You don’t say, “Well Bob, that was great hearing that final story of yours, well, I guess that’s it, I now know everything about you, so thanks and it’s been good knowing you”.

And even if you know them well, they go out and experience more new life everyday, that they will have feelings about, thoughts about, that they will want to digest on their own and with you and others. The depth of human experience is infinite for each one of us. Probably, human consciousness is the greatest thing in the entire universe, and maybe that’s why the universe has to be so big to simply be able to contain it. 

(Sorry Carl Sagan, maybe we’re not inconsequential little dots on an insignificant star in a remote corner of an average galaxy)

You could measure the full volume and total energy capacity of the sun, and figure out how long until it burns out. But we humans keep generating more deep thoughts and emotions every moment, what is already massive just keeps growing and expanding. 

Like the universe we are part of we are expansive energy beings by our nature. 

Most energy is just basic physical energy, it doesn’t have intelligence or consciousness. But human energy is put forth as transmissions of thought and emotion. It’s also a physical energy but it’s infused with our consciousness, it’s not just sound waves when we speak, it’s also our conscious content of love and anger and emotion and ideas and questions transmitted in the look on our face, and our breathing rate and our stance and all these other signals we are sending visually along with the words in the sound waves in order to have relationship with others and wanting to know their consciousness, in that back and forth volley.

Relational consciousness is at the very root reality of our consciousness…so many things are caught up in that dynamic, our whole life and ability to thrive in life is caught up in that relational dynamic. It’s all about the volley. 

And because of the massive volume of each of our lives, we are ever engaged in knowing one another more. There is no end to knowing someone. There is no end to the depth of human creativity shared in our art amongst large groups of us. 

But not only do we have an infinite volume to our beings, the quality of our intelligent consciousness is so dense. Some things are just more valuable per pound. It takes 75,000 flowers to make a pound of Saffron and it has to be picked by hand, so it’s really valuable per ounce, dense with value.

Human consciousness both humming along within us and radiating out of us to others is just so more immensely packed with meaning then normal energy making it so much more valuable than any other energy that exists, that we know of. 

In every moment of our life we are gifted with our own immense value and gifted to be around and receiving transmissions of other humans. 

We’ve been gifted or a good term might be granted…life, from wherever it came…our own and others has been granted to us. 

When you imagine all the depth of consciousness of each of us and there are 8 billion of us all together, and growing, if you add all that together it’s beyond imagining the value.

Human life is the most valuable thing. 

If you take a moment to really consider that…the immense value of human life, it can change you…almost like a religious conversion, to truly and fully realize the value of each human life. 

You can go from taking others for granted, to believing deep in your being that each person around you is immensely beautiful and special and wonderful. And if you do that, if you convert to being one who recognizes the immense value of every human on earth, then you will embed in yourself a deep sort of, “human value consciousness” that can guide you forward as you seek to become a net expander of everyone you meet, and if you do that you will have a beautiful life.

Since you live in your own consciousness, which is a consciousness of relationship, and the volley of consciousness back and forth is what fulfills us, and what heals us, so if you have embedded a deep sense of the value of each human, that will guide your volley, and make it much more concerned about benefitting the other, and never ever never ever harming them…that would be unimaginable…like being a steward of a great ancient sculpture that in a million years you could not conceive of harming that thing of such great value. 

If you live like that with benefitted people all around you, and nobody you’ve harmed, it is inevitable in a world of relational consciousness that you will be rewarded with other humans giving to you. And that is how humans end up having beautiful lives.

And so let’s examine more up close this root reality of the volley of consciousness, of human life content volleyed back and forth between people.

In the first chapter, we built this giant worldwide structure to have a context within which to fit every human expression of their human life energy toward others, through that we could see this thing we call love is much bigger than maybe we’d realized. And in uncovering that we see we have work to do to engage all of that, to leave no asset unused.

Now that we’ve built this building, let’s examine how the electricity flows through it. Let’s look right at it up close and imagine how it flows in and out of us and ask what exactly is love, what is this human energy flowing between us and why does it get messed up? 

︒︒︒ Taking Cycle Out of the Cycle of Life ︒︒︒

We have to go back to the beginning of my quest, which started when I was 17. Only two years later I was on a plane flying to my new college in Honolulu, and my inflight meal had a wonderful and strange fruit that I’d never encountered before. I had to call over the flight attendant and ask her what it was. She smiled and replied, “Mango”. 

I was amazed by the texture and flavor and mouth feel. And it occurred to me how much better this was than the similar Papaya. In my best imaginative memory version I might have replied to the flight attendant that “Papaya is a Mango wannabe”, but I don’t remember for sure, maybe I formed the thought in the moment after she stepped away (don’t you hate when that happens), however since then many have agreed vociferously with the take. 

After the first few years in Oahu, I eventually ended up on the Big Island of Hawaii at an extension campus in a beautiful remote northern district at the top of the island near where the bikes turn around to head back to Kona on the 112 mile halfway point of the Ironman Triathlon bicycle portion of the race. I’m still grateful I got to live for almost a year in that incredibly beautiful remote area before returning to Kona like the bicyclists. 

The Big Island is called that because its actual name is Hawaii, the same name as the whole state, so to avoid confusion they call it the Big Island and it is bigger than all the other islands combined. And it’s bigger for a reason, because it’s the youngest island and is still literally expanding and growing every day. 

You get a feel for the actual mechanisms of planet earth when you live there because magma from the deep inner core of our planet is still rising to the surface every single day through lava tubes. When the molten liquid lava hits the cool water it explodes into cooling pieces of lava rock and sand and boils the water into giant plumes of steam that can be seen for miles. Eventually it piles up enough to break the surface and become new land. Every single day The Big Island gets bigger. 

The Big Island expands at this point in its life cycle but the time will come when like older islands it will begin to erode and diminish. Sometimes the cycle of life is long, and sometimes it’s short, as in the mango. 

When I was in the beautiful lush northern area of the big island there was a huge mango tree that was so fruitful we could not keep up with eating all its mangos. And so they would drop to the ground around the tree and slowly rot back into the earth. Whenever you went back there at the back of the property you could smell the sweet sickly smell of the cycle of life happening. 

We had a teacher in Honolulu, from Southern California also, who was famous for being high energy and pushing us to be more radical, and he would tell the story of when some of his buddies back home suggested he should “mellow” out. He ran and grabbed a dictionary and looked it up and it said, “Mellow means fully ripe and about to rot”, so he even more energetically proclaimed, “Mellow?! No way man, I’m not gonna mellow out”! 

You may have seen a time lapse photography of a little nub becoming a flower and then the flower wilts and the nub turns into a fruit and slowly grows to its full size and color. The mango expands with life and reaches a peak of thriving when it is fully ripe. 

It’s like a rock if you throw it straight up into the air, it will have energy to keep going higher and higher and then it will reach its zenith, its peak and stop there for a moment before all the energy going against the gravity of the earth is finally spent, and then gravity reclaims it and pulls it back down. 

The mango is fully ripe and either we will eat it and transfer that energy to our own cycle of life or it will fall to the ground to reach it’s peak ripeness of full thriving, and then relax and mellow out back into the earth. 

The mango has a life cycle of just months. You and me have a life cycle of 90 some years and the universe has a life cycle of trillions of years. The cycle is always the same expansion to peak and then slow diminishment. The only difference is the amount of energy each has which affects how long it can go. 

But then along comes human consciousness and disrupts everything. We humans take the cycle out of cycle of life. We can control the life or death of things because unlike all other natural things we have a conscious ability to act and change things. 

We can expand someone in the beginning of a conversation and then without realizing it pivot and begin diminishing them towards the end of the conversation, which is most likely to end soon because they now feel the diminishment and seek to break away. 

We humans existing in nature and the ongoing cycles of life all around us naturally following their arcs, have the ability to interrupt nature and impose our own energy to expand or diminish. We plant seeds and create new plants. We choose to have offspring or not. Animals don’t ponder whether they want children now or ever. 

︒︒︒ Expand or Diminish ︒︒︒

And we in our relationships, we are daily expanding or diminishing one another. And these constant ongoing dynamics are the very nature of our human nature and are the actual acts of love and the opposite of love. To expand is to love and to diminish is the opposite. To give beneficial energy to another is to expand them. To take energy from them is to diminish them. 

