Transmissions are podcasts, and other content related to the book.

The Love Channel

Perhaps the power of higher love is not high power but low power. Does the frequency of love operate on long waves versus short ones? Think about the crystal radio and how it works. The crystal radio has no battery and no power, yet it receives transmissions from afar. How does it do this? The short answer is that the power comes from the source.

I wonder then, are we the source of the love transmission? Or is love transmitting itself through us from another source? Is this transmission, this love signal, somehow able to be downloaded into every cell, every molecule in our body?

All living cells, like humans, must find energy in the environment to exist. It can be metabolized from food, water, and sunlight. In fact, without the eight-minute old light from the sun, all life on earth would disappear within a few months. So, when the source of all life is transmitted to us from 93 million miles away, why would we imagine that we “make love” (our most essential nutrient)?

I don’t presume to know where love comes from, but I imagine that love is something that is transmitted to us, through us and generated within us by a force or source that transcends humans or life on earth.

How this happens, I don’t know, but I imagine that we are like crystal radios. We have to tune ourselves to the right frequency to find the “channel” we want to receive the power-full transmissions. What is the frequency of the love channel? Maybe there are many love frequencies, many channels? At least 108, and I’m sure, so many more. My hope is to tune my cells, my body, and my life to receive these signals.

There was a time in history when families used to gather around the radio and listen to the broadcasts together. That seemed like a special time in human history…when we enjoyed receiving these transmissions together. Why not gather around and listen to the love transmissions together? This is one of the intentions I hope to achieve with Radiate Perpetual Love: to listen, share, and manifest these love transmissions together.

Who is Wolfram Alderson?

Roberta

Who is Wolfram Alderson? If one would check your bio on your website, LinkedIn or Facebook pages, they would read just a short description of your accomplishments. On the other hand, if anyone read your resume or curriculum vitae, a more detailed version of who Wolfram Alderson really is would come to life, you would see that Wolfram Alderson is currently the founder and CEO of the Robert H. Lustig foundation. He is the CEO of the Hypoglycemia Support Foundation, the founding chair of the board of directors for the Institute for Love and Time, co-founder of Perfact, and Executive Manager of Human & Environmental Health at KDD in Kuwait. And that’s just for starters. Wolfram is also a champion for human & environmental health, an artist, and agent of love. Today, I am honored to host this first podcast with you, Wolfram, dedicating it and leading up to the launch of your first book, Radiate Perpetual Love. So, let’s take a look at Wolfram Alderson, the writer and author. My question for you today is when, where and how did this journey begin?

Wolfram

Well, first, Roberta, I have to say I can’t think of a better person to have this conversation with. You’ve been so vital and so supportive in the journey to write Radiate Perpetual Love. We all need our cheerleaders, and we need people in our lives who believe in us. I deeply value what you’ve done to help me give birth to Radiate Perpetual Love.

If I recollect, your question is, “where did this begin”? I think it began with the spark of life and love that gave me birth and gave me light into this world. In certain parts of Latin America, when they talk about birth, they say, “Dar la luz” or “Give the light”. So, I believe that we’re all here for a special purpose, and some of us, like me, are late bloomers. It takes a while to figure out exactly why we’re here, but I believe that my journey began at birth.

My mother was a poet, a writer, and an artist. I was born on her birthday. You could say, well, that’s a coincidence. We had a very strong spiritual connection, something that you might call ESP or “extra sensory perception”.

From a young age, I had a very strong connection with my mother, in a sense that there was some magic, spiritual element in life that connected me to being here on Earth. I have to say that in my early years of life, there were a lot of struggles and traumas, and my youth was, let’s just say, a “troubled youth”. I remember that I had a number of experiences throughout my childhood which were sort of illuminating to me or gave me a glimpse of the spark or the light of love, many glimpses from my mother, my grandmother, and frankly, mostly women.

In my life, I have some very special experiences that I describe in Radiate Perpetual Love, and we won’t go in those in detail now. I remember in my teens, as I grew into puberty, falling in love for the first time and realizing how powerful love was in my life, how it could be transformative. But still, it wasn’t until my late teens, when I discovered my calling in life, if you will, which was to pursue a career in social change, that I could make a difference by, for lack of a better way of saying it, loving the world, wanting to make a difference.

