Chapter 1: The Hidden Structure of Love

When an artist writes a song that gets right down inside you and makes you think and feel and even weep, what’s going on there? We were all born into a world with music, and we’ve mostly all danced or cried to it, but have we really discovered what’s happening there? You don’t even know the artist, they might have musically expressed those thoughts and feelings thirty years ago and are now dead, yet here you are having one of the purest moments of your life. You don’t know each other and never will but they put something into a song and it’s getting to you in a similar way that love hits you. 

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. 

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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.

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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.