A Map of Souls takes readers on a remarkable 100,000-mile journey by Harley from homeless shelters to the halls of academia, seeking love’s story in the hearts of extraordinary people, through the eyes of diverse cultures, and in the minds of leading thinkers from religion, history, and the arts to quantum physics and neuroscience. The adventure brings astonishing hope and an understanding of something people universally treasure and believe they know when they see it, yet for which there has been no universal explanation or definition. With an explorer’s heart, A Map of Souls reveals the interconnected story of love’s origin, nature, and meaning and what living that story means for our lives, times, and world.
Intro to A Map of Souls
By Scotte Burns, with Toni Burns
The son of a violent, alcoholic father, by fifteen, I’d lost friends to suicide, violence, and overdose, learning early on that love was rare, fragile, and dangerous. From that wounded boy, I grew to become a cartographer of love's terrain, a man who studied it, even spoke and taught about it, but secretly never truly inhabited it. That is, until Toni, warrior queen of our highway, who spent over forty years refusing to accept my cynicism, finally put her foot down and her kickstand up, joining me for the ride of our lives - a search for love’s true origin, nature, and purpose.
A Map of Souls is my 69,000-word narrative nonfiction/spiritual memoir of that 100,000-mile journey, intimately shared with the reader. Part road narrative, part philosophical and scientific inquiry, it chronicles our encounters with neuroscientists and Tibetan monks, Hells Angels and Amish farmers, soldiers and street buskers. We meet Greg Grey Cloud, a Lakota mentor who culturally reconnects convicted abusers with love by pairing them with abused horses. We are blessed by Reverend Handy, whose agape love welcomes strangers as family at Dr. King's church in Montgomery. And in a Michigan bar echoing my childhood, we find Alex, a tattooed gang leader and ex-con, "recalled to life" by the unwavering love of his own damaged yet steadfast children. Through his redemption, love is revealed, not as something we feel or do, and “deserving it” or not is irrelevant. It’s what we are. This isn't love as theory. This is love as resurrection. And with Toni in the saddle next to me, it’s resurrection with sprinkles.
The result is a new map of human connection, introducing concepts like the erosphere (the shared realm where each person’s love overlaps with others) and eroplasticity (love’s capacity to reshape consciousness through grief). Guided by our vision of the universal divine, “BoB,” the Biggest of Beings, and the wisdom of faith leaders and leading characters in neuroscience, epigenetics, and quantum physics, we discover that love is BoB’s way of “getting bigger," and offer actionable steps for joining that expansion and making yourself a little bigger, too.