Speaker 1: 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 being of your child. Can you come out and play today?

Speaker 2: Welcome, everybody, to Apple Pie Playground. I’m your host, Valerie.

Do I have a topic close to my heart today. I want to share it and see if it makes as much sense to you as it seems to make to me. It’s a message that pretty much has been virtually lost in the age of truth, so to speak, and in the age of personal best, individual paths to enlightenment, independent work of ascension, and taking care of ourselves. In all of those kinds of mantras, we’re missing something really big, friends. Really, really big. It’s so big, it feels impossible to miss. But are we?

I want to thank you, friends, for being here. There’s no place I would rather be this afternoon. And thank you, BBS, for being with us, too. We love you so much, BBS.

There are some very special, highly enlightened folks, chosen leaders with a great task of turning humanity in the right direction of our ascension. It’s a heavy lift, a long, long, heavy lift. Many incarnations, likely. And just to think about it, it’s actually probably miraculous, frankly, that the hard work is paying off for us as a civilization right now, as it’s unfolding.

Now, having said all of that, there’s more to the story. It’s something of a backdrop that I’d like to use as an example for today’s conversation. There’s the part of the story where leadership theory reflects not just on leaders, but also on the people of a society, and offers some insight into the relationship between followers of great leaders and those leaders. Leadership theory asks a few questions.

As we know, nobody is a leader who isn’t followed. It’s called followership theory. I only know that because I looked it up, because I was super curious. I wanted to see where this whole idea led, and it led to some very interesting places. It turns out that the success of a leader hinges on the skill with which followers can follow. It hinges on the capacity of followers to do their good work in following.

I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that maybe our recent history, and actually maybe even longer than that, shows that we as societies across our planet have devolved in our skills as followers. In this relationship between leadership and followership, it’s why we have absolutely no power or no social capital left in our organized social environment anymore, to the point of our enslavement, actually, in many cases, in systems of social control that we are experiencing right now.

But the truth is, as a theory and practically speaking, our devolution and our freedoms are much more likely caused by the lack of follower skill and participation of the governed than by the tyranny of the governing. I get it. It’s hard to believe. It may take some time thinking about it. The idea is essentially that we have offered our sovereignty up to the leadership of our societies, in large part because we weren’t invested in being good followers. In this arrangement between ourselves and our leadership, we were not invested in being good followers as part of the deal that we made with the leadership we elected, provided for, or engaged.

Now, what do I mean? That’s pretty heavy duty. That’s a heavy-duty accusation for some of us, and I hear it. Some of you are probably turning off right now. But if you can, hear me out. We’re going somewhere fairly enlightened with all of this, I promise you, but it’s going to take some muddy steps as we move forward.

Followership theory tells us that followers actually play a pivotal role in the success of shared efforts or goals between leaders and those who follow. In America, just as an example, we do not like being called followers. Thank you very much. No, not us. Call us anything you want, but do not call us followers. But we are a brilliant case study for what happens when a proud people divest themselves from their deeply held beliefs because they become preoccupied with the individual self-interest of living their own lives.

We can call it tunnel vision, but we can also call it a word that might be of interest to us: atomism. Atomism, in the political sense, describes a society where the bonds of community dissolve, leaving a mass of isolated, self-contained individuals, or atoms. Because isolated individuals lack the collective power or collective drive to rule themselves, they easily surrender their agency to the control of others. In many cases, those others exert command and control over the governance of whole communities or societies.

How about that? We don’t want to believe that, do we? It’s sort of irritating as an idea, especially to some of us. But American political theory has produced a hearty debate among political philosophers on this idea of atomism. That becomes obvious when we realize that rugged individualism is sort of a badge of honor for many Americans as a political philosophy.

But let’s think about atomism with respect to leadership, followership, and relationship. Followership theory suggests that leadership cannot exist without willing followers, and that effective followers are not passive by any means. They actively manage up the scale of leadership. In other words, they manage goals from the ground up as leaders start from the top down. Effective followers support the leader by providing critical thinking touch points that actually prevent ethical or strategic missteps on the part of leaders.

We’re talking about active participation and collaboration in order to prevent bad decisions and undesirable outcomes. We’re talking about robust and engaged followership as necessary to the success of good leadership. Leaders and followers, then, are partners. They are necessary partners, and followers are essential in the accountability of leaders. They maintain alignment between the goals intended and leader behavior that assures success in those goals.

