Speaker Identification

Speaker 1 - Announcer / Prerecorded Intro and Outro Voice. This voice delivers the show-opening invitation and appears again in the closing promotional lines. The transcript does not identify the performer by name.

Speaker 2 - Valerie, Host. She identifies herself by name at the beginning of the live program and delivers the entire main discussion as a solo host.

Speaker 1 - Announcer / Prerecorded Voice:
Welcome to Apple Pie Playground, where we serve up slices of healing for the heart. Stay tuned for a journey of transformation back to the divine inner child. Can you come out and play today?

Speaker 2 - Valerie:
Welcome, everyone, to Apple Pie Playground. I’m your host, Valerie. It’s so good to be on the playground this afternoon, and thank you, BBS, for being here with us. We love you, BBS.

I want to start our conversation today by asking you to take just a minute to try something. It’s something I learned this week. I love its lessons so, so much. Let’s make it our inner child’s play today. What do you say?

If you can, hold out your hands comfortably in front of you, palms facing each other, not touching, but facing each other. Let’s ask ourselves: Does the space between our palms separate them or connect them? Does the space there between our palms separate them or connect them?

If you’re fond of Zen koans, which are sort of tricky little parables that get us thinking about things, this might be a fun contemplation this week to sit with and think about. We’re going to come back to that activity as we go along today and talk about what’s called the human spark of experience, which comes in a very unique way for us as humans - as Terrans, maybe we can start calling ourselves - who have cultivated our free will to experience what we call separation of self.

It’s an unruly condition, actually, that maybe other galactics might consider a little off-putting, but it’s in our nature as human forms to want to feel independent, individual and free. When you think about it, we’re a race of people with an intrinsic need to feel sovereign, but who rarely actually experience true sovereignty in our day-to-day lives as it’s felt in higher realms.

It’s as though we have a sense of our sovereignty and we’re trying to remember what it really is. We’re grasping for knowing, and we’re learning. So we cultivate a lot of independent nature. Honestly, it’s probably kept the human race alive and evolving because of our drive for freedom. Never mind that we’re not quite sure what it is or what it means; it has kept us moving forward, determined never to stop.

We’re celebrating that feeling right now wherever we can, as we try to understand what’s happening to our world energetically. We’re feeling the pull of our awakening and talking about what it means, aren’t we? We are deciding how to move forward in our evolution, and figuratively speaking, our hands are up, palms facing each other, and we’re deciding how to translate the energies between them. Are our hands separated or connected? What does our spark of experience say?

I want to share the name of a teacher who uses this example and point you in her direction, and I’ll do that at the end of the show.

So let’s think of this koan and the dialogue many of us are having right now with respect to the human experience. We’re hearing that the degree of “separation” between groups of those who are awake and those who are maybe not so awake is pulling us farther apart from each other. We’re separating out one from another energetically, as an energetic process, and it’s a process informed by our human inclinations and the characteristic sense of self that we’ve cultivated as humans.

What’s been packaged by the ego as identity - probably more than anything else - drives our human conversations through our experience as an identity. The separation of people energetically into dimensions of reality is a real narrative right now. It’s taking decisive shape on truther channels and spiritual podcasts, and it’s really informing our beliefs about our neighbors, friends and family, especially those neighbors, friends and family who might have been fairly mean about our different views over the last several years. I want to talk about it.

This narrative is forming on so many channels and online everywhere, like a good plotline or a good story that pulls us in and forces us to put a few things together intentionally - maybe on pain of survival, maybe like a horror story. How about that?

I want to ask us all a key question to get us thinking critically about our topic today, and that is the idea of separation or connection as a human evolutionary experience. That’s our topic.

I want to ask a super-important question about nearly every character who starred in horror films produced in the 1980s. There were a lot of horror films produced in the 1980s. I grew up on all of them. There was Friday the 13th, The Evil Dead, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Psycho and Day of the Dead. The list goes on and on.