But why would we ever take someone’s energy and diminish them, when expanding is so much better? That is the great question. We don’t want to be diminished ourselves, that doesn’t feel good, so why do we do it to others, and most crazily, why do we do it to those closest to us that we love?!?

These are the great questions. You can actually see the golden rule deconstructed in the above paragraph, we treat others as we would not like to be treated. So why do we diminish, when expanding is so much better? Which is asking exactly why do we do the opposite of love when love is so much better?

It’s not because we just decide to hate…nope, nobody wants to hate, we all want love…as we saw in the first chapter, parents don’t hate their children when they end up creating a dysfunctional family…something causes them to diminish.

I think we can follow the energy flow. It’s like the great movie scene, “Show me the money”…you can follow the money, or in this case the value, and what we value is getting some life, so if we follow that we can find out the true plans and motivations of our own hearts. Nobody’s gonna pay for what they don’t want. 

We pay for what we desire. 

Desire is the key. Our human consciousness is full of desire. And sometimes everything goes right and a child is loved well and grows into a similarly giving adult who creates a warm and loving family. And if all goes right and they enjoy physical security and economic prosperity they will be good citizens who give expansive energy to their community and one another, and that’s so lovely when it happens. And then there’s the rest of us. 

And things don’t go right. Our family might be dysfunctional and leave us with huge deficits where the love should have been. 

This time it’s not show me the money it’s, “I ain’t got the money”. 

But I desire the money so bad, I may do things that are not beneficial to others in order to get it. 

Deficit is a great word, it means something is missing where there should be something there. I thought I had 1000 dollars in my bank account, when I wrote that check for $852, but now I notice I only have $700 in the account? That’s a 30% deficit from the 1000 I thought I had. I was supposed to have 1000 but now only have 700! I’m a deficit spender! I’m Tom Cruise in another movie flying an expensive fighter jet irresponsibly, I’m writing checks my body can’t cash. 

A deficit is like a vacuum, it wants to be filled and find equilibrium. We are all walking love deficits of desire. All of our motivations that direct all of our actions are based in our desires. How well we understand those interior dynamics within our own consciousness that we alone can know and maybe come to understand and control is the essence of mastering our one unique human life. 

Will we expand more than we diminish? Only we can control ourselves. We need to understand all our desires and all the deficits that suck at us like a vacuum compelling us forward into the acts that define our life. 

Who we are and who we will become is all based on whether we have enough in us to give more than we take, or whether our love deficits will compel us, often subconsciously and unbeknownst to our unexamined self to go and take and get the love we so desire and don’t have enough of…and when we take it we diminish those we take it from. 

It’s not very hard to find yourself just tripping forward in life led by deep and not well understood desires and slowly but surely becoming a net diminisher’…someone who takes more than they give.

As we trip along, we may sometimes rise to net giver, then later sink below to net taker, it’s a long life with ups and downs. In the volley of life energy in human relationships, there is the giving and the taking both.

All these agonizing questions of why doesn’t love work, why does this wonderful thing so often fail us, all come down to this crazy twist that love is so wonderful and we desire it so much that we can tilt out of balance and let our desire turn us into takers and when enough of us do that the world doesn’t go ‘round the right way. 

And this self blindness, this tripping forward in life following desires is because we don’t understand our ability to control how the energy within us flows. We fall into a pattern of trying to take that which we so need and desire and end up perpetually short. 

         ︒︒︒  One Way︒︒︒

But here is the great truth applied in a way that can change everything…we have to learn that taking simply does not work. You can’t take it, you can’t grab it or get it. It has to be given to you.

Because human energy only goes one way — it has to be given and can never be taken. 

Love only goes one way. 

That’s the crux of the whole human condition. Love is what we desire the most. Stuff happens and we don’t get enough, so our craving, our desire compels us to go try to get what we need, so we stumble around trying to take it and we diminish others as we go. And because it doesn’t work we end up in a sadly vicious cycle of getting more lonely and more desperate so then we go to take even more of what we need. Some people never escape tripping through life in this vicious cycle and their life and the lives of people around them are forever diminished. 

When you see someone spinning out of control, this is probably what’s happening to them, they are dumbfounded by events, they didn’t want to end up there, but they took too much (unbeknownst) and made others pull away and all they wanted was some love so now they don’t understand why all the hate?? If ever you get into that state when all you wanted was love and all you got was hate, that’s probably why…you didn’t know you were draining life out of people until it was too late and they’d run away, or fought back which seemed like a sudden unexplained attack. 

Many of us find a way to get some balance and we do have people giving love to us, and over time we mature and get even better, and there’s enough of us like that to keep humanity from spiraling into a destructive chaos overall. But we have these pockets of history, where in a particular region it does spiral into utter chaos and destruction; like Ukraine right now, with whole cities being destroyed; like the Holocaust in Europe in the 1930’s and 40’s; like the Rwandan civil self genocide; and like the life of a single young person in a horrible family, or another being trafficked against their will. But so far we’ve contained these mini-dystopia’s to a region, and the greater world keeps chugging along.

We’re at this sad equilibrium where we can keep chugging along, but there is still so much bad stuff in the world happening to individuals or whole nations and all this suffering still exists, and I’ve been desperate my whole life to try and understand why we do this to ourselves when being good to one another is just so much better and smarter. And I feel this dynamic of our desire compelling us to try to get the love we want so bad is the cause…and it’s because we fundamentally don’t understand that taking it doesn’t work, because love only goes one way out of us, and cannot be grabbed, or gotten, or taken or sucked into us.

The only way to break out of this vicious cycle is to learn that the only thing you can do is to give. You have to give life to get life. You have to give energy to others and expand them and then they will in turn be inspired to give their expansive energy of love to you. 

When you’re desperate for love, the only thing you can do is give love. 

That’s the only thing you can do. But fortunately for you there are the other parts of the Structure of Love that exist as a form of mercy, giving life to you even though you didn’t do anything…and you yourself through your work are also giving that mercy to others, so these indirect forms of love through work and art are truly mercies we all give one another built right into to our humanity. 

When you have that craving need inside, don’t try to fill it, but go give out of it…and that can seem impossible. And if you’re a generally good person and feel you love the whole world, and don’t have any plans to hurt anyone, this is how you can understand where you too become part of the problem. No matter how good we are, we are all hungry and desirous and we go and we act on those desires, and we try to get something. It’s in all those billions of little acts of trying to get something that humanity goes wrong. 

But we all have this fundamental need to feel good about ourselves. No one wakes up in the morning thinking about how they will try to suck life out of others today. We do bad thinking we are doing good. That’s why caricaturing people as the group who is trying to destroy things is such a waste of time and energy, we are all convinced we are good and seek to do good. We just have different ideas about how and what to do. 

Pure racists just want a lovely pure race to be all together, for the benefit of their family. They haven’t figured out yet that to do that requires hateful harmful actions. The movie evil mastermind wants to kill all the humans who are destroying the earth because he’s got such a sweet spot for Mother Earth…it takes the hero to explain that doesn’t make sense and go ahead and stop him.

This problem of thinking we are doing good, when in fact we are doing bad is true for 100% of humans, and it is in figuring your own self out that everything gets better. It’s not that you’re doing good or bad, it’s that you’re expanding or diminishing, and usually the diminishing happens unbeknownst to yourself…you don’t detect your desire causing you to try to take what you want. You walk away with your little piece and they walk away diminished. 

Diminishing someone is sucking life out of them which means you are putting them on the path to death eventually if you kept going. 

We have not learned, though others have told the tale before, that the only way to the true happiness we all desire, is to continually give and give some more and even when your empty keep giving. And then the physics of energy in our universe will work and all that expansive energy you’ve been infusing all around you cannot but help to flow back toward you. And when human life energy is given to you, that is the love we all hope for. 

But unfortunately, the less fulfilling meal you can get by taking does kind of work in a “better than nothing kind of way” and billions of us are living on that cold stale rotting food (It was already mellow days ago). 

Love only goes one way — out of you and into others, and out of them and into you. You can’t reach into them and take it out of them just as no one can force you to love them. 

This is the great secret of our love mechanism that we’ve heard before, but always forget. 

In this social theory of mine there’s plenty of stuff I just make up originally, but this is not one of them. That love only goes one way is just my way of saying it, but this has always been known and agreed upon by all religions and philosophies, and for most readers is kind of obviously self evident; No one can force you to love them. 

