Stranger Love Newsletter: 1^st Edition

Welcome, I hope you came right over from the pre-edition and you’re binge reading…Stranger Love? What in the world is this guy getting at?

It all started when I was 17 and I was emerging into adulthood from a very failed family. I was starting to imagine how it could have all been better and wondering what went so wrong with my parents lives and choices.

I knew they loved me, but wow, what a sad way to show it. I felt probably love was the primary human desire and motivation, possibly the very core essence of our humanness—but what a broken and fractured core. So full of promise and potential to produce a wonderful life or to just flip over into into failure mode, leaving us broken hearted on the path to anxiety and depression or just low grade numbness.

What is this thing that we want so bad, that holds such promise, but always seems to underperform?

What is love?

Most of us are pretty good and decent. We mean well. We want to have a good life. So why do parents always mess up their children?

We start with such hope, but we end with the very clear statistic that more people consider themselves to come from a dysfunctional family than a happy one. Dysfunctional is the norm, a happy family is more rare.

So what are we doing wrong?

I hadn’t turned out too bad, lots of little missing pieces, though the vehicle could generally keep going. But I yearned to experience the energetic side of love, the full big romantic thunderbolt.

And after the thunderbolt to settle into the security of the familial cocoon. I imagined a home filled with unreserved passion for each member and total acceptance that you were in.

And not just any in, birth-right in, an uncontested spot. A family. Four people so happy to be together. I was going to find it.

A family.

Mine had died. So I was going to figure out how 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.

If family’s were karaoke, mine was one where each member was in a different room singing from different lyric sheets, totally different songs, some busy snacking and not singing, others flirting with the waitress and also it was 4am and the whole place had been closed hours ago.

And not just sing, but sing like a choir with harmonies so beautifully designed that every part was needed to bring it all together.

Some might think by this point in human history everything that could be said about love has been—the poets, the religions, the thinkers they’ve all been fairly verbose.

So here’s a little thought experiment on the question of, “Is there really something new to be said about love?”

You may agree that love is the most important thing for humans, the bond holding us together and motivating us to partner up and procreate, the thing we often dream about finding when we are young and yet it seems to miserably fail so often. The family is the cocoon we all come from, the place a completely dependent baby human is cared for as they develop over twenty years, and yet statistics reflect that more people admit to having a dysfunctional family than those with a healthy one.

Parents consistently mess up their kids. Different generation/different developmental f#%k-up. Then there’s all the animosity and unkindness and meanness in public life all the way along the spectrum from casual indifference to assholishness to strident dislike of those that are different to violence to war. So if love is at the essence of our humanity how is it life on earth is so unloving?

That’s the thought experiment and it shows a clear discrepancy.

But what if the problem is simply that we haven’t yet fully uncovered the full spectrum, the full structure of what love actually is…kind of how we only use a portion of our brain.

When I began this journey in my youth I was a little nervous that I could actually discover anything new about love since hasn’t everything that could be said about love already been said? Well that’s what the thought experiment disproves. If we really understood love we would not have the world we have. Given the evidence of the sad state of our families and our societies it is clear there is more to be discovered.

Maybe it’s been right in front of us but we just couldn’t see it…kind of how you can look out the window and see nuclear fusion 93 million miles away. When sunlight hits you, only 499 seconds ago it was mass and not light…but our natural universe changes things…maybe that’s why we like shape shifter stories…a rock is really a ball of energy that could be turned into energy by fusion, but so far only the sun can do it and not us yet.

Einstein already gave us the formula for it, the famous e=mc² . The “e” is energy and it equals the “m” for mass…a rock, the very picture of mass, is also a ball of energy deep inside where electrons and protons whirl around nuclei…maybe someday like in the movie Back to the Future, we’ll be able to put a rock or a banana peel into our car for energy. The sun does it every day and we are only alive because of its mass constantly being fusion’d into energy.

The news keeps saying our earth scientists are finally on the verge of creating useful fusion.

I think discovering the full structure of love could be as revolutionary as fusion, ushering in a new era of human flourishing.

It’s right there in front of our faces, yet also a ways away, like the sun.