So here’s the question: Who is the only person to get out alive at the end of most horror movies, especially in the 1980s? Who gets out alive? Think about it. Who’s the last man standing?

It turns out that the last man standing was almost always the last woman standing in the 1980s, because almost every horror film made in the 1980s had what was called the “final girl” character - the final girl who survived the dark demise suffered by her group of debaucherous friends, who were all picked off one at a time or two at a time.

How did she survive? Let’s think about that as we think back to our memories of horror shows, horror films and the plotlines. What is the one thing everybody refuses to do in a horror movie that gets them all unalived? What’s the one thing everybody refuses to do?

It’s the same one thing people refuse to do when they go out hiking and exploring. It’s the same one thing people refuse to do when a bunch of folks get into a mall or go for a day at Disneyland. It’s the same thing people do in emergencies. It’s the one thing the Marines will train never to do. Any ideas?

Characters in horror films refuse to stay together, don’t they? They are always leaving people behind. That’s the one thing. Either pride, panic or distraction gets the better of most characters in a horror movie when you think about it.

So when the mild, empathetic young lady whose morality is beyond the pale realizes that most of her friends refuse to stay together, she has to fight to survive on her own, doesn’t she? Everybody is gone and has left her, and now she’s carrying a butcher knife and hiding behind doors.

It’s sort of like a measurable part of our human condition. We get distracted, we go it alone, and we get lost. Or we end up where we shouldn’t be, and then all of a sudden there are things coming after us.

Now, what does that have to do with humans separating ourselves out in this highly energetic evolution of consciousness that’s going on right now? Does it even? I might be off the mark here, hoping to make some connections today, comparing horror movies to ascension conversations. I mean, come on, Val. Right? Well, let’s talk about it.

Here on the playground, we talk about ourselves as energy bodies functioning in the broader environment of universes of universes, animated by living intelligence that we call Source consciousness. All of us are participating right now as part of the magic of a cosmic evolution that some of us refer to as ascension, some call revelation, some call Armageddon, and some are basically just calling a midlife crisis. And that’s okay.

But this experience is a macrocosm of intelligent energy existing in the intentional unfolding of creative forces that are all around us, of which we are part. Some scholars have contemplated that worlds are born and they end, and so do universes, and even the cosmos pushes itself to an endpoint only to reboot again.

These kinds of things are interesting for us to ponder, like so many do, and are likely to become fairly common conversation as we evolve our capacities to understand what all of that might mean for us.

All these suppositions beg a question that is very large, even as a paradox of what the human heart is as a center of a spirit’s Source power in a physical body. It’s a question that contains the pulsing of an entire cosmos installed inside a single heartbeat - a heartbeat that encompasses all of the natural laws of creation and all the creative power of God itself.

If we’re not careful, if we’re not inwardly directed, we might suffer some discrepancies in our truth about those natural laws and the truth about the Absolute That Is, or the unified One Creator of all that is, from whom all things flow and grow and go.

True to our human nature, we might form our own ideas with the free will we have and the egos that direct it through our physical experiences and the emotional bodies we have, often having little memory, maybe, of some of what we know and who we truly are.

Do we posit the ideas that we contrive with limited information as absolutes, maybe with very little contemplation, inner dialogue or verification from within ourselves? For example, do we watch a podcast and it becomes our truth? Do we join a chat-room conversation and it becomes our truth? Do we hear a sermon and it becomes our truth? Do we accept what trusted people say, and do we trust ourselves with the information without due diligence, introspection or any kind of scrutiny?

Never mind that folks on the other side of the production or the show might have their own understanding, priorities, viewpoints and agendas. Much like characters in horror films, their appeal is to go their own way and invest in their own information without feeling into our inner knowing.

