival depended on him knowing the language, customs, the people, how to blend in, how to not blend in, and when to do those.

When I read the original stories about Conan’s travels, he goes from an uneducated kid to a very sophisticated leader of a country, through his travels.

DJ: Really? The Conan series, I only really read a bit of it.

Man: So Robert E. Howard was born in 1906 and died in 1936, so he lived 30 years. His career was over as soon as it started, because he killed himself. In that time he was a very liberal thinker. Women were smart. Colored people were considered stupid, but in his stories, his main characters best friends were of color. They had higher rank, they were brave, they were determined, and they were smart. The women of his writings were equipped and capable of defending themselves and being in command of large numbers of men, people, and countries.

So he was a very liberal thinking man during the times when he was alive and writing the stories. I like Robert E. Howard; he was one of the first writers that I read.

When I was taking my college courses, I was taught in my chem class and my physics class that matter is most of the empty space. They put the top of a magic marker, the little black top things, in the middle of the desk. He goes, “If this was the nucleus, the first electron will be like so many miles away from here.”

So I already have this idea that it’s mostly empty space. The only reason we can’t pass through this empty space is the electron field and the electromagnetic field that’s generated by the electrons moving around the nucleus, if they even do, don’t even know if there are electrons that move around the nucleus anymore, or if there’s even shells. They disproved the Bohr’s model of the electron, and the Bohr’s model of the atom. Things that they’re based on still exist, even though they disproved his theory.

DJ: Well there is some interesting stuff that they can’t figure out. One of the things that I think is fascinating is that astronomy is so far behind these other things, like they have not mapped multiple planet orbits around another sun, or another star. They’ll keep observing, but they’re relying on shadows and other things like that. One of the things about electrons, and in the atoms, is those rotational positions are fixed. The number of electrons that are in those positions is a fixed number. It has to grow, but it has to grow in a certain order. They don’t deviate. So the position of each electron orbit is the same on every atom. It’s just the number of electrons or whether or not there are electrons in those positions. But the positions are the same. It’s really weird. I wonder if that’s going on with planets.

Man: That’s what I was thinking just now.

DJ: It might be or it might not be. We have no way of knowing, but we do know that the galaxies rotate in a way that doesn’t make sense to us. If they were just spinning around a center, the outside ones would be going slower, but they’re not. They’re all going the same speed. It’s organized in a way that we don’t understand.

Man: They’re linking that back to black holes and the manifestation of the galaxy from black holes.

DJ: Well yeah, they think that the black hole holds the galaxy together. If it was just gravity, the rotation should be different to what it is. There’s something else, some other force that’s keeping it. Then they think, “Well maybe its dark matter.” They don’t know what’s going on with that stuff, because they know it exists. They don’t know what it does exactly, or anything else, and that part is fascinating to me.

Man: Have you heard about the theory of the big rip?

DJ: No.

Man: That the universe is flying apart faster and faster and faster and faster, and there will come a point where it will start coming apart faster than the speed of light, so that eventually all the light that hits the earth, all the star light and stuff, is going to wink out, because the starts are going to be moving farther away from us faster than the speed of light. Light won’t be able to reach us anymore. Then it will keep accelerating, and then the very fabric of space-time won’t stay together. It’ll rip apart too, space-time will rip. That’s the big rip theory.

When I heard that theory I go, “Wow, so that might be the big bang!” Like the previous universe is still flying apart and it rips apart space-time, another universe starts.

DJ: Well it’s hard to say if universes are asexual or if they will mate, if there’s some other way. They’re like, “Well there’s not enough mass in the universe to do that.” Oh really? So we need outside mass? Like an egg needs the sperm? How is that? We don’t have any idea how that works. We know that things work in cycles, but we can look around and extrapolate that, because we don’t find things that don’t work this way. Everything seems to work this way.

Man: In cycles?

DJ: Yeah, there seems to be arcs of existence in all types of things, weather patterns, lives of insects, lives of planets, and stars. There’s a basic ground of existence upon which those things are allowed to arise and fall, the ashes to ashes bit.

Man: So what’s the ground substance that it all exists upon, the nothing?

DJ: That’s a good question, and where does consciousness fit in there?

Man: What is it that is and is not? It is and is not, neither is or is not. What is that? What is the thing that we can’t talk about? That all this stuff arises from, consciousness? Alright teacher, what is it that all this stuff arises from?

DJ: I think that the best answer to that question is “I don’t know.’ I think that’s the best answer to that question. Here’s my thinking on this. In order to really get an awareness of that, that probably has to be your awareness all along, I mean your goal, what you’re moving for. It does assume that there is such a thing, and time and space are required for this. However, is that what we’re talking about? Yeah, that’s a good question. I don’t know.

Man: There was a German Buddhist you gave me that recording of that talked about dependent something?

DJ: Origination.

Man: Dependent origination.

DJ: Yeah, well dependent upon the circumstances under which it exists, as well as its own potentials.

Man: I’m very interested in this discussion that you have here on the board.

DJ: Let me tell you what else is going on. I went to this Unitarian church again. They don’t usually rent their rooms out to outside people, but there may be members of the church that are interested in it. So they may put it on the schedule if I talk to them, and I haven’t yet, but I have the information, which would provide an audience even.

Man: Right, very cool.

DJ: So we’ll see about that. It may very well be the place to start. I’m really getting comfortable there. I went to a Buddhist group; did I tell you about this? On Thursday night?

Man: At the church?

DJ: Yeah, they did a reading, they did a 25 minute meditation, and they did a discretion period. Three half-hours, about an hour and a half meeting. You want to eat?

Man: Yeah, let’s walk down to the-

DJ: Okay, alright cool.