ABOUT
On the map of souls, love is our compass rose
- Scotte Burns
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The Story
I was born with a father to whom love was a commodity and a weapon, and he swallowed it like whiskey, bringing years of antics and indifference, bullet holes and blood. When he left, I was relieved; when he died, I was numb.
Over time, I lost friends to suicide, violence, and overdose. Numbness became a shield, raised on the arm and fist of alcohol, drugs, and silence. I was brought back to life in the arms and eyes of a beautiful girl who grew into an astonishing woman, then redeemed by the love of friends, family, and colleagues.
That redemption and love carried me into a teaching career where I could gratefully pour it back into classrooms, across years of writing, performing and recording music, and eventually onto a pair of Harleys, where together with Toni across 100,000 miles of American highway, I spoke with quantum physicists and gang members, monks and jazz singers, psychologists, street people, and the families of death row inmates. All of them asking, in their own ways, the same question that drove me after seeing its miracles. And yet, no two of those experts, wanderers, and faithful answered or defined it the same way: What is love?
I'm Scotte Burns. Author, speaker, storyteller, teacher, and explorer. I hold an MFA in Creative Nonfiction and spent twenty-five years in the classroom, from middle school through university, helping to raise and guide over 3,000 young people. I'm a veteran TEDx speaker, a popular podcast guest, and a researcher whose work has been featured on NPR's Morning Edition and PRX.
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But none of those titles explain why I do what I do. For that, you need the wound, the road, and the woman who insisted we take it together.
TONI & THE JOURNEY
A Love Story That Became a Research Project
People sometimes ask what our secret is, after over four decades together. We don't have one. What we do have is something more honest and more useful: a shared refusal to stop learning what love actually is, and a willingness to let the answer change us.
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When we launched the Journeys to Love project, we didn't set out to prove a theory. We set out with a question: could we find, across the extraordinary diversity of America's cultures, places, faiths, lifestyles, and events, a common thread in the way people experience and understand love? We packed our Harleys and rode into the unknown with little more than recording equipment, curiosity, and each other.
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Over a decade and a hundred thousand miles, we found far more than a common thread. We found a common being. Conversations with leading minds in neuroscience, epigenetics, quantum physics, consciousness studies, psychology, philosophy, and faith converged with what we heard from everyday people in diners, churches, prisons, and living rooms across forty-eight states.
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Science, faith, and the road were telling the same story.
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Those discoveries became the foundation of my upcoming book, A Map of Souls: The Quest for Love's True Story, and the living body of work I now share through speaking, writing, and guided experiences.
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Toni is not a co-presenter. She is the living proof. Our story is not an anecdote in my talks. It is the ground beneath them.
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WORLDWIDE
THE MAP
What All Those Miles Revealed
Here is what the science, the stories, and a hundred thousand miles taught us:
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Consciousness is not something our brains create. It is something they receive. Like a radio tuning into a signal that exists everywhere, our brains are the hardware that receives a universal, non-local consciousness that is the ground of all existence.
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Love is not a feeling, not an action, not a choice we make. It is the creative and purposeful aspect of that universal consciousness. It is what gives existence its meaning, its direction, its drive to connect, create, and become something greater.
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And here is the part that changes everything: the unique wiring of each individual brain, with its particular senses, memories, imagination, and emotional landscape, is what gives us our identity, our sense of being individual and separate; a way for universal consciousness to know itself - as you. Your experience of love, in all its specific, messy, particular glory, is how the deepest reality discovers what it means to be.
Your love matters.
THE CREDENTIALS
100,000+ miles across 48 states for the Journeys to Love research project, exploring love across diverse cultures, places, and lifestyles.
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Dozens of interviews with leading minds in neuroscience, epigenetics, animal behavior, quantum theory, consciousness studies, philosophy, psychology, and faith.
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Veteran TEDx speaker. Popular podcast guest. Featured on NPR's Morning Edition and PRX.
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Author: A Map of Souls: The Quest for Love's True Story, exploring the origin, nature, and purpose of love.
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MFA in Creative Writing. Award-winning educator. Speaker to thousands across conferences, universities, professional organizations, and faith communities.
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25 years teaching, middle school through university, helping to raise and guide over 3,000 children and young adults.
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​​43-year marriage to Toni, co-researcher and co-adventurer. Two children of their own.
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​​Researcher and storyteller whose work synthesizes science, philosophy, lived wisdom, and the stories of hundreds of Americans into a unified understanding of love.