A quick little thought experiment will add to the eternal cultural truth: Imagine if you could suck out the life of another that you desire; Think of your generations most beloved and desired movie stars…now imagine if anyone could take their human life energy from them…soon poor Julia and Brad would be little raisins, all the life sucked out of them. 

Thankfully for them they have to choose to whom they will give their love. No one can take it out of them. That’s how human consciousness works, we are all in charge of our own conscious self. I’m glad little raisin versions of them won’t need to struggle to find acting parts, in like…raisin tv commercials or something. 

Let’s look at this weak point, this bottleneck in our human construction that becomes the point of failure, we are hungry for love, so we try to take it when in fact it can only be given. This is a fail…and it causes more fails up ahead.

We are all like the vampires in Anne Rice’s novel, Interview With A Vampire, in which they seek the greatest food they desire, fresh living human blood, but of course if you keep killing everyone in a town it will create a problem, a social reality most vampire stories dispense with. So sometimes they can’t get what they desire, and they have to take something lesser, so they drink the blood of rats, and this less satisfying meal is enough to keep them alive, it is their “better than nothing” compromise. One might wonder why a dead vampire needs to be kept alive, but we won’t nitpick the details. 

So how do we avoid that fail and transmit better? Transmit is to give. How can we move toward every human relational volley we engage so we are giving in it and not taking? We have this desire based fail bottleneck in us, how can we tame it and get control of it, so we are not going around “unbeknownst to ourselves” trying to suck life out of people? 

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We need to be knownst to ourselves, not unbeknownst. We need to be able to look at ourselves and count up all the parts of who we are and make sure they’re under our control. It’s those sneaky inner desires that get off on their own and compel us to do the unbeknownst stuff. How can we do a self inventory, count all the pieces and make sure none are sneaking off on their own?

We need a counter. Do you know what they call a person who counts? An auditor. Oooh sexy. How we love that sexy word. Everyone’s dream to receive a letter saying they will be audited. They are going to come in and count everything you’ve done. Yes, we hate that word and it is as sexy as accounting, but in fact, it’s the secret behind the sexy, if you find rich wealthy people sexy…because if you have a business, you have to know exactly what assets you have, exactly what liabilities you have in order to manage it in reality. 

It’s exactly like how driving a car needs to be based in reality, not in emotion. Because the reality on the road will roar up upon you and take away many good things if you do not focus on it, just as in business the reality will sneak up and grab you. So audit becomes a very sexy word for those that have wisdom in living in reality. 

Right now, I can think of many older rock bands and singers that if they had only understood the idea of audits, they could have been auditing their manager and their record company and all business relationships (who in order to work with them would have been compelled to accept such audits) and have completely avoided getting ripped of the way so many were. Probably those audits would have added a lot of good music to the world. 

What we all need to do to truly uncover the unbeknownst to ourself parts of ourself and get them to stop desire-diminishing other people is to do a self audit. 

I’m not going to try to teach you here how to do a self audit. The fact is there are many teachers all around us and always have been who can help us do that. Your grandparents have some good advice on it. Your religious leader does too. There are a million good books and podcasts and teachers in all areas of life. We just need to commit to doing it and find those sources all around us to help us do it. Philosophers call it “The examined life”…to know thyself. 

The only thing is to do it for the sake of getting better at giving to others, not just focused on you and your own happiness. And you can filter through the various teachers and methods by noticing how much they appeal to making YOU happy and wealthy…if it’s all about you you you and becoming wealthy then it’s obviously not going to help you figure out how to better give to others. 

In any situation, ask who is the beneficiary, and become good at making sure it isn’t you…and then when you’re better at making sure someone else is the beneficiary, work on increasing the quality of the benefits they gain from your actions.

You want to be a net expander…that when you count it all up, there is more expanding than diminishing. 

And so this is really a lifelong work. Some of your little unbeknownst’s will be buried in there and take some time to discover. 

But here’s an important perspective to maintain on this lifelong quest; As you are turning inward to examine yourself and count it all up…remain aware of the Structure of Love outwardly in your mind, helping you in the long journey. 

As you are trying to become a net expander, remember always that your 8 billion other human buddies are going to work everyday and producing things which benefit and expand you. And so it will encourage you to go to work and do the same. 

And keep looking around you at all times to the beautifully designed nest that you live in. All the creative producers of all that music and clothing, and beautiful buildings are all giving life to you every single time you see the beauty. You are literally held and hugged by all that human life put into everything in the room. It’s all the ultimate gift that keeps giving.  

And I just want to create a balance here when I talk about doing everything for others. There is self care, and even myself as a writer and thinker I have spent a lot of years with myself thinking, writing, meditating, praying. Some people are more comfortable staying close to themselves and venture out with others only occasionally…that’s fine, I’m not suggesting changing your base self and forcing you to go be with others always…but for you it would be the trajectory of your life and all the thoughtful self time preparing you to benefit others, in whatever way your life makes that possible. 

Self care is so important. I like to think of myself as a giving engine, but in order to keep that engine going it needs oil and gas and maintenance…you can’t run the engine into the ground, because then it will not be able to do its good work. So there’s plenty of being good to yourself, giving yourself some treats, taking some time for yourself, it’s just that you do all that so you have more in you to give to others ultimately.

And with all my crazy new ideas using new language to get a different perspective, we always come home and apply it to the normal language. We’re talking about love and learning more about love and loving better, and hopefully receiving more love as a result. It’s just that love is an outflow activity, it’s a giving thing…and that has not always been self evident to us. 

︒︒︒ Priming the Pump ︒︒︒

But so much of the Structure of Love is out there and not in person, so how can we be assured of being given in person some nice Sweet Honey love?

We have to prime the pump of the volley. 

Above I talked about giving even when you’re empty…of course that’s not easy. It’s the problem or the challenge of the ability to “deficit give”, in other words, when you are empty, how can you have something to give? I know trying to imagine receiving life from all the art and design might be too abstract for some people…you’re feeling lonely and you want some freakin’ love given to you now! More love units please. Need some bliss blazing love units right about now!

This is where I bring up the image of priming the pump from the old days of wells with hand pumps. 

Priming the pump is an old mechanical term—in the old days you had pumps to pump water up from an underground well, but they weren’t as nice as our modern day pumps, their pumping unit was made with some leather parts, that if not used for a while could dry out and stop working. So they had to be wetted again before they could get going, that is the priming. Especially if it was in a remote area like a desert where people only passed by occasionally. The only way to get it going again was to pour some water into it and slowly start pumping, and then it would get reanimated and start working again and pump up new water. 

So whoever used the well last had to leave a jar of water there so the next person coming along would have the “prime” to get it going again. Now imagine a person dying of thirst in the desert stumbling upon this well and seeing the jar of water…they needed to have enough self control not to gulp down the water. They needed to control themselves and pour that beautiful water out, down into the well with faith hoping it would rewet the mechanism and get the well working again. If you had lost your mind and you grabbed the primer water jar and just drank it down, now you would last another day or so, but then you’d begin to die of thirst again. A temporary fix. The ultimate shortsighted mistake.

We need to prime the pump of our own flow of human life energy to get it working well.

So much of life takes faith. When the farmer plants a seed, it’s possible nothing could happen, but he has faith from past experiences that a plant will grow…of course it’s not blind faith, he does everything he can do to help it. Every scientist every day exercises faith in the laws of nature, that if you mix together these elements, you will get this result. 

They don’t make it happen, the mystery of nature makes it happen, but they regularly have faith that if it happened before, it will happen again. What if the universe wanted to mess with us and would just randomly not do what it’s supposed to…that would be a bummer…I’m not sure we would psychologically survive that betrayal. That the universe always follows through on its promises says something about the inherent goodness of our universe, it upholds its laws. It’s laws are promises.

We must not be afraid of the word faith because maybe we had faith in someone or a religion and they let us down. We have faith everyday the bus will show up. The paycheck will be deposited. The sun will come up. The reality is that most of the time our faith is rewarded and the thing happens. 

When the thirsty pilgrim arrives at the desert well and sees the beautiful sparkling jar of water by the well, it takes tremendous faith to pour that water out and down into the pump in the well…but if they have any wisdom at all, they know their life depends upon it. 

When you are empty and have nothing to give, is the same moment the thirsty pilgrim encounters the primer jar of water…dying of thirst they pour the water out by faith. 