Over the course of my career, which has spanned over four decades, I’ve seen a lot of human and environmental suffering. It could be easy to get burnt out or lose hope when you see so much neglect in the world. But for some reason, I keep finding inspiration. I keep seeing the light, the love that’s here, that’s keeping everything glued together despite all the challenges.

At this late point in my career, I came to the realization that even though I’ve done many different things in social change… working with the homeless, abused children, seniors, low-income communities, and refugees…it doesn’t really matter what population or what environment I was in ­– the common denominator, I realized, was what I call the love deficit.

To me, the sum of suffering and challenges in our world today are essentially equal to the love deficit, meaning that humanity must step up and give more love, realize more love, actualize more love for us to be able to overcome the greatest challenges we have today on all fronts.

So that’s a long way of saying how I got here. It’s actually the short version. There are many more stories and I share some of them in Radiate Perpetual Love. Moments of magic and places of rescue is a phrase that I borrowed from my mother, who was a poet. These moments, these places of rescue in life, point you in the right direction or help renew your faith, whatever your faith may be.

For me, the best concept I have of what God is or what a higher being is, or what a higher purpose is – is love. And specifically, unconditional love is the type of love that I’m most focused on. Anyway, like I said, that’s a long answer to a short question, but I hope that does it for you.

Roberta

That was perfect, Wolfram. And one more. When I wrote the first edition of my book, The Do’s and Don’ts of Hypoglycemia, an Everyday Guide to Low Blood Sugar, in 1988, I experienced a tremendous amount of fear and self-doubt. I was writing a book about a medical condition with no medical degree and describing a condition that the medical community labeled a “non-disease”. So even though I continued to write four more additions and even won some awards, I cannot forget my overwhelming and crippling fear.

It has been said, perhaps by several writers in different ways, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” Well, if other writers could do it, so was I! I guess this is just part of the territory. Wolfram, you are already a writer. You have the degrees, the intelligence, the ideas, the passion. But still I ask the question, was it coupled with fear? They say there are stages of writing. First the terror of the blank page when you start before writing the first sentence or paragraph. Then writing it in full, followed by the arduous pain of editing it from something messy into something presentable. So, Wolfram, if fear came over you, how did you handle it? How did you get through it, or pass the feeling of dread to where you are today?

Wolfram

That’s a great question. Yes, of course, yes, I experience self-doubt, and crippling fear. Radiate Perpetual Love is my way of working through this fear. Many things led me to realizing this. My mother was an incredible writer and my grandfather was also. And I have other writers in my family, both living as well as those who’ve passed on to the other side, who are really incredible, talented writers. My sister is an amazing writer. And so, this family heritage could be inspirational, or it could be crippling, depending on how you look at it. I take writing very seriously and you say “I’m already a writer”. For me, I don’t even know if I can say that yet with full confidence. I do embrace that as my path or my journey: to be a writer.

The idea behind Radiate Perpetual Love is to find a system, a method, a structure that can be employed in life to beat back that fear, that crippling fear you speak of. I think it’s very common, and I think it’s an obstacle to so many of us who have passions, dreams, and ideas about what we can be, what we could be, if only when… We let these fears and self-doubts hold us back from fulfilling our true destinies. I’m now in my early sixties and I’m getting ready to publish my first book. I’ve had this idea for this book in my head for a couple of decades now, so it hasn’t been easy to draw it out.

That’s the idea of Radiate Perpetual love: the core of the book is 108 radiances, as I call them. 108 facets of Unconditional Love. So, like a mantra, I can repeat these, I can reflect on these, I can use this structure to help me overcome my fears. And I think the only way we can do this to replace it with love. I think there are two paths in life, two ways we can go: We can succumb to fear, or we can give into love.

And so Radiate Perpetual Love is about giving into the love, but maybe offering a little bit of structure along with that. For me, I need that structure. I need something that’s really clear and well laid out. And so this is my attempt to do that. Radiate Perpetual Love is very structured. It’s 108 radiances, but they’re divided into four quadrants (each with 27 radiances), and this is relevant to your question.

The first quadrant is to be present with love. So, before you do anything with love, let’s just be present with it, to be aware of it, to observe it, to spend time with it, to study it. And that’s what I’ve spent a lot of my time doing, just that.