A Starting Point

First, let’s get a ballpark idea of what we think of when we think of love…kind of set a baseline with the current version. When we think of love, I think the two most famous things we think of are the romance and the new baby which are the two things that create the family cocoon where we all come from. Those are the two biggies.

Those romantic funny feelings in the stomach when you fall in love. That heady, swept away feeling of wanting someone so much and knowing they want you the same way.

And the experience of holding your child in your hands for the first time and feeling that wave of love come over you. A mysterious thing where a moment ago you were just you, but now you are a whole new person, a parent, intrinsically bonded to this little mini-you and responsible to raise it to adulthood.

Most families enjoy some good early years where the cute little kids keep the parents entertained and there’s a joy in being together…but then stuff starts to happen. The little cuties start to get more complicated. The romance between the head units that got this whole thing started, if you know what I mean, seems to sputter and get boring.

Twenty years later and the little cuties are now graduates of a dysfunctional family.

Arghhh! Why does this happen? We start off so well. That dream of romantic love and the dream of having a child and loving it with our whole being is so wonderful and drives our imagination in our younger years. The way this boat keels over and takes on water instead of sailing off into the sunset just drives me crazy…why is love not working?

And if our families are failing, it’s not hard to imagine why our whole society is failing. Not a lot of love out there.

We’re only getting this miserly 1,374 units of love per month, who can get by on that? (If you don’t get this reference, you have to read the pre-edition :).

Haha, it would be nice if we could quantify love in units and see if you’re getting enough and then order more.

But whether by ordering or by any other means, is there a way to get more?

Retooling: A New Language

If Einstein is actually the one who said that when you keep doing the same thing over and over but insanely expect different results—that’s not smart, then we’ll take his advice and try something new.

Language is one of our tool sheds and for all it does well it occasionally limits us. If we think “car” we limit ourselves to a vehicle on the ground, but what if we want a vehicle that can fly or go underwater or into space? We generally need a new word…and maybe later we can come back to car when all of us are updated to know that cars can now fly and go underwater and to the moon and back. We change the meaning of the word car and we use it once again in its expanded version. So for now let us drop the word love and later we can come back to it once we have an expanded view.

Let me tell you a story to inspire some new language.

As I’ve journeyed in life over the years since I was 17 on my quest to figure all this out I’ve become a big fan of reality…it is so elusive, but if you can get as close to it as possible you’re more likely to truly see the causes and effects and steer the car more accurately. This ability to see is what we know as Wisdom. Wisdom is the ability to see reality and know how to live in it.

It’s kind of like the relationship between driving a car and being a pedestrian near cars…it’s vital to see the reality of what’s around you…if you have a failure to see, then you may injure or be injured…cars and humans really need reality.

The problem with teen drivers is they fancy a world where they can express their emotions through their car and nothing bad will ever happen, so they express their enthusiasm for life, their youthful energy by going fast and in their reverie, they slip out of reality just long enough to not notice the young child also unaware of reality darting out in front of them. Two beautiful young people forever scarred physically and emotionally as a result of failing to perceive and live within reality.

Basically the whole journey of life, when lived well, is just an increasing awareness of reality…very little as a child and increasing through adulthood.

So let’s begin the imaginative journey toward reality by getting very basic…I look out the window and I see some plants and trees and the sky and it all appears to be standing still…but actually it is not standing still, it is hurtling through space at a very high speed. We are all hurtling through space, not only very fast, but the speed is accelerating.

If we were to zoom down the other way to the very small world we would find that a hard solid rock is actually a bunch of sub atomic particles moving and spinning around, it’s not hard or solid, it’s perpetual energy and motion. Reality is weird.

That, my friends, is our crazy world’s most basic reality. Things are not what they seem…rocks are balls of energy and we are hurtling through space at high speed.

You’re not a loser, you’re actually an astronaut flying through the universe. There’s no such thing as being stuck in a rut, every human alive is a speed racer astronaut, valiantly sailing through the stars.

The Edge

Around 1929 a number of scientists concluded that the entire universe is expanding. And not only getting bigger, but the expansion is accelerating. The reason we are hurtling through space is because there is so much energy in our universe it is rapidly expanding outwardly, and we are caught up in that expansion moving with all the other mass of the universe.