When you have nothing to give, you have to learn to have faith and just give anyways…have faith the water will animate the dry leather pump…have faith your giving to another will cause life to be given in return. Give the seed, put it into the ground, it most assuredly will sprout and grow. Just mutter to yourself, “I’m priming the pump”, and give.

Unfortunately, it might take a few weeks. 

But that’s why you have the mercy of 8 billion others giving to you to keep you going while you wait for the dry leather to animate. 

And once you get it flowing, then it becomes a matter of the quality of the water. Unlike pure artesian water, this form of life is something that can have huge levels of qualitative difference. We can love poorly or we can love well…love has skill levels, and you can get more skillful at loving well. 

This dry desert well is not a bountiful fountain of water overflowing in beauty with a grand Italian sculpture on it, it’s a basic beginner well. Once you start trying to net give more, and turn part of you around that was formerly desperately trying to get something, you’re a beginner, but over time you can become a fountain that children play in and people toss coins at.

Examine the quality of what you’re giving. You can be giving poor quality, medium quality or high quality life. We’ve all been around people that we sense just don’t know who we are or what we like, or around people we were hanging on every word and they delighted us with their sensitive attention to who we really are…the life we give can be given even better by knowing what the recipient likes or needs. You can love more skillfully. (We’ll devote a future chapter to this).

And since this is an energy game, the more expansive energy you put out there, the more is going to come back to you. So giving a lot of good high quality love is going to bring back a lot of high quality love to you, the secret dream of your heart, even if you didn’t know it. 

Like our grandparents used to say, “Doing something good is the best way to do it” 

As I mentioned before the thing about so many self help methods is that they point you to focus on yourself when you’re already too focused on yourself. The one thing I’m adding to the vast conversation of self improvement ideas, is that this is not for you, this is so you can give to others. So try to not get too self focused, but always keep remembering this is so you can learn to give more than you take. 

And have faith that if you give eventually you will receive. 

         ︒︒︒  Power v Love︒︒︒

And now we will transition to the end of this chapter and the greatest maxim of all, the one that’s hard to hear because we don’t like being told the truth about our own abuses or unkindnesses. It’s the real dark part of the heart of diminishing, but it’s the one that brings it all together, and if you can see it, it will guide all your development towards being a net giver and recipient of a beautiful life.

There is an important mechanism in our failure mode…a lever we use to effect our insanity. 

When you are hungry and desiring life and you go out to try and take it, (instead of giving it), there’s an additional thing you need in order to get it…since others control their own love, there’s a lever you need to pry it from them. 

You need power over them to manipulate them to get what you want. We aren’t diminished willingly. 

It’s a like your secret passwords, no one knows them but you, but if they point a gun at your head, you will give them up…under duress.

Because even though pure and true human life energy only goes one way. That lesser version, the fake artificial version has to be sucked out by force. 

Many of us do it daily and live on this lesser artificial life and that’s why we’re anxious and depressed and fall into a descending cycle of needing to go take even more to keep going. 

You cannot love a person you are exercising power over, because you are using power to take something for yourself instead of expending your energy to give them something. But in kidnapping their free will you only imprison yourself as you become trapped living off this lesser life. 

Our need keeps staying ahead of our reservoir of life to give.  

And in this way both are diminished.

We do it in a million little ways, to describe and understand them all would be to describe and understand every grain of sand or star in the sky. We each do it daily many times, some days more than others. We find little leverages and we push down and we get what we want. Of course this is a cold meal, it’s not love being given to us, it’s human life being taken by us…but we are all so hungry for life we just can’t help ourselves. 

Here are some examples; Just the confidence to place yourself above another who is willing to take the bait and acquiesce to you so that they feel they must go along with your wishes. This is often because of age and position, but it can just be from individuals being good at manipulating things and others in order to place themselves higher. Con artists are the ultimate expression of this, but there are so many of us that are junior con artists out there trying to get our way. 

People who seduce others often have this skill, they’re like a movie character with fighting skills. Most people if they find themselves in an actual fight are quickly disoriented, the whole world slows down and it’s confusing and you’re in a zone you don’t know. But the pro is in a zone they know well, they are fully prepared and calm, and that edge means they can dominate others. It’s the same in romance. 

The abuse of bosses with more power is easy to deconstruct. They’ve been authorized by the company to guide workers toward productive ends. That’s it. But now they take that position and they freelance into a whole new zone…the zone that benefits them in some way at the expense of the employee. A single mother supporting her child is not in a place to easily resist a boss who controls her livelihood, whether it’s to pick up his dry cleaning or to meet him after hours. 

I remember when I encountered in a short time a number of very obvious religious cults or sects…they were obviously gaining control over their users whose only goal in life was to get you in under that control too. You can really tell the difference between that and normal religious groups who are just chill normal people who also like to gather in faith. And I found myself really wondering, what is the motivation of these cult group leaders? Why would you want a bunch of weird people all doing weird stuff, that doesn’t seem like a really fun career to forge. And eventually, along with coming to better understand dictators, and religious broadcasters, I figured it out. 

To create power in the world you need human body mass. The real thing that makes the world go around is humans interacting in all the ways we do. And since energy and mass are the same, more human body mass equals more energy, so that in the end, if you don’t have any humans behind you, then you don’t have anything of value. That’s why they build walls to keep people in…you can’t have everyone escaping from East Berlin or North Korea or any totalitarian country if you want to have a country. If they all ran away and all you had was the leaders and security police, that would be a pretty empty result. You need the bodies. The more bodies you gather the more your thing has weight in the world. 

So what people do who want power is they get followers. The oldest trick in the book, is scare people about some made up threat, and convince them if they follow you then you will lead them to overcome this threat. This is the use of fear to guide humans into your pen. Once you have those bodies in your pen you have power. 

We all have to be aware that our body has that value and be careful who we give it to…and there are sophisticated ways of measuring how many bodies when it comes to media…how many eyes are watching the channel, clicking the link. The more clicks, the more eyes, the more money, the more power. 

There are so many ways out in the world people seek power, but actually the most significant place it gets used is in the home, because of all relationships, parent to child is the most common and where the parents always have the power, and in the daily grind of life parents almost always fall prey to exercising their power and mess up their kids because this is a relationship where it’s easy to have power over the other. You live in the same house and the child is 100% dependent on the adult. It’s a human energy power problem just waiting to happen. 

It happens a lot of other places obviously but home is it’s purest habitat. 

Oh the dysfunctional family again…the opposite of what we all wanted…how is it we keep doing this? What is the crux of our fail? Why do we see the green leaves but not the mycelium even closer to us below our feet? What core operative truth will help fully unfurl our folded and hidden love? What is the maxim of maxim’s?

It is that…

Power is the opposite of love. 

…..

….take a moment….

Love expands, power diminishes. Love is giving, power is taking. 

This is the root of all gone wrong in the world. 

Because our human energy only goes one way and you’re desperately trying to get them to give you some…

but 

that 

doesn’t 

work. 

Yet you are desperate, you need to make it work. 

So you exert power to get it.

You’ve found our loophole to a lesser life. 

This way you can get that vampire meal that never really satisfies, but can keep you going for years at a diminished level. You can force them to give you what you need. 

When love is not working for you and the desire is tripping you forward, it is power that you rely upon now…you leave love behind. In some people’s lives it’s like they’ve entered the dark side. They’ve given in to it. We make movies about that. 

For most of us it’s a mixture and not so dramatic, but still we can be living, at least partially, on this lesser artificial life for years. That’s why love in our world isn’t working and many of us are mostly unhappy living on this lesser cold meal. Let me say it again… our need keeps staying ahead of our reservoir of life to give. 

This is the great idea of chapter two, a great and tragic logic. 

Power is the opposite of love. 

Power and love are light and dark. They cannot exist in the same space, they are the literal opposite of each other. But love like light is the greater energy. Darkness is simply the absence of light, it is a non-thing, same as death being the absence of life. Power is a thing in human relationships that is present when love is not there. And when love is present, power can’t be there. 

         ︒︒︒  Some Final Words︒︒︒

The key is understanding your own great value and that it is the same as the other 8 billion of our kind. 

We are all of inexpressible value. Every human can produce love, and if they have any other qualities those are all deeply secondary to love, they are just supports of love (playing piano, business acumen, leadership qualities), so all qualities are below the greatest quality of love. Therefore all humans are always completely equal. 