The second quadrant is focused on loving yourself and actualizing it, practicing what you preach. There we begin to, I think, really strengthen our resolve around having positive thoughts, and building our life around love.

The third quadrant is to love others, to essentially master love, and to express it. I think so often we feel love for others. Perhaps we aren’t always confident enough or well-versed enough, or maybe we don’t feel that socially it’s appropriate to share that we love others in our life. And so this is an important stage.

And then the final quadrant is to love essentially systematically or structurally. And that means to transcend oneself, to look at your society, your environment, your community, your school, your church, your mosque, your temple, wherever you’re at, and to begin to put your love out there into the systems in our environment, into our culture, our societies, and to be part of movements that are doing that.

So, the answer is yes, I’ve experienced all the doubts and fears that I’m sure you have, and many others. Unfortunately, many writers and creatives succumb to their fears, and they suffer so much because they don’t know how else to manage that kind of overwhelming doubt and fear…it can lead down some dark paths and become a crippling force in our life.

So, this book, for me, is a tool for doing that. This is important for me because this is not my last book, this is my first. I have another book that I’ve been working on for many years, also on the theme of unconditional love, but more of a science fiction epic. I don’t think I can write that book until I get this one out. This is sort of the key or the matrix or the mandala, if you will, that will allow me to take the next step and to wipe away… I can’t say I can wipe away all the fears, but to help me when the fears return, when the doubts return, to have something ready, to have some tools.

That’s what I hope this book can do, is to be a tool for others as well, to push through to the other side. I also have a strong belief that we can’t do this alone. I think many writers and artists often feel alone because of the creative process and other reasons. I’ve decided I don’t want to do this alone. I want to communicate these ideas about unconditional love, and I want to experience this journey, and the struggles that come with it, with others. I want to do this openly, without any hesitation or fear or shame. I want to take this journey with all my friends who think love is the answer. Radiate Perpetual Love is my strategy for doing this.

Roberta

Well, thank you so much, Wolfram, for giving us a glimpse of who you are and your purpose, commitment and love through the Radiate Perpetual Love book. Until the next time, please stay well, stay happy and be in love. This is Roberta Ruggiero and Wolfram Alderson.

Wolfram

Thank you, Roberta. 

RPL TRANSMISSION – INTERVIEW #2 with Roberta Ruggiero & Wolfram Alderson

Roberta

Welcome back to our listening audience and to you, to Wolfram. Last week we taped our first dialogue about Radiate Perpetual Love, your first book that is due to be launched on February 14, 2023, in Los Angeles, California. The purpose of giving our audience a glimpse into RPL’s message is first, to share your view on what the world is suffering from ­– according to you, it’s a love deficit. And secondly, why and how can we fill this empty, aching, and painful void that I feel? In order to read, feel and process your message, the reader should also know the reasoning and feelings behind the messenger.

Today my question starts with Radiate Perpetual Love – it is more than just a book. You couple it with poetry and art. I bring this up because both add profound depth to the definition of love, specifically unconditional love. We spoke last time about writer’s fear, and you were open and honest about what you went through writing RPL, since you’ve been an artist for many years, was adding art a bit different from what you usually do? Was this process difficult or did it come more easily? And the same with your poetry? Did that just follow or was that also a challenge?

Wolfram

Roberta, thanks again for engaging in this conversation with me. The whole idea – my biggest goal behind writing this book, is just to be able to have these conversations with amazing people like you, especially on this topic. The short version is, that it’s scary as hell. I harbor every fear, every doubt, every iota of lack of confidence that anyone might have when they try to reveal their inner/creative self or to listen to certain voices in their head or wherever they come from. Of course, the subject of love and unconditional love and art and poetry and visual art, all of that, wrapped up together is asking for trouble – you’re really putting yourself out there for all kinds of criticism. I’ll have to say, being the child of a family full of writers, it wasn’t necessarily easier to be a writer.

I remember specifically one art show, one exhibition that I was holding where I had a particular piece of sculpture – an altar-like piece. And I included some of my poetry within that sculpture to mix up the written word with the visual art. My mother came to the show – she was an amazing poet and writer, and her feedback was brutal. “Oh, honey, she said it in the sweetest voice, don’t mix bad poetry with good art.” Our parents can be the most brutal critics. One, because they’re often right, because they know you better than anyone else, and two, because they don’t pull any punches.