Let’s try to really understand our universe’s need to constantly expand. We live in this universe and are part of it, so let’s really drill down into reality…

…let me introduce you to the newest model of expanded functionality car…wait a minute, it’s right here but I need to make it visible, sorry I had it in invisible mode…Ok here it is, pretty cool, yeah? It looks more like a big puffy spacesuit than a car, but that’s how cars have evolved…you just step in and it wraps all around you like a cloak and let’s link up the neural control system, ok I’ve got mine on too, let’s switch them back to invisible and all you have to do is to think of the destination to enter it. Since you don’t know where we’re going and I’m going to surprise you, I’ll enter it for both of us…and off we go on a little journey to the edge.

A journey to find some new language to help us get past any limitations that the current language may be causing.

We move linked together, and I am speaking in your headset as we fly out of earths atmosphere in our invisible body cloak “cars” on our journey to try and see the most fundamental reality of our universe…we’re going to the edge where reality and non-existing nothingness meet.

The edge of the universe, where we will see what’s happening as the very edge of our something expands outwardly into the nothing and makes more something.

Of course we are not scientists, I didn’t bring any measuring instruments, we’re not going to the edge to analyze it, we’re going to surf it. That’s why we’re wearing our invisible cloak vehicles because they allow us to move freely.

And so after an eventful flight we approach the edge of the universe. Dark matter is usually calm like the still ocean, but here it pitches up into waves, as the ocean does to the coming shore, as it realizes the edge is near…If you don’t understand surfing, it’s basically the same as sledding down a snowy hill, but the snow is liquid and keeps moving forward.

As the something of our universe approaches the edge it forms a wave and crashes down into the nothing, and in that foamy mix some new thing—something—comes alive and the universe gets bigger.

We are curled in the wave watching the creation in the crash and all that new universe matter becomes the very hill we are surfing down. Better not fall forward into the nothingness for who knows what would happen.

None of us got to live in the garden of eden or other creation stories, but here we can witness the literal creation of new life, there is more every moment, than the moment before…It reminds me of the Big Island of Hawaii where I lived for five years. Fresh hot lava pours through underground tubes everyday out into the cold Pacific Ocean exploding into giant plumes of steam and cooling and building up on top of each other until hard lava rock emerges from the ocean to form new land. Every day the Big Island gets bigger.

That is the expansive life we flew to the edge to see…this is our universe’s physics, new life gets made every day because the universe just yearns to get bigger.

I’m pretty sure this is a miracle. It is pure science and religion all at once. Nothing becomes something. The energy has to expand, it can’t be held back, it just surges into new reality and no one knows why and probably never will. I don’t understand how you can make a new baby human and why when you hold it in your hands for the first time and you see your own human energy has expanded into a new life staring back up at you and everything in you is moved by a wave of something that wasn’t there before, something so wonderful the poets are still searching for the words.

That’s it, that’s the creative expansive energy I want to understand. It’s not only all around us, it is in us.

Our human energy.

What we take with us as we fly home to the earth, is the witness of expansive life energy.

Let’s take this core reality of our existence - our expansive human energy and try to examine human relationships with it invigorating our imagination.

And here we should say a word about imagination, which I have so generously been applying in the story so far. Imagination is all we’ve got when it comes to science and any other creative endeavor.

When Sigmund Freud imagined that the human mind had different parts he called the id, the ego and the superego, that was pure imagination, he just made it up. Nobody, in the hundred years since has found even a bare shred of proof pointing at an actual id. But he also had another idea that was more physically real…he felt that by talking to a trained person who would really listen and kind of guide you a little that maybe you could process some of your unresolved relational experiences and it might relieve some of the anxiety you were feeling. And it worked!

Nobody knows if we have an id, ego and superego, and nowadays much of the mental health community has moved on from those ideas…but the “talk therapy” is going strong and helps millions every day.

So imagination creates new things, and we often will never know if it’s really true, or partly true, but what matters is if it works…does it allow us to have a framework within which to modify our behaviors that can cause positive change?

What is this thing we have and then transfer to another?