It doesn’t matter that you’re rich, or a major leader, or a famous whatever, those qualities of you are below what the most humble human sitting on a dirt floor in a hut with no electricity, who cannot read, but who loves their family has…the love the most simple person has is greater than the sub-qualities of the worlds greatest genius. 

But since you can both love your family, so you are both the same. 

Every human being is completely and in every way exactly equal to the other. 

If two competitors for the worlds biggest diamond both have one of equal weight, it does not matter that one of them has a bigger house than the other. Or more college degrees. It is the diamond that matters. 

Therefore no human can be better than another. So no human can possibly be over another human. We all wear the highest crown above which there is no other higher authority in our sensed physical world. (Religion speaks of another world and a creator being greater than humans, which is fascinating, but is not being discussed here.)

If this is true then to think something about yourself makes you better than others is an illusory non-reality…is skin pigment better than love? Is national affiliation better than love? Is being in your group somehow better than those in other groups who also love? Does your intelligence, or wealth, or skills measure as greater than love? Of course not, and so… 

All humans are equal. 

And if you can come to accept your own great value as well as the equal value of all others, you will never seek to have power over another. Such attempts are illusory, they are not real because they only get you that lesser sour, “not real” love. It can only ever be a rejection of reality to imagine holding power. To imagine your life with its love engine inside is greater than another life with its love engine inside is madness. 

And living in non-reality is the opposite of wisdom. 

Love is to act in accord to the great value of another and give them every benefit within your ability…and to do that equally to all humans. Using the four part structure in this book one can overcome distance and the reality we have a limited circle of people we know directly to love every human on earth via their work, their benevolent role in their community and through art, and in exercising these ways we will be fuller from which to give directly to our beloveds. 

And if everyone did that; Peace on earth. 

     ︒︒︒  Let’s take the obvious question︒︒︒

What about using power for good? I want to make millions and use it for charity…or I want to go into government work to serve the people, can’t power be used for good?

Those are of course wonderful starting motivations, but we know from experience how they often end up…Google started saying, “do no evil”, and now Google?…you decide. Facebook then, Facebook now. Nerdy dude with passions, then billionaire, then billions of a-holes becoming dominant feature of their personality and then maybe jailionairre. 

I understand power being the opposite of love is a new and challenging notion. I’m actually making it harder to understand because I am changing the meaning of some words and I think I need to make that clear. Changing words is not usually recommended, but in this case when introducing a very new idea, we need a word to anchor it to, so in this rare case I’ve done it. So I am choosing to use power, and you’ll note it’s very connected to energy. Power and energy have always gone together. I’m choosing now to tie the negative of diminishment to power, and tie the positive of expansion to energy. 

And of course like many words, power has more than one meaning, I’m using it as power over others. And I don’t think there is ever a place where one human should have power over others. Ever. What we can have is humans authorizing a person to act on their behalf, for their benefit. But not power over them. 

So when you imagine gathering together some money and maybe some political capital to try to do good, I would call that gathering the energy of many people to do things they authorize you to do to benefit them. And for that you need their ongoing permission. You need to earn their trust and become a person who always acts for the benefit of those who’ve authorized you, and never to benefit yourself. And this arrangement must be continually audited and kept in its original state, because the drift towards collecting more power to benefit the power holder at the expense of the earlier authorizers is always there at the gate trying to get in. 

If we’re really honest, most of us were planning to use the power we hoped to gain to benefit ourselves also along the way, and that’s the dream we’ve all been handed because those in power want it kind of accepted that you do get a lot of benefits from it. We vote for people just accepting they will become rich and powerful from it at our expense. We’ve kind of accepted the lie, normalized the saying of “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. We’re not angry enough at the 1% inequality problem, which is actually insane and makes no sense.

It’s not too hard to examine rich people or organizations and ask are people benefitting from their existence? Just like we have to always know that the receiver of our personal relational efforts will always be the judge of whether we are expanding them or diminishing them. That’s the follow the money point of discovery…it’s the person receiving the supposed benefit that can say whether they’ve been benefitted or not. This is the trick in the skillful loving quest, it’s your feedback loop, and the same for social structures.

The reality is that practically 100% of people and org’s upon examination will find they are doing a lot of taking. Plenty of expanding themselves at the expense of others…which equals diminishing them. It will not be easy to fix. 

Nothing about the path this book gives is easy, because we can be selfish b*#tards but if we ever want to enter that better world where love is all around, where everyone has all they need, no one is violent, asshole’s have mostly disappeared, there is plenty for all…in that wonderful place life will flourish for a very long time, because we’ll heal the earth, and we’ll overcome disease. 

Of course there will still be suffering, natural disasters will exist, people will get their heart broken by the one they wanted that didn’t want them. But slights will be rarer and smaller and the community will encourage us to repair them. To do that, to get to that place, takes a lot of us self changing over a long time. 

There are serious existential threats that have hung over our head since we started inventing such good weapons. And we’re always worried some group who’ve been treated poorly will get their revenge on the rest of us with such weapons. So we need to remove all the injustices that create potential flash points…we can’t have vast areas of poverty and vast areas of great wealth nearby and think that’s going to go well…we can see it does not. 

Wealth near poverty is like a vacuum, the poor will stream toward the money because they love their families. And then the rich feel imposed upon, and there is anger and fighting. We have to remove these inequalities. 

The best market to operate a business in is one in which the whole population has plenty of money to spend on your widgets. Inequality does not help business leaders and their goals. It only creates areas of anger, bombs go off, commerce gets slower. 

People will be happy to stay in their own lands when everyone there has a job and can afford a house. They won’t need to come interrupt your wealthy stable life. The whole globe is a symbiotic process of seeking equilibrium. Global wealth inequality will drive us toward fails in controlling existential weaponry more than anything, and should be our number one priority, because once you fix that everything else falls into place. 

It’s a power thing. Inequality is unequal power. Think of all the things you will do for your child. You’ll feed them and house them well, you’ll save for their college, you’ll get them a car, cellphone, iPad, laptop computer, all the clothes they could hold in their huge personal closet in their own bedroom in a safe and secure neighborhood. All the while other people’s children don’t have adequate healthcare, have lesser education, and no sense of safety and security, can’t get clean drinking water, and so much more misery. How can we live that way? This kind of inequality is unsustainable in a way that will probably get us before the climate ever does. 

And it’s not just to stop making them suffer, it’s activating all that human talent and potential that is going to waste because it’s not being enabled. Imagine how many Picasso’s and Einstein’s are imagining great things on a dirt floor and making their small shop hum with efficiency but not getting the education, and the encouragement to raise their vision above the horizon, so that we all suffer from them not curing cancer or breaking through on fusion energy. We’ve come a long way, but one could imagine how much further we might have come had not so much human talent been oppressed and lost. I have this imagination of one day all humans being equal and sitting at a table together and finally being able to overcome all our challenges because finally we have the full spectrum of our gifts and collective intelligence working together.

It’s almost like this whole thing has been a test to see if we could all come together equally and we’d been given this mechanism called love that could overcome all the other challenges within our souls, but we had to solve the puzzle of how to let the love become the preeminent energy guiding us forward. And if some greater being didn’t assign us this test, then we can assign it ourselves.

We need to love other people’s children as much as we love our own. We need to go to work and there be converted to working for both our children and the children of every family. We need to just do way more art to bring us all together and give these notions of our connectedness concrete reality in feelings and awe and laughter and joy…all the goodness of love is found in art and it makes us all lovers who don’t know each other but would love to revel in such a big love. 

An explosion of art will add so much to our world, as science in the NeuroArts movement is discovering in many healthcare and human thriving modalities, and I hope my work is also helping to reveal. 

We just need to keep pushing our systems and our leadership structures to fix inequality wherever it exists and if we each can strive toward becoming net expanders ourselves, then it will start happening automatically…love could actually unfold from it’s hidden place and blossom into it’s fulness and actually work amongst us. Humanity could finally discover its true full self that works in all giving benefits to all. 

︒︒︒ ︒︒︒
Postscript: There’s so much more to say, we are deeply complex and I’m never going to pull it all together. There’s a whole section I need more time to think about focusing more on what to do when you’re the one who’s been diminished…and this is where most clinical psychology goes to heal.

These first two chapters really cover the whole thing, and then we’ll go into more detail on various aspects in coming chapters. It is my sincere hope that collective intelligence, the input from readers, will guide so many rewrites and additions and make the whole thing more palatable and readable and workable in real lifeable.