Perhaps these creative influences in your life are also projecting their own fears and doubts. My mother was quite a talented visual artist as well, but she didn’t feel comfortable so much expressing that publicly. I do remember one morning waking up with my sister and brother and finding that my mother had painted the ceiling and walls of the kitchen in our old farmhouse with pastel. She had stayed up late drinking wine and feeling inspired and decided to paint a mural across our entire kitchen, including the wall and ceiling. But her talent was rarely shared publicly – she never had an exhibition. In fact, most of her poetry was never published either, but she did try. She so much wanted to get her poems published in the New Yorker Magazine and covered one whole wall in our house with rejection notices resulting from her submissions.

The point is that sometimes you may have a creative heritage in your family, which seems to call you…writers, musicians, artists, and creatives. But perhaps they were so talented that it becomes intimidating. You may ask yourself: “How will I ever be as good as them? Why set myself up as a failure in their eyes?” And even when they have passed, it feels like they are still watching you!

So, having talented, creative family members doesn’t mean it’s going to be an easier path for you. It could even be harder. In fact, I think for many years after hearing that critique from my mother, which was somewhat biting because my mother was such a wonderful poet. I looked up to her and I thought, “Well, gosh, is my poetry really that bad? And why should I mix it up?” So, for years I segmented my creativity, avoiding risky ground. To the point of Radiate perpetual love, which is about unconditional love, is you do have to practice what you preach, and it means opening yourself up and exposing yourself to that possible criticism. If you are a creative soul (I think we all are born this way), you can certainly be creative just as a purely therapeutic, personal, private process. If you don’t share your art with anybody, that’s ok that you don’t need to. If you don’t want to share your art and put yourself out there in the public realm, there’s no reason why you have to. But I think that ultimately, art and poetry are about telling your story. And I think telling your story is a fundamental and very important aspect in anyone’s life – to have the honor, the opportunity, the capability of telling your story, whatever that story may be.

We all have stories and I think expressing them is one of the most fundamental human needs. I believe my mother expressed it. I’m sorry, I just said one more thing. She expressed something called she said.

Roberta

Probably because I interrupted you. I apologize. But I understand where you’re coming from with the poetry. So poetry, like your book, is the written word, but then all of a sudden I see your art and I can’t wait for the audience and your readers to see your art. That is an incredible extension of your work. How did that come about? Because I know you’re usually doing art in big sculptural pieces. I’ve been to your shows. They’re big, they’re vibrant, they’re in red, gold, and bright colors, and now we have black and white. And it’s all strictly pertaining to the love deficit. So how does that come about?

Wolfram

Well, how about fear and frustration? Number one, yeah, I was still fearful a couple of years back of combining my art with my writing. I still was segmenting my creative energies or talents or abilities into different silos and saying, well, that form of art, well, you feel accomplished enough to say, yes, I’m a sculptor. I feel accomplished enough to say that I’m a sculptor. Do I feel confident enough to say I’m a painter or a printer or a ceramicist? Well, I’m on the road there, but I have so many amazing artist friends who work in these mediums, and they inspire me to want to learn so much more. When I started writing Radiate Perpetual Love, I realized this book would benefit from some illustrations. So, I asked some friends and other artists that I really admired, I looked for artists who had a style of art that is compatible with my book. One response was, “I don’t illustrate books because it’s just such a challenging job. It takes a lot of time, and I would rather illustrate my own book, if I do choose to illustrate a book, illustrate my own book because it takes so much time and focus.” I got similar responses from various artists that I know and love and some that I didn’t know very well, but I kept reaching out anyway, including to some who illustrated books like mine, and I got turned down by all of them.

So, then I got frustrated, actually, well, pissed off! I was like, “Humph, if they won’t illustrate my book, I will!” I initially thought since I am a sculptor, I feel comfortable in the sculpture medium, so I will literally make sculptures that will illustrate ideas in the book. Many of my sculptures can take three months or six months or longer to make, and so that idea is a creative one, but it probably would have taken me several years, and in a sense, it could have been another, say, artifice for me, delaying giving birth to this book. As a writer and an artist, I think a lot of people are familiar with the process of procrastinating or avoiding the inevitable process of putting out your work there for the whole world to see. It’s terrifying. So, of course, delaying the final work of art as long as possible is a strategy of sorts! Luckily, a variety of life-changing circumstances led me to spend significant time in San Cristobal de la Casas in southern Mexico, in the state of Chiapas, where my brother Virgil lives – I have some other family connections there that go back over 50 years.