Is it possible that our character might be left standing behind the proverbial kitchen door, trying to find a way to make it to the car? Does that make sense? Maybe we’re afraid because of what we’ve heard. We’re confused. Maybe we know just enough to run crazy with the ideas rolling around in our brains, trying to put all this information together. We create this dialogue in our heads, and sometimes it overwhelms us.

Is it possible that we can allow such a thing to happen to this brain that’s trying to figure everything out through an ego?

The podcaster, the chat room and the priest are all providing a background against which truth can arise when we contemplate it. That’s their good work to do, but it’s not the full work, the final work or the deciding work to be done.

Sometimes information has good intentions and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes the truth of those messages aligns with the Absolute, and sometimes it doesn’t. But the true work of sorting it all out is to do what our heart commands of us as spiritual beings: to feel into the current of ideas and pull them through the intuition of our own knowing.

Sometimes discernment is not that easy for humans whose free spirits inhabit fairly entrenched minds, waylaid by histories of dark manipulation and mind control. Then we add doubt, panic and distraction. It becomes a horror-story plotline up there in the brain, doesn’t it?

The incapacity for discernment is the guiding premise behind every horror movie ever made. Do we see that? Does that make sense alongside the goal of human energetic separation? Folks are writing these scenes with the intent of making sure characters go any which way but stay together. Characters scatter and the inevitable happens.

It’s sort of a cheeky way to think about a serious idea, maybe. But can we think about this idea of energetic separation a little more together?

Some of us look for guidance all day long on our phones. We’re seeing something of a movement that says we must increase our frequencies in order to make it to what our subconscious minds probably conceive of as heaven. In many cases, we have to “make it,” and now it becomes a struggle. It becomes fear. It becomes a measurement of us against ourselves, trying to do the right thing.

Have we created suffering for ourselves? We think: Will our children make it? Whatever “make it” means, will they make it? Will our families make it? Will our friends make it? Will our pets make it?

If the people we love would just hold on a little longer, maybe raise their vibrations a little better, they wouldn’t be so sick or they wouldn’t be so poor, and they’d make it. They could see the truth everybody’s talking about online. They could see this truth everybody’s communicating, this external truth everybody is suffering with.

Can we see the suffering here, friends? Words matter all the time. It’s a painful lesson for each and every single one of us because humans love language. We love our words. Sometimes we can express them so beautifully. Sometimes we trip over them, and sometimes we say things we immediately know we wish we could take back. But we can’t. Words heal, but they can hurt too.

Then life becomes something of a performance, an animation of the advice everybody gives us when all these conversations are taking place and we’re trying to do good, feel good and make it to wherever we’re supposed to be. We’re feeling like it’s me against the world.

The pull to perform becomes intense. The pull to separate becomes intense and intentionally considered because, by separating ourselves out - which is what the conversations are telling us - we’re moving in the right direction, right? We are celebrated by people who are awake and aware and enlightened and ascending and special.

Of course, we’re not better than anybody else, but we’re hearing that we’re “called,” whatever that means. And that makes us special. It makes all the difference. We allow this to become a human truth that celebrates the special nature of a few of us because we get it. We get this thing called ascension. We need to feel special because we need to make it. We need to get it.

We see this conversation as a lifeline that gives us hope, entreats faith and administers resilience. We survive another day on such things, don’t we?

Before I cause frustration, I want to go back to the koan at the beginning of the show and consider a Zen perspective on the idea of separation.

The open-palms activity appeared in my inbox this week, and I am most grateful for the message. I really fretted over how to share what’s in my heart, friends. This particular activity was a beautiful gift offered to me as a way to share with you what’s in my heart and what’s on my mind.

As we look at our hands, the left and the right, we realize we can either put them together or hold them apart. But what is apart? What is separate as we hold up our hands?

In Zen, the description of separation that I studied this week is a matter of contact. That was the word used: contact. Are our palms separated by the space between them, or are they connected by that space? Do they help each other function in the tasks they perform by their separation or by their connection?

What is the answer? The answer is: The choice is yours, and what would be accomplished? The choice is yours.