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What if love has a bigger footprint than we’ve realized? Networks and interconnections we’d never pieced together, hidden like the mycelium beneath our feet. A whole reality we can see in one way — because we can see the plants on the surface, but have not yet discovered in another way — because we didn’t know for a long time they were all connected by this underground fungal network thats always been there just under the surface. It’s like being able to feel the wind on your face, but you don’t know where it came from. 

Everything is hidden right in front of us. Humans gazed at green trees for millennia but had no idea why they were green, staring at photosynthesis without a clue. You have no idea how your brain animates your consciousness yet here you are and you know you are you. I remember just staring at my hands as a kid trying to figure out what they could do and constantly exploring as I was slowly discovering reality all around me.  

All of life is a discovery of new levels of reality. Science is really just reality discovery. Rocks have always had whirling energies inside them. The trees have always been green but it took us a while to understand how the leaves interact with the sun…and even after the giant breakthrough of figuring that out, it’s taken us all these many more years to understand the underground mycelium networks that connect plants whose roots feed sugar to microorganisms to create soil which is the whole other side of plant reality, the very basis of life on earth. 

Ignorance can’t be avoided, we’re swimming in it, the world can’t be contained in our brains, it’s just too big, there’s too much to know, so let’s embrace our own ignorance and let it guide us to new discovery.

And what about the old school parents who worked hard and sacrificed their own dreams for thirty years working in a job they didn’t really like? Maybe they didn’t tell their children they loved them with the words we now understand to be so important, but in their own way they did the thing they knew to be right, and now we get mad at them for their ignorance, but they exerted tremendous energy and kept a family alive. 

What if you’ve been loved in ways that you could never have known were happening, and you received benefits that have allowed you to become the person you are. What if we could stitch together all the ways you’ve been benefitted or benefitted others and discover a reality in our midst that’s been hidden right in front of us?

And what if in discovering this, you could actually feel more units of love? Because if you’re alive in this world today it’s very likely you don’t feel you’re getting optimal units of love and would like some more (please). Yes, hello? I’d like more blissful blazing units of love, please…I’d really like to feel them this time if possible, do you have the really feel them kind?

Right before our eyes the sun fusions mass into energy every day. Fusion is the discovery we are seemingly always ten years away from, but Einstein told us the main idea of it long ago, that energy and mass are really the same thing but just in different forms; e=mc². 

The “e” is energy and the “m” is mass and Einstein discovered they are equal, they are the same thing. So a hard rock, the very picture of mass, is also a bundle of atoms with electrons whirling around a nucleus of protons and neutrons. It’s simultaneously a solid hard mass and a whirly bundle of pure energy. This strange observation is a fundamental reality of our universe. 

Zoom in; whirly energy, zoom out; hard rock. 

As they say in Asia, “Same, same”. 

Around 1929 a number of scientists discovered that the universe is still expanding from the original bang that started everything 13.8 billion years ago, and we’re still so early in the long life cycle the expansion is still accelerating. So not only are we going around the sun, but our solar system and our whole galaxy is being flung outward through the cosmos along with everything else in the great expansion of the universe.

The life of our universe is a life that expands energetically. It would seem that must anchor our thinking as a core reality. 

Uncovering reality is the process of healthy development on the path of a maturing life. The most expedient trait of a person on the path to reality is humility. Humility is being and being known for who you truly are, no more and no less. Prideful arrogance, vanity, excessive ego, etc. is trying to be more than you are because you don’t value who you already are, and lack of self esteem or self pity is a lie you’ve believed that you’re less…humility is that sweet spot right in the middle called reality. And when you stay there in that sweet spot, you can see the world more clearly. 

Wisdom is the ability to see the reality around you and know how to live in it, as well as co-creating it as you go in the best way, the way that expands others with benefits and doesn’t diminish them. Go with the universe in its expansion, not against it.

Astronauts have always been admired because of their rare feat of traveling between worlds. But maybe they’re not so rare, a major insight of our existence in an expanding universe is that you are not a loser and no one is stuck in a rut, we are all actually valiant astro-speed-racers sailing through the stars with tremendous energy. 

︒︒︒︒︒︒︒

I’ve been on two great quests in my life. Reality seeking journeys lasting decades. The first started when I was 17 and just emerging from my very failed family and wanting so badly to understand love and why it was so hard to achieve. I remember standing outside Mr. Steinmetz’ speech class near the big band room and vowing to figure out what love was. 

I knew my parents felt they loved me, but somehow they hadn’t figured out what that really meant; how to hold a family together in that love. By a failure of understanding or lack of skill they’d let our family spin off into disrepair and finally death.

So I was going to figure out how to make a new one…and not just make one, anyone could make one, my Dad had made four. Four wives, four ridiculous families, I was going to figure out how to make it really sing.

Nobody wants a dysfunctional family. We long for romantic love, it animates our dreams when we’re young and compels us to partner up which leads to eventually gaining a child and forming a family and a home. All that is tied into our deepest hopes to love and be loved…and yet in my country there are more dysfunctional families than healthy one’s. 

Why does love so often fail?

Do we humans really know all there is to know about love? Here’s a thought experiment…if we did, then why is this world such an unloving place?

Let’s have a skip down the ugly rainbow path where “dreams never do come true”🎶…along the whole spectrum of human bad behavior from rudeness to assholishness to whole groups excluding others, to violence in the home and on the streets, to war and all the way to genocide, the human species is really not behaving as if love is at it’s core. 

And yet the songs! Our poets and philosophers and religionators have all said so much so beautifully about love. Little babies can’t survive and go on to thrive without it. Most definitely love is somewhere in the mix, but it’s just not really working that well.

Why?

Is it because we have just not fully discovered and understood the whole thing yet? Maybe it’s in there in that big portion of our brains we don’t fully use yet, an evolutionary potential we’ve not yet reached. Maybe there’s a whole hidden part of love that remains folded and out of our view.

Like scientists jumping up and down on the ground with excitement having figured out the mystery of photosynthesis in the green leaves five feet above their head, but still many decades away from understanding the mycelium only a foot below them. 

The flower of love not yet fully blossomed. 

Evolution awaiting.

Ok so we have this thing, and its supposed to help us but it’s just not working that well.

In English the word love is very beautiful. But that word symbol still stands for the malfunctioning thing we have. So maybe we should stop calling it that as a temporary experiment and try some new ways to imagine it without all the preconceived notions that word holds—an Einstein’ian “Try it a new way so as not to be insane”

They say language is how we understand things in the world. So let’s have a change in language to give us a new perspective to look around and try to see any new reality sneaking around right in front of us. The reality that life in our universe is expanding energy will be a key to this new approach.

︒︒︒︒︒︒︒  

I was off and running on my first quest to understand love, and after my BA in college, which took me 11 years, I moved to Manhattan to be a songwriter and began my journey of being an artist and then later working with artists, trying to help them navigate what it means to be an artist in the world. 

I became a person responsible for the wellbeing of artists and it gave me a tremendous placement to be able to think deeply about art and what art actually is and what it means to be an artist. I knew it was hard and I wanted to help them in their struggle. 

That inaugurated my second great life quest; What is art? And what does it mean to be an artist?

And eventually the two quests merged. The merger enabled me to make a great discovery, which you’ll understand by the end of this chapter. 

Whatever it is we transmit to the people we love…some aspect of our life and being and consciousness…Nobody really knows what it is we give each other, but the closest thing I can imagine is to just call it life. And life takes energy, everything we express of this inner life is an expression of energy outwardly.

Let’s examine this life different in each of us because it holds all our thoughts and feelings, our unique interests and the whole history of our experiences. All of this becomes our life content made and held by our consciousness and communicated outwardly.

We have life and we give some of it to others, and now they have more than they did before so they’ve expanded (just like the universe). And it makes sense to think of expansion since there is the negative side that we can also take life from others and diminish them. 

This is helpful because it shows how we can intend good things, like families that started well but ended up dysfunctional — somehow we can intend to expand, but end with diminishing. When a parent fails their family this way, it’s not because they hate their children, it’s because somehow by a failure of understanding or lack of skill they didn’t give more life and expand, but fumbled and diminished.

Imagining this as flows of energy expanding or diminishing is a lot more useful than the words love and hate.