Followers are a force of leadership, a force that propels leadership in a direction. That is going to come back as we continue our conversation. It will be important when we think about the force in this relationship between followers and leaders. They are intertwined together with the leader and with the outcomes created between leaders and followers.

Is that what we recognize as the way things actually work with our leaders? Does that sound like something successful in our current experience or our historical experience with leadership? You can pick any country, organization, or environment and put that idea to the test. We tend to blame the leader, don’t we? Especially historically, when things don’t work out well or when terrible things happen. We tend to blame the leader, and the question is, should we? Of course we should. But don’t we also need to take a look at our own participation, or lack of it, as a society?

If we’re really honest with ourselves, bad leaders are surrounded by bad followers. We can’t get away from that relationship. The force behind the results or outcomes of leadership is focused on the capacity of the followership of any given society, community, or group of people. I’m so sorry to say that, friends. We are all to blame when we look around and we’ve lost agency, liberty, and voice.

But we’re not about blame and judgment. We don’t do those things here. It’s not very fun, and it’s not super effective. We don’t need that kind of lens. So let’s move past that idea and consider how the situation affects us. Let’s personalize it.

Ancient scientific theory, and even into modern theory up until quantum mechanics hit the stage, theorized that matter was organized atomically. Atomism, at least as far back as Greek scientific history, saw the makeup of matter as discrete atoms of energy. Einstein agreed, by the way. But we see something different in quantum mechanics. We see an evolution of the idea of the atom. The construct of atoms has moved beyond the idea of physical matter, and we’re starting to talk about energy as indivisible collectives of action, of motion. It’s what’s called Planck’s constant.

That’s deep water, friends, so we’ll stay on the surface here when we say that quantum mechanics conceives of matter as a force. It’s a force, a life force, a flow, as it were. Max Planck said that matter does not exist in isolation, but is the result of a force causing subatomic particles to vibrate. Well, what does all that mean, really? Maybe you’re thinking, “Val, you’re throwing a lot of stuff against the wall.” I don’t want to get us too far in the weeds, so please forgive me if I have.

What it means is that there is no separation of the forces of energy until we decide to observe it as something material. We decide the world we create. In every second, in every microsecond, we are actually creating reality. Nothing exists until we create it except the energy, or flow, of the potentiality of what can be created. In other words, we manipulate the life force of an entire cosmos into the reality we decide to observe. And it’s a shared reality, friends, so we are all creating that.

The idea that we exist in a shared reality changes everything about us and our understanding of our own life force. It changes our understanding of source creation and its work. It changes our understanding of what Christ was telling us 2,000 years ago, and really only a very few got it then. I think only a few are really getting it now, and that’s the big topic I wanted to talk about today.

In contemporary theoretical physics, the concept of the ultimate atom has moved beyond physical matter. Quantum mechanics dictates that energy and even the fundamental constants of nature are indivisible. So modern atomism often refers to the quanta of action, the indivisible unit of quantum information. Quantum information, in this quanta of action, is information in action.

I’m wondering about the end of an age that we are in. Are we at something of a crossroads in the way we conceive of our material world, its relationship to an energetic cosmos, and our relationship to each other? How do we resolve ourselves as spiritual beings tethered to source consciousness that flows indivisibly throughout all of life collectively? I mean in us, among us, between us, and as us.

Can we divide ourselves from God, friends, or from each other? We can do a lot to isolate ourselves from the experiences of source consciousness. We can individualize ourselves, our unique sovereign experiences. We know that we have unique sovereign experiences. My experience is my own, and yours is your own. But can we call isolation a natural way of being?

Do mothers cry from their children’s pain merely because they observe the suffering? Do lovers pulse with electricity only because they notice passion between each other? Or is there something more here? Is there more that binds us together in the human experience? As individuated as this experience is, I have my experience and you have your experience, but somehow there is indivisibility in this energy that runs through us.

Adopting the adage of rugged individualism may be what we do as a fix for a deteriorated social order rather than an actual experience of the flow of conscious awareness as energy. It may be what we do when we individualize ourselves in this loss of inalienable rights that we’ve experienced, an attitude we feel we need in order to attempt liberation from the leadership that we have, in a way, unfollowed.

Is it possible that we have undermined our true selves by perceiving that we stand alone in this human experience? Are we searching for sovereignty that our soul experiences and that we have forgotten? In a manner foreign to us as celestial beings, this physical experience may be separated enough from soul memory that we feel very isolated and individuated in this material experience.