Human Energy

Let’s imagine a scene: you had an eventful day where some ideas that had been simmering inside you suddenly blossomed into a new understanding while you were staring out the window of a coffee shop…you perked up excitedly because finally all the pieces had come together and you realized something about yourself and about the world that was totally new and not something you’d read but just formed within you and it was liberating…you felt free like you could fly.

After a while basking in your own reverie, slowly consolidating all the parts into a cohesive whole, you suddenly had an overwhelming urge to get up and go home to your beloved and tell them what you learned. So you jumped up and ran home.

They were home chopping broccoli and looked up with a smile as you came in the room. You proclaimed they would not believe what you were about to tell them and their curiosity was piqued. So off you went into the story explaining what had been simmering for a while, and then some other important parts and wham! the big reveal of the big new thing! And their eyes lit up and their arms came off the counter towards you and you both knew that you fully understood each other and your big new thing went into their heart and mind and became a big new thing for them too.

And you grabbed each others shoulders and started bouncing up and down as you laughed and cried and looked in each others eyes and in that moment life was as good as anyone could ever imagine.

What just happened between these two people?

We know before having flown to the edge of the universe we would have used the love word to describe it…but now we have this new idea of expansive life energy…something new was being made, first in the coffee shop, then together at the home, the first person had a new creation of life in them and then they transferred that new life to the other person. A whole new thing had come into each person and they got bigger…they expanded.

What is that energy (or that mass?) that expanded them?

Did you notice as we flew through deep space to the edge that there were long stretches of just dark empty space? That wasn’t actually emptiness, that was most of what the universe is made of, dark matter and dark energy. It’s mass/energy and it makes up 96% of the universe. All the stars and planets, the comets and cupids, the quasars and galaxies all together only make up 4%. Most of it is that dark stuff and that is all expanding, somehow energy is pushing all that mass from within and the whole thing just keeps getting bigger.

What is the energy in us humans that just creates new stuff within us, new ideas, new feelings, new body mass, and then we go and share that life content with the people we like sharing it with—Who knows? Let’s call it human life energy. Maybe we could try ig, eno and supereno? Ok yeah, let’s just go with human life energy.

So we have no idea what it is, this energy within us that we transfer to others, but we know it happens and we know we really like it when it happens in the good way. But there’s another side to life when people come along and instead of making us bigger, they make us smaller. That kind of also would fit into the human energy idea, they suck energy out of us and make us smaller.

So we can give our human life energy to expand someone, or we can suck energy out of them to diminish them. That kind of summarizes all human relationships. The word love only captures part of that, but the opposite of love, when we take something from another is also a big part of human relationships. But when parents do that to their kids, when they take rather than give, we don’t say they hate their kids, even though the end result is kind of the same…so the words love and hate just don’t cover all the bases, don’t account for the fulness of our experience.

Expansion and Contraction

Where else do we see expansive life energy?

On the Big Island we had a big mango tree. Mango roots go deep into the earth to get water, and the leaves are hardy for collecting sun beams. The little mango forms and all this energy from above and below goes in to expand it. When it approaches its birthdate an amazing juicy sweet personality forms hugging tight to it’s huge seed.

I first ate mango on my flight to Hawaii for college and I couldn’t believe how sweet and juicy it was with such a luscious mouth feel, I had to call the flight attendant to ask what my new best friend was named. I felt sad for the poor papaya, destined to be a mango wannabe.

One of my early teachers in Hawaii influenced by California culture of the sixties and seventies, and known for being quite energetic, said, “My friends used to tell me to mellow out, so I looked it up in the dictionary and it said, mellow means fully ripe and about to rot!…so no Man, I’m not going to mellow out”!

The little mango is fully ripe, and we either eat it and it cycles its energy into us, or it drops to the ground and goes from ripe to mellow to slowly decomposing and goes back into the beautiful cycle of life. Our human body does the same.

That’s why we journeyed to the edge, so we could see that expanding energy is at the core of our universe’s reality. When you drill down to find reality, that’s what you find, expanding and contracting energy.