Can we raise our conscious awareness in ways that transcend us as individual sovereign spirits? Of course we can. Can we do it in ways that transcend broader humanity as a collective of spirits? Of course. Can we do it in ways that create resonance between human hearts across a worldwide energetic field? Can we call a new reality? Of course.

The only difference in our work is our focus. Are we hands separated, or are we hands connected, doing the good work of enlightenment? It’s an age-old question, a question of every age of man. It’s usually a question asked at the eleventh hour before things start going really wrong, historically.

If we can help it, not this time, friends. Not this time. But our last ascension effort bore this out. There were too few people interested in the message of a collective shift in consciousness. Those who did listen sort of secreted the information away and created small sects and private communities of believers around this particular kind of information, in large part because the information was destroying the darkness of that time and dark actors were determined to hold on to humanity at all costs. They succeeded by sowing seeds of separation.

Today, we don’t want to lower our vibration, so we stay away from anything that can jeopardize our Golden Age opportunities, out of necessity according to our own reasoning, whatever that may be. But back in the day, Christ gave a different instruction, and it came to serving what mattered most to move humanity where it needed to go. He had a different message that had to be told.

So who did he seek out to associate with, knowing the uphill battle they faced trying to push humanity through that golden doorway, trying to create the energy of a shift in consciousness and maybe trying to plant a seed of information that would ensure a future evolution of man?

Who did Christ seek out to associate with? Who did he share the news of ascension with? The Pharisees and the Sadducees? The chosen ones? The pious? The proud? Or the common man, the maligned man, the downtrodden, the degraded, the indigent, the outcast, the unfit, maybe?

He didn’t spend much time on those who thought they already knew everything there was to know and didn’t really want to hear anymore. He spoke to those who needed a message, who would hear it, take it into their hearts and create energy from it.

They needed the good news. They needed to feel part of what would ascend them, of what made them better men and women. They needed to be told they were worthy before they felt it. They needed to sense their sacred nature before they could possibly believe it could be true.

They needed to feel included in the divine plan of the salvation of man because life had already left them behind. Something needed to help them dare to presume that they could be loved by an all-powerful God, a God of union and communion, and that such a person could trust that was true even before feeling it in the soul.

But, you know, we do love all the others who just can’t get it together. We love them, right? We love them. We don’t want to judge anybody. Those poor slobs who won’t wake up - all they have to do is wake up, right? Those who have chosen in their spirit to be left behind. We love them all. God bless them all. God blesses us as well, doesn’t He?

Since we’re growing into special things and we’ve got places to go, wings to grow and powers to assume in a new place, we won’t have to be bothered by the brother who can’t get it together, right? The sister who can’t see how right we are. We’ve been right all along, right? After all, we can love at a distance and still keep our vibes high, right? Can’t we do that?

So here’s the thing. Atlantis destroyed itself and everything else playing the “I’m special” game, friends. We’re special and we’re in control. We’re growing our powers and they’re better than yours, and we have separated ourselves to prove our positions.

We’ve been there, friends, and we’ve done that a lot, all in the name of the evolution of humanity. The spiritual among us became energetic manipulators, and their causes grew into the politics of destruction. Are we not advised more wisely this time around? Surely we are.

Can we imagine such a thing today? Of course not, unless we get distracted and take our eyes off what matters most. I want to talk about what is starting to plague us at the eleventh hour of a most extraordinary shift in human consciousness, and that’s the illusion of separation.

Our conscious evolution is not a function of what separates us. It can’t be. It is only a function of unity. That’s all it can be, friends. It can only unify us.

This beautiful unfolding of a beautiful cosmic plan is meant to create a force of harmonic resonance across all consciousness to a perfect pulse point that aligns us all. Some of us dream of the singularity of this extraordinary moment in an eternal now.