I happened to be at a point in my life where I had some time to spend in this amazing part of the world. By coincidence, because I hang out in cafes and so on, I came across a gallery where they were teaching what’s referred to as the Linocut printing process, or as they say in Spanish, making “Grabados,” which is literally “recordings.” But these are prints. These are recordings of prints made from images that are carved into linoleum. “I say “kitchen floor,” because if you’re from the 1950s like I am, you remember that linoleum was a popular way to cover the kitchen floor. And so I took my first course, and I just fell in love with the whole process, because linocut printing combined sculpture, carving, printing, and ink, and you can produce multiple images from one piece of art in series, or even combine it with others in multicolor prints. But I just love black and white. I have long been a fan of Johnny Cash, and he has a famous song, “Men in Black.” And I wear black. Most people notice that I wear all black, and one reason is that it frees me up, just like this linoleum material.

I get up in the morning, and I don’t think about, well, am I going to wear the blue socks or the yellow socks or the checkered shirt and the gray slacks or whatever? I don’t think about any of that. I’m wearing black socks, black underwear, black pants, a black tee shirt, black shirt. Everything is black. I don’t have to spend any mental energy at all on what color clothes I’m wearing or how to match them. I do have, frankly, some form of Dyslexia. Like many people who have Dyslexia, there’s no single way Dyslexia expresses itself. But for me, even with my sculptures, I like to work with one or two colors in a piece. And I don’t know, it releases me from the tension of having to figure out how to get all those colors to work together. And I have some friends who are amazing painters, and they use the full palette of colors that’s out there, and it’s really impressive how they work with color. But I prefer to work with colors, like, one at a time or two at a time. I love red and gold, and I love black and white. The short version is that I really enjoy making black and white prints, even though I was trained to do a multicolor process.

Again, it always kind of made my brain hurt having to think, well, what color is this part going to be? And that color going to be, and how do I blend them and all of that? And because of Dyslexia, as I said, it doesn’t just come and has to do with left, right, or the order of things. It can also do with how you perceive colors. Like, as you might say, there are some precognitive abilities that many of us take for granted, and one of them is color, and the other is senses, like scents and smells. And with colors, I sometimes find it challenging to make orders from them, at least in my creative mind which is always spinning around. And that’s a long way of saying that, just by coincidence, I discovered the linocut printing process. And I really love black and white. The Mexican style of doing linocut printing is also very unique. And for me has influenced my thinking quite a bit. I don’t want to say stark. I want to say it’s very graphic, it’s very bold, and there’s a certain like, I don’t know, emotional energy and spiritual energy that you see in Mexican printing. I love Mexican and Latin American art. I’ve never quite known where I fit in the art world, so, in fact, I’ve defined my own genre that I call “primitive intergalactic.” In other words, there’s something very primitive in my style that I choose to embrace, but there’s also something far out, like out there in space.

That’s a very long answer to your question, but that’s part of the mix and what goes on in Wolfram’s head, and how I ended up making a black and white book.

Roberta

I can’t wait for them to see it because I’ve had the honor and pleasure of seeing them as you’ve made them. But I must go back and say there are no coincidences. You were meant to be in Mexico and to learn this process, and I can’t wait for the audience to see it. I want to thank you. We have one more question. I don’t know if you want to do that now and take a chance.

Wolfram

Let’s go for it.

Roberta

Let’s go for it. Okay. Most of us well, I’ll speak for myself when we hear the word love, we think of romantic love, love of family, love of friends, community, country, and the world. Most of all, again, my thinking, my consciousness, love of God, the top of the list. In RPL, you write about unconditional love. You mention a whole list of different kinds of love, yet not much about romantic love. It was when I read the whole book and a very powerful quote you wrote that I got your deep message. You wrote that by learning all about the different kinds of love, your hope was to then have the reader deepen their romantic love to depths never before reached. Can you explain your thought process?

