What changes when you understand what love actually is?
Everything.
Scotte Burns: Author and Speaker on Love, Consciousness, and Meaning
The Cartographer
Most of us wander the territory of love without a map. We inherit fragments: fairy tales, biology textbooks, advice columns, song lyrics. We’re told love is a feeling, a choice, a chemical reaction. None of it is enough.
I’ve spent my life drawing a different map. As a teacher, I watched love transform classrooms. As a husband, I’ve navigated over forty years of partnership with Toni, the woman who refused to let me study love from a safe distance. And as a researcher, I’ve ridden 100,000 miles across America on our motorcycles, asking everyone from neuroscientists to ex-cons, monks to jazz singers, the same question:
What is love?
What I found changes everything. Love is not a feeling or an action. It is the creative and purposeful force at the heart of consciousness itself. And understanding its true origin, nature, and purpose transforms how we live, how we connect, and how we find our way through this world.
I share these maps through stories, books, talks, and guided experiences for seekers, educators, helping professionals, couples, and anyone who suspects there’s more to love’s story, and to their own.
25 years teaching. 100,000 miles of research across 48 states. Interviews with leading minds in neuroscience, epigenetics, consciousness studies, philosophy, and faith. A 43-year love story. Two books. One question that refuses to let go.
The Work
Maps for the Territory That Matters Most
Speaking, writing, and guided experiences that translate the science and stories of love and consciousness into something you can carry with you.
Speaking & Events
Keynotes, plenary talks, and media interviews that blend storytelling, science, and lived wisdom. Not lectures. Guided journeys that leave audiences with a changed understanding of love, meaning, and their own lives.
Writing
A Map of Souls, the book that charts love's true origin, nature, and purpose. And The Cartographer's Log on Substack: essays, stories, and dispatches from the frontier of love and consciousness.
The Journey
Over a decade of research. A hundred thousand miles. Expert interviews. Hundreds of encounters across every corner of American life. Media coverage of the living body of inquiry behind the maps.
What People Experience
"Scotte's knowledge, experience, and passion just blew us away. He's one of the smartest people I've ever met, but what was really amazing was his ability to put it all together with humor, a sense of adventure, and a genuine love for teaching and learning. Everyone came away feeling a little 'bigger.'"
MIKE MUNIER
VP, Colorado League of Charter Schools
"Brace yourself for a powerful and enlightening experience with Scotte. As a speaker, he reaches the audience with humor and wisdom. His intelligence and genuine caring nature are evident in everything he does; he left a lasting, loving impact on our members."
DR. JEANE M. RHODES
Psychologist, APPPAH Director, author, The Birth of Hope
"I was really moved by the depth of his insights and thought-provoking ideas. If you're searching for a speaker who can bring intelligence, inspiration, and a dash of humor to the stage, look no further than Scotte Burns. Trust me, you won't be disappointed!"
BEBE ALEXANDER
Program Director, Arvada Center for the Arts & Humanities
A Map of Souls
The Cartographer's Log
Essays, stories, and reflections on love, consciousness, and the journey. If you've ever suspected there's more to love's story, pull up a chair. There's always room at this table.
LATEST ENTRY
Walk This Way
A karate master, a memory, and learning to Be
Yesterday, the epiphany came, but not with the kind of revealed knowledge that suddenly bursts from the clouds, dropping stone tablets of profound wisdom at one’s feet, if indeed such things still happen now that Charlton Heston is long gone. This was the kind of revelation that builds slowly, like the sun rising from a simple paling of the eastern sky, its rays sorting out the clouds as its waxing light returns color to the world. In keeping with my love for Latin (and for the way it commits wisdom to the mundane), I think I shall name this new light of understanding Non omnia retrorsum videns: Not Seeing Everything Backward.
Throughout my life, and especially through the work from which so much of my purpose and identity has stemmed - music, teaching, and Journeys to Love - I have followed what I took to be the modern tradition: identifying the career, possessions, and lifestyle I wanted, setting goals to mark my movement toward them, and making plans for achieving those goals. These were the things and ways of life I wanted to Have (with a big H). Then, according to what had become my standard operating procedure, what I would Do (big D) was driven by what I sought to Have. Who I would Be was determined by these two preceding elements. In other words, my Being was the result of what I was Doing, based on what I wanted to Have. This worked well when I was satisfied with Having as the goal. But it wasn’t where that calm, content, confident walk I’d recalled and imagined over the years was leading.
I don’t know how widely this Have-Do-Be pattern holds beyond my own life, and ...