If we’re willing to consider that there were teachings left for us, intent on reaching us today for the very purpose of our endeavor at the end of this age, don’t we want to consider what those instructions were? Was it instruction on separation or on service? Was it sharing the good news?

Can we serve what we hold at a distance, friends? Can we be the salt of the earth? Can we be the light of the world in those circumstances? Do our hands serve others with palms facing in connection to our good work, or separating what we do from that work?

The answer is yes and yes, because it depends on what we choose to do. It’s a matter of our discernment. Christ called us into service, and he taught discernment as we serve. I suppose the two go together.

When we think about discernment, it does require something of an informed choice, doesn’t it? It’s a meditation on the soundness of ideas that we measure against the truths that guide us, maybe, and resistance to taking action without a knowing that settles our hearts on the way forward.

We watch and we wait for peace, and that peace tells us what we need to know, and we call it discernment, don’t we?

I’m just wondering: Is there peace in your spirit when I tell you, friends, that you are the salt of this earth? You preserve peace and dignity and love. And you are the light of the world - you, friend, you - lighting the way for those standing in the darkness. Your presence is required if you would shine for those on that path homeward.

Friends, it may be true when it’s all said and done that we do separate our energies into finely crafted dimensional realities for man, I guess you would say, on this healing journey of ascension. Is that for us to say how it goes? Is that our work to do? Or is that the work of maybe others better positioned to guide us in the unfolding of such a grand plan?

In the meantime, maybe our work is to unify a world separated by suffering, circumstance and fear. Our work may be to serve the interests of others the same as we serve ourselves.

This message - the message of service - is the only way Christ could get people to understand their role, understand their power, understand their journey and understand the big picture, the cosmic picture. It’s always hard to get the human mind to see the big picture, and that’s true even now.

He urged everybody who would listen into service, into healing and helping, and into honoring the human condition by a presence of heart. There are powerful energies that move universes of universes in the beating of our hearts. So maybe service instead of separation, friends. Maybe that’s something to think about.

Let me share the website of the practitioner I studied from this week. You can find her online at the Dharma Academy. Her name is Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi. That’s Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi, and that’s the Dharma Academy online. It’s super easy to find. She also posts a lot of great things on YouTube, so let me recommend taking some time to find her online this week.

In Zen, the struggle of separation is actually what defines suffering. Did we know that? The struggle of separation itself is what defines suffering. It’s an illusion of parts, as it were.

We suffer trying to understand which parts of us are real, which parts are valid and which things about us are important. But we aren’t pieces of ourselves. We are a whole of many things that coexist, all of it together. Our balance - that alignment we work toward - is the happiness of accepting all of those parts as a beautiful masterpiece. Does that make sense?

We are supposed to be on our way to a higher-dimensional experience as a humanity, and as we know, folks are calling it a 5D experience. Can we realize that such an elevation in consciousness is one that steps out of duality? What it steps into is wholeness, friends. Putting all the pieces together, it steps into wholeness.

Are we separating ourselves out just at the moment the cosmos is embracing greater connection? Could that be true? Is that what we’re seeing? Are we holding on to duality just at the moment we are most able to begin to release it? Just something to think about.

What if discernment were a tool we were able to use more ably in these times of disclosure and inquiry? Because there’s only going to be more disclosure. That is where we are in this human journey. We are now in the truth-telling that has been prophesied for ages. It is an ancient prophecy that this is a time of truth-telling.

Disclosure is on its way, friends. It’s here. It’s on its way. It is the requirement of us moving forward into our higher selves, this requirement of truth-telling. It’s essential for us, and it’s here.

How do we use discernment as a tool as we’re hearing things online, as we’re reading things, as we pick up that phone and scroll through all kinds of stuff on all kinds of sites and channels? How do we use that discernment? Could it help us trust our own intuition a little better?

So what is discernment? We tend to think of discernment as an inner voice that subjectively understands the truth of a situation and can guide us intuitively. But that’s called intuition. The immediate feeling about something that we have a knowing about - that’s intuition, friends, and our intuition is growing.