And if it’s the universe’s physics then it’s our physics because we are made of the same matter as the universe. Remember the creation story of the breathing of life into the dust to make humans…it doesn’t matter where your creation origin story comes from, dust or star dust, they both are the matter of this universe, and they both involve new expansive life energy. We also have the same mass/energy thing in us just like rocks or the sun.

Our human life is a life of expanding energy that we give to one another.

Why don’t we call it human energy…or human life energy, I like both at different times.

Know and Don’t Know

Let’s take this to the next phase of exploration…as a categorization, here is a simple one that covers its subject well; There are two kinds of people on earth—those you know and those you don’t know. That covers all 8 billion of them.

We remember the 150 that they say is how many people you can reasonably know. Who knows? It seems about right to me and my 150 friends, family and co-workers.

I’ve always thought it strangely poetic that there are strangers, even on the next block over, who I will never meet and may never even see or maybe we will brush past each other in a neighborhood store not knowing our lives have played out, each with all our own family and friends’ dramas and joys, over decades, just a few hundred feet from one another. The sonder of it all.

In a city, we could have been in the same building and never rode the elevator together.

How much do strangers affect each others lives?

Ask all the Ukrainians who don’t know Putin.

Ask all the people with two nice legs who might’ve caught polio but never did and who never met the doctor named Saulk who assured with his invention that they never would.

And the school kids in Malawi, they weren’t doing well, so they sought to improve their educational system. They tried better books, nope, they tried more teachers, nope, they kept scratching their heads and somebody noticed some of the kids had stomach worms…and stomach worm pills are cheap and work good, so they gave all the kids the pills and suddenly all the metrics to measure student performance shot up.

The poor kids just didn’t feel good most of the time and they couldn’t concentrate. The people who put all that in motion have had a huge influence on the whole country.

Right now there’s two kids in different places on earth, one of them is bound to get cancer thirty years from now but the other one will cure cancer twenty years from now and save the others life. Many kids and grandkids will owe their lives to that stranger kid with the cure.

We just lived through a worldwide pandemic. If there was ever something to learn from a worldwide pandemic, I would hope it would be that strangers affect one another.

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

How are you a piece or a part of the main? Are there ways we’re connected that are not so obvious? Is there some sort of structure that was always there but we couldn’t see it? Let’s explore our structural connections using this new language of human energy.

Human energy that life content carrying thing.

The Modalities of Human Energy

We’ve already explored a little the two people sharing their lives and expanding one another, they could have been lovers, or a parent and child or roommates, they are people that know each other and we would say they love each other.

But in order to build an understanding bridge for how we connect with people we don’t even know—Stranger Love—first I have to imagine with you this curious thing about how our human energy flows amongst us with people we do know and how it’s state or modality can change, kind of like how life in our universe can be energy or mass interchangeably.

The heat you feel right now from the sun is because 499 seconds ago mass was fusion’ed into light energy and then it travelled 93 million miles to shine on you.

Maybe we do a similar conversion with our human energy? Here is an example.

You expend your human energy directly to the people you know by talking, hugging, spending time together in each others presence. But there’s another way we love our children when they are not in our presence—we go to work.

And when we go to work those kids are not in the room, they are nowhere around.

Yet we go work and expend a lot of energy there because we know if we don’t those kids will have nowhere to live and no food to eat. That same lovely sun we flew by will be fusion’ing down on their heads and killing them. So we need to construct a shelter to stay out of the sun and the cold rain. We need to expend a lot of energy to survive life on this earth.

When we are directly in their presence we give our human energy directly to them, you could say it’s more like the “energy” side of the e=mc² —we beam our love right at them. But when we go to work we give them our human life energy indirectly…it goes into our hammer and nails or into our computer and it makes things happen that produce money that we then use to build a house for them. Our human energy converts more into the “mass” side of the e=mc² and exists in “things” which then in turn give a benefit to the child. It’s our same human life energy, but sometimes it goes direct into their body and other times goes indirect through things.

This is an amazing phenomenon that we might call the different modalities of our human energy.

And the two different modalities have a very distinct quality difference between them…the direct transfer of human energy is the one we like the most. Talking, hugging, laughing together. Kids playing games. Adults playing adult games. The intellectual exchanges or the laughing we find so stimulating…these are what I call the Sweet Honey of human energy, the fun stuff that we love, that we even crave, like Pooh Bear always seeking the pot of sweet honey.