And this isn’t some kind of new agey energy aura but simply the natural energy of thinking, talking, doing things toward people, and it’s just like a mango slowly expands to ripeness then mellows and begins it’s cycle toward falling to the ground and going into the soil again, all of life are these life cycles of expansion and diminishment, the mango is short, the universe is long. But human interactions can have moments of expansion and diminishment in one conversation.

So you see how instead of thinking of “love” and all that means to us, we just have a whole new way of imagining how something is happening between humans, they are doing actions toward each other that benefit one another and by imagining those acts and the benefits transferred as our human life energy flowing amongst us we can see it in new ways…the parent who unintentionally diminishes isn’t hateful, they just didn’t have enough of the good life content to give, and maybe there are reasons for that. If we keep following this it goes to many new places showing human interconnectedness in a new light. We’ll realize there are things happening that we never categorized as “love” but are definitely transfers of life content between people.

And since it’s mysterious and none of us really knows how it works, we can each fill in some of the mystery in any way we want according to our cultural or religious heritage. These ideas are neutral and can fit any world view. 

And remember our human life energy exists in this universe and follows the laws of this universe, so that’s why, for example, those who’ve studied story know that shape shifting has always been a popular storytelling device that draws us; Miracles, superpowers, the human becomes a werewolf and then back again, the pumpkin becomes a carriage. What if we understood that as the e=mc² thing of how mass and energy are the same thing shape shifting to different forms? As a fundamental reality of our universe maybe that’s why it has always captured our imagination.

So now let’s look at multiple ways our life gets transmitted as expansive benefits to others, both in boring things and exciting things. Things to just survive and things that thrill the heart. 

I’ve prepared pictures. 

This circle is the totality of love in all its forms which means it’s really all the humans and everything they do, or you could say, every life energy they exert or take away. We can categorize this for each of us facing the world quite easily as the People You Know and the People You Don’t Know. That covers all 8 billion of them. 

And so I’ll slice it into four main forms in their different contexts. The first most obvious one, is to the people we know…and we do it directly in person. 

This is the one we usually think of when we think of love. We transfer our life to our beloveds by talking and hugging, by spending time together and all that good stuff, and we do that IN PERSON directly to our beloveds. And of course this is on the People You Know context side, and above and below still scratched out is what I call a “quality” of these forms, which I’ll explain and reveal as we go. 

Life in this universe is a form of energy that gives more life and expands. That’s possibly some kind of truism of humanness, how we stay alive, the fuel we run on…of course it’s true physically, because we need the life of nutrition and oxygen for our bodies, and it’s also true of our consciousness that holds our mind, it needs human communion to be healthy. And we give our expansive life to them in person and it’s like they’re feeding on the life we give them.

And life is a good word because it brings up the issue of staying alive. This world is not an easy place to stay alive in. We must do a lot of work to build shelter to protect us from the hot sun and the cold rain.

After you hug your child and spend time with them directly in person feeding them that way, then you go off to work in another place where they are not with you, and you are motivated to do work to feed them another way. And what’s really happening here? Well, you go do work, you exert energy that becomes a value in the economy that transforms into money that again transforms into food and a home to benefit your family with life. 

In this instance your care for your child is not expressed directly to them in person but rather it shape shifts into mass, into “things” that later benefit them. You exerted energy at work and later it manifested as the beneficial mass of a house. It is an indirect form of your human life expressed as energy at work then transmitted through “things” to your family. Just like the old school parent whose work was their love.

This is the second form of life we give to the people we know, we WORK to benefit our beloveds…and we do that indirectly, not in their presence.

Isn’t that interesting? That our energy can shape shift into a mass and benefit our children…it’s a new way of seeing the energy flow, following the basic rules of our universe, because don’t forget every moment above us the sun is shape shifting helium into energy and sending sunbeams to keep us alive (helium is a mass, as are all gases). This is our home territory, this is how things go in this neck of the ‘verse.

These are the two ways I’ve imagined in this first half of this whole social theory of mine that we transmit life in the context of the People We Know…we do it in person with hugs and kisses and we do it indirectly by going to work so that we can survive life on planet earth.

And so there’s the right and left division of beloveds and strangers, and then there’s a top and bottom division that shows the quality of that kind of life energy/love…the bottom is the one we have to do to survive, so I’ve added “Work To Survive” to the bottom of the circle, and the top one is more about the love that is exciting, that we so desire, and I’ll soon reveal the name of that quality.

Now you can see that the bottom right quadrant that’s coming next is in both the Work To Survive bottom quality and the People You Don’t Know context. And that’s because when you go to work everyday the things you produce not only benefit your family, but they go out into the whole world economy and benefit every person out there. And all the work those 8 billion strangers do benefits you. 

I like to talk about pizza. Like many things we take for granted, the production of pizza is a very complicated weaving of so many different skills and hard work in a matrix of economies from all over the world that come together to put a pizza before your very hungry and excited kids. 

No matter how self made you think you are, in fact, there is no pizza for the self reliant. Pizza only comes to those ensconced in the weaved nest of human community. 

Farmers grow the tomatoes and the wheat, they raise the livestock for the cheese and the many other toppings. Pizza ovens are very hot, so miners get iron ore to make steel, or if you’re lucky stones and bricks for a fire oven. There are the cooks and the delivery car drivers. And never forget the canoe paddle carvers who work on the side making the pizza pie paddles.

It doesn’t matter what you personally think of “others”. You might not like them, and some of them don’t like you…but the reality we all actually live in is that we do benefit one another all the time with our productivity. 

The inescapable reality of human life on planet earth is that we are all woven together into a giant undertaking called: 

Project: Survive Life on Planet Earth

We all benefit from one another’s work whether directly or indirectly. Everything is intertwined and eventually something we produced supports something else connected to another and it’s all needed and we all uphold it and expand it every day.

And this is exactly like the work we do for our family. It produces a life giving benefit. 

So if in the instance your work for your family produces life giving benefit and we call that love, but when we do that for strangers we don’t really call that anything…well there’s that hiddenness, a glimpse of the fold we discussed before.

This massive reality has always been there, but we are still emerging from our caveman ignorance and it didn’t fit our way of understanding love, the flawed barely working version. And what about feelings, you can’t have those toward strangers…but as we’ve seen with work for our family there is a form of indirect love not involved with feelings. The reality we unfold is that the same energy exerted to benefit our family is the same that benefits the strangers.

As they say in a number of non English speaking countries, “Same, same”.

That’s a little thing I call Stranger Love.

This is a form of giving your life energy to benefit another that is indirect, the person is not in front of you, so it’s not as obvious to connect it to feelings…but it could be…maybe you not realizing you’re loving strangers is the same kind of short sightedness of the old schoolers not telling their kids they loved them. We all would have failed to tell our kids we love them if we’d lived long ago and didn’t realize that was important yet. We’d have been just as ignorant, because that wasn’t known yet.

So we add the third quadrant also called WORK…but this time it clarifies “Indirect to Strangers”, obviously on the context side of People You Don’t Know. 

So just look at that, the bottom half of the whole thing is all work. Maybe that’s why they always say relationships are hard work.

Just imagine how the world could change if we all collectively came to realize that we are loving each other every day in our work! (ie. giving a benefit). Remember how we bemoaned the whole spectrum of malfunctioning humanity…all the wars and violence and unkindness…hmmm….maybe this is an unfolding of the formerly hidden structure of love that could increase its functionality. 

What if we all sang songs at our work places celebrating how we are doing this for the others in Asia and South America, for Africa and our competitors across town and how they are doing it for us, maybe the people would all get along so much we’d just elect leaders authorized to only get along with the rest of the world too. You’re not going to pay for warfare to the same people you’re lovingly working for. Just as we don’t buy mortars to drop on our kids at home. 

And that’s just the ho-hum of work…there’s an even bigger and better one coming in quadrant 4…it’s on the exciting upper level, sharing the same qualities as that direct love that we so desire and enjoy in person—but on the context side of People You Don’t Know!? 

How could that be?

First, let’s reveal that “quality” wording at the top half of the structure. “Work to Survive” is the lower half, the ho-hum quality of life that we don’t really want to do but really just must do to survive life on planet earth. But what’s on the upper half?

Come on now my friends, let’s raise the roof, this is love, and love is a lot more exciting than just going to work to survive. We know we love the hugging and kissing and other adult contact sports that get us all so excited. The intellectual and emotional exchanges when we talk for hours, sharing who we are and discovering the other. 