A lot of the time, we need more information and more pause in order to form a better knowing about something. That’s what we call discernment. Discernment is the mental process of creating clarity around the truth of a situation.

What is required first, before anything else, is the capacity to be objective about what we’re seeing, hearing or feeling. It means stepping back from reaction and emotion and allowing a fuller picture to emerge. It means taking an objective path through the information we’re getting and then putting it all together as something of a final read on things.

We test our viewpoint, feelings and perspective against the objective information we have, and take the step to investigate further to our satisfaction. Discernment is knowing when to know more: when to step back and pause, gather more information, or allow time for the physical alarm response that we call intuition to kick in if it does.

So the two are different: intuition and discernment. Both are necessary and important and part of our evolution of human consciousness. We can help ourselves along by practicing listening and feeling for intuition, guided by the objective process of greater discernment.

We can train our discernment by identifying the baseline standards that we hold for things. What are our values? What are our guiding principles? What is true for us? These are standards against which information can be tested, and we can test ideas if we know how to do it.

Why don’t we try it out together a little bit? We don’t need pencil or paper unless we’d like to write things down and work with them this week, and that’s always welcome. Some of us do like to use our notebooks.

Let’s test an idea that we’re not so sure about. Get an idea in your mind, something you’re thinking about, something rolling around in your brain that you’re not too sure about, something you’ve got questions about. Let’s choose that idea to work with.

Choose an idea unique to each of us that we’ve heard or read, or maybe something we’ve been thinking about. We can write it down if we want to and make some notes, or we can hold it in our minds.

Let’s ask a few questions about this idea we’re not so sure about. The first question we might want to ask is: Where did this idea come from? And I mean the original idea. Can we trace it back to its source? What is the source of this idea? How has it evolved, and how is it being used now?

The environment in which we’re finding it right now is important because ideas evolve as they’re passed along. Then we can ask: Why was the idea shared with us? For what purpose? Really think about this. It will help us understand the underlying agenda for sharing the information in the time and place in which it was shared.

We can ask: Who is the audience for this information, and why is that the audience? What do I have to do with the audience? Am I part of this audience in a natural way? Does it make sense for me?

Next, we can ask: What are the fruits of this idea? What is the result of this idea being valid? Does that result align with our truth, our values and our knowing?

Finally: What will change for me in believing this idea? How does the information change me, and is that change reasonable and aligned with my spirit? We’re going to feel into this information. How does it feel?

These questions can put us on the path to discernment as we learn to integrate a principled approach to information management, I guess you would call it. Does that make sense?

I hope we integrate some of these questions as we go along listening to the things we listen to. I have to say, I was fascinated by these questions. I want to try them out this week as part of my mindful practice, and maybe it will be a practice for you too.

We all have trusted advisers, mentors and folks who help us navigate the times, and that’s always really important for us. For the rest, we can decide to arm ourselves with a little discernment and ask some objective questions about what we hear and see and what we’re trying to better understand.

It’s a powerful skill for days such as these, don’t you think? Maybe we play around with that this week as we go along listening to what we hear, moving through our channels, getting onto YouTube and listening to all those things we tend to listen to. It can help us work our way through lots and lots of disclosure and information and authorities providing all kinds of what we might call intel out in the world today.

Thank you so much for being with me this afternoon. It is time for me to go. I’m so glad we could spend time together today. I really want to thank you for sharing your energy here in this space. I’m so grateful, and thank you for making it possible for all of us, BBS. We love you so much, BBS.

So, friends, until next time.

Speaker 1 - Announcer / Prerecorded Voice:
Time to head home, friends. Thanks for being a part of today’s journey. We’ll see you back on the playground next Sunday at 1 p.m. Central Time on bbsradio.com. Make sure to subscribe if you enjoyed the show. Find us on Telegram and X to share your insights on today’s topics. Your input heals the child in us all.