On the other side, the indirect transfer of human energy usually comes from work. And some are lucky to really enjoy their work, but for most of the world work is work and it’s kinda hard or really hard.

So there’s a qualitative difference between the two modes of human energy transfer, one is fun and we’re drawn to it, and the other is really just that we must do it to survive life on planet earth.

These two modalities of our human energy will be very important to our understanding as we observe it do things we’d not really imagined before as we broaden and cross over to the other side of this structure. Because as we will soon see, the same two modalities of human energy exist as we transfer our human energy to…People We Don’t Know.

And so finally we arrive…Stranger Love.

Stranger Love

Let’s start with the modality of the indirect…the “survive life on planet earth mode”, before we get to the sweet honey mode (later I’ll show you a visual graph of this structure). How do we transfer our human energy to people we don’t know so that we can both survive on earth?

Well that’s pretty easy…you didn’t make that pizza you’re eating did you? Nor did you make the chair you’re sitting in while you eat it. You also didn’t make the toilet and sewers that handle the back end of pizza life cycles. You didn’t make the car the pizza delivery person drove in or the roads they drove on. Strangers made it all. And your kids are really buzzing with energy from that pizza.

You did go to work to make the money to pay for it and it just so happens you work for a flour mill who supplied the pizza company with the flour to make the pizza. So you did contribute, along with all the strangers, to the making of the pizza.

And let’s not forget the farmers of the tomato’s, dairy and wheat and the miners who dug up all the rocks and minerals for the roads and buildings and pizza ovens (and the artisans who make those pizza paddles).

So we are all wrapped up together in:

Project: Survive Planet Earth.

We all expend our human energy toward one another…it goes in that indirect mode into “things” that benefit one another. And this is absolutely crucial to our survival in the current style of life that we are accustomed to…we could imagine billions dying in some catastrophe and since they’re no longer doing what they do for us we just fall into chaos and carry on in a post-apocalyptic way with no pizza…even if you knew how to make it, could you produce the cheese and the flour and the tomatoes and make an oven hot enough?…if you did it would probably become the cradle from which civilization re-emerged.

But if you’re not into that scenario and you want to keep all the modern transportation and food and the energy to run it all, we had better all get along to keep it all going.

One of the things we’ll do to promote little blossoming’s of understanding as we go is we will toggle back and forth between the old language and the new language so that as we explore ahead using the new language and discover something new, then we toggle back and go “Oh, Yeah that was just this other thing we already knew about using other words”, but now in this new light as we see it more fully and clearly, with new words, there may be discoveries.

We’ve just discussed using the language of human energy and how we indirectly put energy into “things” that benefit strangers we don’t know and never will know, and then we toggle and we realize this is the exact same thing that happens when we indirectly give our human energy to our children…whom we famously LOVE…yet notice that we don’t use the word love to describe the mirrored other side with strangers…hmmm, maybe that discrepancy betrays a dimness of view in the old construction of language that is illuminated by the power of the new language…and we see this via the toggle.

It is the same exact thing on both sides—work to benefit a human. It’s just with people we know on one side or people we don’t know on the other. Our human energy can do an e=mc² /fusion thing or maybe a shape shift thing and flow beneficially into both. Even though we don’t think of strangers loving us or us loving them, if our human energy is doing the exact same thing in both cases, then maybe it is the exact same thing.

It’s the good ‘ole; If a=b and b=c, therefore, a=c logic.

In this way we can see that our human energy or (toggle) our love flows indirectly to the benefit of our children and equally indirectly to the benefit of strangers.

Therefore, it may be said…we love strangers.

Stranger Love.

Told ya.

As I said, all promises will be delivered in this the 1^st edition. :) but we’re not through yet…

Because that’s just the beginning boring necessary part of Stranger Love, the indirect mode. The work one, the little less enjoyable one…unless you work with dolphins or horses or fast vehicles.

The Big Surprise

We still have one more to go. Direct mode, also known as, the ™Sweet Honey mode. The one we really like.