This is the transfer of our human life to one another that we have such passion for, the Sweet Honey parts of love. We’re all like Pooh Bear searching for the pot of sweet honey and when we find it we are in ecstasy. 

If loving each other by the work we do to survive was all there was, we might take a pass, who knows, maybe humans wouldn’t find the motivation. But it’s the sweet honey side that we so desire, that drives our motivations and makes us want to do it all because we just love it so much. Falling in love and spending time with those you love is not work, it’s pure joy. It’s what we live for. 

The secret to what motivates humans to keep going is exactly this part of who we are…our intelligence, our consciousness, our ability to communicate are all activated forward by an inner desire that is never ending to experience each other’s life…to intertwine and communicate our lives to each other. 

This part we know, but there’s another part of the Sweet Honey that has remained hidden right in front of us, tucked in the fold, unblossomed in our understanding. 

We’ve always had this mechanism to communicate the deep inner thoughts and longings of our hearts to people we know and people we don’t know…it’s a unique mechanism that encodes our human life and is later decoded by the mind of another. It’s the Sweet Honey between strangers.

Exactly the same thing as when a person in front of you lights your fire directly but this time its a lighting of your fire via a mechanism….

…can you guess what’s the sweet honey between strangers?

…a mechanism called…

…Art!…

Art is far more important than we’ve ever imagined and is not a thing we do outside of ourselves but is actually like an organ of our humanness for transferring our life content broadly throughout our society indirectly amongst all of us who don’t know each other, drawing and holding us together like a giant web connecting us all and pulsing with life. Its like the mycelium that runs underground and connects all the plants in a vast communication.

There’s a love for beloveds, and a love for strangers. 

Ahh, what a relief, you don’t just have to love strangers through your work, you can love them by enjoying as much art as possible. Maybe singing songs at work towards foreigners turned you off, but you’ve been singing and listening to this song your whole life.

If you were designing humanity, you’d say, look we need something to hold them all together that gets into the deep heart part, just like romance, but between strangers…we need a way for people who don’t know each other to spiritually make out and have long non-conversations. And we’d remark, yeah that’s really cool coz you can make out with strangers and they never judge you because they’re far away and don’t know you and never will :)

Art is like talking or hugging it’s just a different form human life takes to transfer itself between us. All these forms we call love. 

Art is a form of love, if you’re willing to imagine love in this new way. 

Art is not just a thing we do but a mechanism of this larger structure of love we hadn’t seen that remained hidden in the fold. 

An increase in our awareness of this can drive a change as we feed this underfed organ of ours. Imagine getting by on one heart, and suddenly discovering you actually have two hearts and there can be a massive increase in your energy and endurance if you activate the second heart and get all that extra oxygenated blood pumping through your body. 

Open our brains evolution. Expand us. 

Like when astronauts first saw the earth from space. Or how now we understand people from other tribes are not meant to be killed or enslaved…wow, what a revelation, they’re actually here to benefit us…”Hey Joe, did you see this knot they have, that would fix so many issues we have”…or…”Wow, this is a much better way to eat, why didn’t we figure that out?”.

Some of you may be having different reactions to the reveal of art. The art nerds are like, “Yay, our team wins”! But others are like “hmmm” that seems like it randomly came out of left field. Why the arts?

Rather than the arts being just one of many human categories, like education, healthcare, etc. I’m imagining that the arts transcend all those things we do up to a level higher, to be actually a part of our humanness, rather than something we do to survive…those categories are outside us, things we do to survive, but the arts are in us and aren’t even needed for survival, but rather needed for us to thrive in the interconnected web of human community.

It would be like imagining a baby could just be fed and never held. 

We need the work to survive and the sweet honey to thrive. 

 And this piece of our humanness we put in everything we make. Look at the room around you, the walls have color and maybe paintings or murals, wallpaper designs or tiles. Where the wall meets the floor is a little wooden baseboard placed to cover the joint that could have been plain but instead has a little creative flourish in it. We eat deliciously made food on colorful plates with silverware beautifully designed in a way that goes beyond mere function. 

I have this cool modern European yellow tape dispenser that sits like a piece of art on my desk. Our buildings are not concrete blocks but have design and pleasing shape. The land has been scaped. 

Your clothes, your car, the book and album covers and of course, everyone’s favorite, the music, which really has no reason to exist except that humans can’t help themselves but hum and sing and build instruments to make lovely sounds in melodies that move us. Music makes us want to fly, and since we can’t do that, we dance. 

Art is from deep inside us and we put these pieces of us into mediums and send them out into the world…to who? To the other humans. And what happens when they get it? A little bit of you goes into them just like right now as my words are going into you. 

Just as work shape shifts your life and energy into “things” that benefit your family, so art shape shifts your life content into a thing that others encounter when you’re not there and something magical about our humanness allows them to receive that transmission and the life content goes into them. 

Here’s another way to see it; Why do we travel? Is it because we want to understand French sewer systems or healthcare policy? No, we want to experience the lives of the humans that are different from us over there. We go to France for the food and the architecture and the art and the cafe culture. All culture is this sweet honey.

All of those things are experienced by us as life. And we all crave life. Life only comes from one place, from the other humans, and we all feast on it.

And of course, from nature, but that’s another story for another day, to be written by other people.  

Later in the art chapter I’ll talk more about the fine arts and the difficult and important journey of a public artist. But we are all involved in artistic expression, from how we design the layout and decoration of our home, to our cooking and how we curate our clothing choices. We are always on both the creating and the receiving side of art, just like we are on the giving and receiving side of all relationships. 

Art is like the ROM in computers. It just sits there with no electricity waiting for you to turn on the computer and when you do it springs to life with its content ready to go. A book might sit on a dusty library shelf for years unopened. But one day a child reaches up and takes it down, opens it up and suddenly they are transported to tales of adventure and fall in love with characters they can barely stand to say goodbye to a few days later when they reach the end. 

People cry at the end of books. At least the cool one’s. 

I mean the crying people.

Imagine the artistic skill of the comedian to shape words and story expectations in just such a way and then yank them in a surprise direction causing the solar plexus of hundreds of people to jerk in surprise exploding air out of their lungs and making the muscles of their face go berserk as their neural network triggers a dopamine rush and the sound of so many people reverberates off the walls like a drunken choir. What happier moment on earth could there be?

I’m sure if you could stand near that room with a human life energy meter, it would max out at hilariously insane levels.

We owe all these artists a debt of gratitude, for they do the work that allows us all to make out spiritually with strangers. They write the songs that make the whole world cry. And we all need a good laugh or a cry don’t we.

Art is ubiquitous in all human cultures and it has been for all human history. From those ancient paintings of animals on cave walls, until now, we humans must express ourselves creatively. 

And it’s all vibrating with the human life put into it. Have you ever been in a city and just felt the energy? That’s it. A city is a highly concentrated place full of all that human energy built up in layers over the years.

Once, in my old Manhattan apartment in the East Village on the block of 1^st St and 1^st Avenue, (Kramers famous “Nexus of the Universe”), as I was painting my wall, an old thick piece of paint came off and it had layers and layers of different colors, I could just imagine all the people and families that had lived there over the many years. 

The fabric of our society is this “mass” form of our human energy that we make and then live in like a nest. And if you can really perceive it you will never be alone because hugging and holding you always is this fabric of life in the clothes you wear, the food you eat, the rooms you live in, it’s always there full of human life energy giving you life.

You were always held by it, starting as a baby that doesn’t know the benefits of being held, then maturing and beginning to see how good it is to be held safe in another’s arms. In the same way you can over time more fully enjoy and be enthused by the nest that holds you and was made by a million strangers for you. 

If you haven’t been into art and been walking around taking for granted all this designed beauty, then you’ve taken what you’ve been granted wrong—you’ve been living on a measly amount of love units that is so not optimal and was never all there was, you’ve failed to realize and appropriate the greater bliss blazing units that have been around you all along, made by people you will never know who live far away and never judge you and as you take a moment to breathe it all in and expand, you realize you have never known a stranger love.

Thanks for reading.

Chapter 2 is now published! The Electricity In the Building

…Next in Chapter 2: All the dynamics of the flow of expansive or diminishing human life energy. Why do we diminish others? How can we become more skilled at expanding? Please subscribe and join the conversation to influence future chapters.