Do you remember when we talked about sovereignty as a new sort of definition? We said that celestial spiritual sovereignty is as much a matter of ensuring no trespass against the sovereignty of others as it is making sure we are not trespassed against. Sovereignty is a collective or shared action that requires reciprocal participation in order to uphold and ensure sovereignty among all of us together as spiritual experiences here in a physical world.

Why would we conceive of sovereignty that way? Is it because we can’t ever truly exist in the vacuum of our own separate life force? Is it because we need something that helps us create an individual experience as a teacher in this material realm? Maybe we call it sovereignty as a benefit of what we do as we add information and experience to this celestial whole, or source consciousness.

Because we are inseparable as a force, as a flow, as source energies imagining a material reality together, there is a degree of inseparability. It’s something of a paradox. It might not even really matter except for what we know about what happens when two or more are gathered. Do you remember where that language comes from? When we are gathered together in Christ’s name, there will Christ be also. There will be Christos in what we are doing together. There will be the consciousness of source among us and between us.

This Christ consciousness is the life force that runs through us, the vibration that moves the atomic into a flow, into a force, inseparable in its motion. Our sense of what is individual, separated, discrete, and isolated is something of an illusion.

Somebody asked me a couple of days ago what Christ consciousness was. We took some time to look at a definition, and it included the idea of experiencing a perfected state of consciousness or connection to source, and a union with divine essence that aligns us with source consciousness. This universal consciousness was biblically considered to be something of an anointed state of being.

It all makes sense, doesn’t it? Where two or more are gathered, we are energizing a shared field of consciousness. Not as a couple of distinct energies standing around together, but as a flow of life force between us. We are essentially self-actualizing as a shared vibration. Our energies combine, and it shakes out, so to speak.

Just ask your teenager what it means, and they’ll tell you. They’ll say, “It’s a vibe.” We were vibing. We were all hanging out and vibing. They know exactly what it means. This can be hard for later generations to conceive of, especially Generation X. Gen X is trudging through suffering as individual hearts, beating as determined, independent pacekeepers through this life, one step at a time, determined to be individual and separate from a matrix of horrors. That’s Gen X right there, the survivors.

But ask your teenager, because it is very easy for them to sit around and vibe in a very different way, creating a coherent resonance together. The idea that a group of us can synchronize our heartbeats and our breathing is a real thing. When we are together long enough, there is a natural energetic synchronization. Breathing begins to synchronize, too. It all happens subconsciously. It’s called subconscious synchronization.

Energetically, we are already moving together in this flow. This life force is already doing its thing subconsciously, with this built-in natural expression of our earliest beingness. Our essential selves are held in the subconscious. We become together the strongest result of our resonance together. If one of us is super angry, it changes the energy for all of us.

Lots of gurus and truthers want to tell us that isn’t the case. We hear that we have to keep our own independent vibrations as high as we can. We have to stand in our own independent vibration and do our own thing. But I’m going to tell you, friends, it’s just not possible to engage this shared experience of the flow we are co-creating and also stand there in rugged individualist form while maintaining our own vibrational integrity. We will move to the strongest result of our resonance together.

So, do you want to recalibrate your vibration in a mob of angry people? Then you really have one choice. Leaving is your choice, friends. Leave the situation. Leave the group. Walk away from the negative synergy being created. That’s your choice. It’s also why some folks don’t get along together energetically. We call that not having synergy together. There is discord. There is what we call negative synergy. That’s when the total outcome is less than its parts. In this case, we lose vibration.

When we think back to the times that Christ moved himself in and out of groups, traveled with those he traveled with, and stayed away from those he stayed away from, Christ could not afford negative synergy. Going into places, doing what he needed to do, performing the acts he needed to perform, and teaching what he needed to teach was something of a fight and exhausting at times because of this shared collective consciousness that we each tap into together. We are all contributing at every single moment, wherever we are and whatever we are doing.

We just want to be careful where we cast our pearls, friends. It takes a lot out of you. In some cases, we are not creating resonance together that is pleasant, peaceful, or harmonious. We have felt that. Being in the same environment means being in the same energetic field. When we are in a crowd of angry, hateful people, guess what energy we are being forced to share.

Here’s the part that we don’t really talk about as spiritual practitioners. The thing we miss as gurus of spiritual teachings, unfortunately, I think, is this: ascension is not an individual experience. Yes, we are unique frequencies. It’s our cosmic identifier. But what we are doing is integrating life force into a shared physicality, a material world. In other words, when we vibrate at a high vibration, we increase the flow of particles into energy.

Now I’m heading 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.