This is where the 8 Billion Pump really earns its keep. This is where Stranger Love can really give you the 199,200 units of pure love seeping out of your pores.

What am I saying?

I’m saying just as we love people we know directly in the Sweet Honey way of talking, hugging, intellectual and emotional interaction…so there has always been a way we do that with strangers too.

You can spiritually make out and have long non-conversations with people you will never know and actually you’ve already been doing it without realizing it. But once you realize it, I hope that will flip a switch making it stronger and more visceral to you and allowing you to direct more of your human energy toward it.

Because actually, no one could ever survive on the measly 1,347 units, most of us would be dead in weeks. And all along even when you thought you weren’t getting enough love, you actually were getting enough to stay alive, but you didn’t know it.

This is why even though we’ve had plenty of post-apocalyptic movies where humanity has fallen into chaos, it’s never actually happened worldwide, though it’s definitely happened in pockets like the Holocaust and the Rwandan massacre, and some slums that are on the edge of keeling over into it every day. This mechanism has kept us all bonded together enough to keep everything going.

So how is it we transfer our human energy emotionally and intellectually to people we don’t even know?

How do we experience the Sweet Honey of emotional and intellectual love with people we do not know?

Can you guess?

Maybe using the e=mc2 thing to shape shift and shoot lazer beams of love long distance?

Haha no….maybe someday.

I’m giving you a moment to think about it, but this is a newsletter not a personal conversation so I’m trying to figure out how to give you a moment…(scroll carefully to not reveal it too soon)

….

……

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….again…how can we experience the emotional and intellectual human energy of people we do not know?….

Guess now and remember your guess and share it later in the comments….

Ok, so here we go…the way that humans who do not know each other at all can transfer emotional and intellectual human life energy into each other…

…is via a human energy mechanism called…..

….Art!

Duh dunt dah duh!! Art is the one.

Art is the RAM like physical mechanism that human energy goes into and just sits there waiting to be released into someone else’s heart and mind in the same way that we directly transfer emotional and intellectual content into each other in person

Think about it. Art is in every single human society and has been throughout all of history…the buffaloes on the ancient cave walls…the ancient pottery with paintings on it…art has always been there, it is ubiquitous in human history.

In fact much of the human history we have is from the art that survived.

And look around you right now…look at the nearest wall…it’s painted, there’s trim between the wall and the floor that has sculpted shape to it. The wall may have other artistic paintings or wallpaper. Look at your plates and silverware, look at everything on your desk or the things in the room around you, everything is designed creatively by talented people who make things more beautiful. We simply cannot just make functional things without making them beautiful, unless they are hid from view under the hood.

What this means if we toggle again is that art is actually a form of human love that holds us all together.

If you’re not getting enough love in your life, this stranger love is there to fill your heart with human life content, just as the strangers built roads for you to drive on and grow food for you to eat.

Man, those strangers love us so much!

There are many accounts of discussions about art where they say that art is an expression of our humanity, and that’s right, exactly like the expression of my humanity I make when I tell my beloved the stories of my day and I transfer my life content into them. The artist does the exact same thing, but alone in a room, transfers their life content into a static physical thing like a painting or sculpture (shape shift) and then later when another human views it, the life content comes back out of it and goes into them.

Sometimes the live performing arts are a little more direct from artist to audience, but it’s still going through the musical instruments or the story of the play. The art is still the “thing” the human energy goes through. And the artist doesn’t really know the audience.

Imagine the artistic skill of the comedian to twist words and story expectations in just such a way that the solar plexus of hundreds of people explode air out of their lungs and continue to spasm as all the muscles of their face go berserk and their neural network triggers a dopamine rush and the energy of so many people in the room just reverberates in a choir like sound bouncing off the walls amplifying it all. What happier moment on earth could there be?

What gratitude do we owe to these artists? They write the songs that make the whole world cry.

Loving those we know and loving those we don’t know, it’s just a different mechanism for the same transfer of human life energy. It’s a transference of human life content and it takes energy to do that, the human energy goes forth either directly or through the static art medium. As they say in Asia…Same, Same.

And importantly, as we will dive into deeply in the 2^nd Edition, the human life energy expands us and gives us something we didn’t have before, it makes us bigger.

So we toggle; human energy is the same as love…in this way we can see that art is love….one of the forms or modalities of love. Human energy goes into art and then through it to other humans.

I think many of us have thought of art as just another category of human society like business, education, healthcare, civil society, and so on. But I believe it is uniquely in it’s own super-category above all those subcategories, attached to our very humanness as we carry out all the subcategories. Not just something humans do, but at the very core of human essence, the place where what we call love exists, and if instead we call it human energy we can see so much more broadly and deeply how it flows amongst us and holds us all together.

This is the Structure of Love.

Doing all the work to protect your children is just hard work, and the work we all do to make society thrive for one another is also hard work…but the art, the music, the food, the design, this is all the sweet honey just as the talking and hugging and being together.

We thrive when we are getting deep full drafts of another person’s human life coming into us, sometimes it’s from people we know, and other times from people we don’t know. One of the secrets is realizing that even if you feel you’re not getting enough of one, you’re getting some of the other.

Even when you’re not feeling the love from your dysfunctional family, all those strangers making pizza’s and making and loving the same music as you love are sending their human energy into you.

Both the care for your survival and the sweet honey can come to you from strangers and put that deposit of human life content inside you and you feel content, or even over flowing.

Content from content.

An interesting angle from which to see this is to consider travel. What do we travel to another country to see? We don’t travel to France to consider their healthcare or sewer systems, we go there to experience the human energy they embed in their art and culture and design and food. All these creative categories broadly come under art, and can be understood in sub-categories like familial art, public art, one of a kind art or mass produced design. In future editions I’ll go much more deeply into all this.

What’s amazing about art being love is to realize that love is far more than what we thought it was…it’s not just a feeling you desire, it’s not just a thing that happens to you when you fall into it or a wave that overcomes you once in your life if you’re lucky, but it is weaved in the fabrics of all our human culture, which is really our collective inner life imprinted on a media and displayed publicly for all to share.

All the things we make and build are infused with it—sometimes for our survival, and other times to utterly thrill us with their beauty and design and meaning. And they’re all around us.

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.

Love is expending energy to benefit others.

If you can cultivate a continual awareness of this nest surrounding you, in those moments when you take a break from the current thing you’re concentrating on, the human energy of strangers you will never meet can blossom more fully within you. You were always held by it, but as a baby who doesn’t know the significance of being held yet then growing to a woman having a moment of intense realization how good it is to be held safe by her partner, you can over time more fully enjoy, be enthused with joy, by your nest.

Have you ever felt the energy of a city? That’s what it is. An energy vibrating in all the buildings lovingly built and the streets and all the beauty designed rich with humanity and when you’re there you just feel it all. It’s all full of human life energy and as you walk by it just releases a little charge of it into you.

That’s the miracle of art and design and things built for us, the RAM deposit of human energy in them never runs dry. It’s like the basket of fish that miraculously keeps refilling and feeds 5,000 people. A painting in an art gallery will thrill a person today as much as it will thrill another 100 years from now and another 1,000 years from now, the charge inside never runs out.

Kinda like the charge inside a rock.

If you haven’t been into art, if you’ve been walking around ignoring and taking for granted all this designed beauty in every room, then you’ve probably taken what you’ve been granted wrong—the measly 1,347 units that is so not optimal was never all there was, you’ve failed to realize and appropriate the 199,200 blazing bliss-joy units that have been all 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.

Postscript:

If you’re starved for love and you can’t eat art, maybe you need more of the direct kind from people you know…I’ll go into detail how we can imagine human energy flowing in all it forms and modalities and some of the secrets to probably get more of that expansive life energy…there’s things you have control over and things you don’t have control over, you have to learn how to prime the pump of what you do control.

There’s so much more to all this in the coming editions…I’ll give you a graphic framework to see the whole structure of love laid out, the people you know and don’t know, the shape-shifting modality as human energy transfers directly into people or indirectly through things. And then there’s two big areas we have only begun to explore; the dynamics of how human energy expands and contracts…for when it contracts, we see the opposite side of love, all the fighting and violence and dysfunction in our world that diminishes us all. All coming in the following editions….