Wolfram

Well, as I mentioned in the book, and you can read in my bio, I’ve been in social change work, and environmental change work for all of my life – over four decades. And I’ve seen a lot of human suffering and environmental degradation and things that weigh heavily on my spirit. And I’ve also experienced, let’s just call it the vagaries of human experience and romantic love, good and bad. What just has emerged for me over the course of my lifetime… is… and this began honestly as a child, and it’s funny to describe it, but as a child, I grew up without a father, and there was no really no other besides my mother. She was a single working mom. There just weren’t enough loving adults in my life. And I had this urge as a child, I wanted to go around and hug people and kiss them. Not romantically – I was too young. I didn’t even know what romance or any other forms of love were. I just wanted to hug, to be touched, to fill the love deficit in my life. I love my grandmother’s hugs. My grandmother on my mother’s side wore fur coats, she wore beautiful hats, those old-fashioned perfumes, and she just gave the best hugs in the world. That was my role model for hugs, incredible furry, aromatic hugs. In fact, one of her hugs saved my life during a car crash. Hugs are lifesaving.

I remember those Grandmother’s hugs and my mother’s hugs from a very young age. So I wanted to go around just hugging and kissing people, and I knew that I needed to love, but of course, at least when I grew up after a certain age, just isn’t appropriate to go around hugging and kissing people, at least in many circles. People tend to shut down that part of you, that loving hugging part of you that reaches out and asks for love gets shut down by “social norms.”

I had a troubled youth for a variety of reasons, and part of it was that I was very frustrated. I couldn’t understand why couldn’t people be more loving. Why weren’t people more loving in my life? Why aren’t there more loving adults – loving men specifically? Why is that?

The Love Deficit I experienced from a very young age became a lifelong aching emptiness that I wanted to fill. I went into social change work, I think, in part to fill this gap, and of course, you see it over and over again, no matter what population, what human problem you’re dealing with, no matter what environmental problem you’re dealing with, you see that there’s a lack of love – the Love Deficit in those situations.

There’s no lack of technology to solve homelessness, there’s no lack of technology to solve hunger, there’s no lack of technology to solve poverty, any great human problem. There’s no lack of technology or know-how, there’s a lack of will, there’s a lack of human courage, a lack of human resolve, a lack of human love. And we have to love our planet more. We have to love our children more. We have to love the homeless, the strangers, and we have to practice the things that are written in our great books, whether it’s “Love thy neighbor” or “Turn the other cheek” or so many other examples that you would find in almost any great book, religious, spiritual or otherwise.

But this idea of this love deficit didn’t really crystallize until later in life when I reached a point in my career where I realized that even though I earned two degrees in organization development and working in nonprofits. Where you would think that love is part of the essential ingredient that holds nonprofits together. Because it sore ain’t the money and it’s not the abundance of resources. It’s just pure love that keeps nonprofits working.

But how often do you get to talk about love in an organizational setting? I’m sure human resource managers would get very nervous if managers started walking around talking about loving their employees and hugging and kissing everybody. In today’s climate, we’re taught to have boundaries and keep our hands off of our fellow employees, etc. There are a lot of good reasons why those kinds of standards roll out in organizations. But what happens is that we’ve become essentially a lot of nonprofits trying to emulate the transactional, business-like nature of the for-profit world. And to me it can be very cold and sort of in denial of why we’re involved in nonprofit work, to begin with. And so, again, this is all a long way of saying, why am I interested in unconditional love? Is that in almost every circle of influence in my life, every area of my life, I experience this love deficit? And the more that I experienced it, the more I wanted to fill it, the more I wanted hugs, and the more I want to be able to talk about love in a serious way. And they say, well, be the change, be the change that you want to see in the world.

Ultimately, I don’t believe in whining or crying or complaining about problems that you aren’t willing to solve yourself. So, I started to collect love, just like you would collect stamps or bugs or rocks or crystals or anything. I started to collect love. What I mean by that is, I collected quotes about love that were inspiring because I couldn’t find any single book. There are some really great books out there, of course, by Marion Williamson and Bell hooks and I could go on and on. There are bits and pieces of this conversation about love. It’s everywhere once you start to look for it. But I wanted to somehow put it all together in one place. I started collecting these quotes about love and I realized that actually, once you put the love filter on, imagine you had a pair of glasses that you have glasses that filter out certain sun rays and you see a certain spectrum. Well, these are the love glasses. You put the love glasses on, you start to see all these amazing quotes and writings from the masters, from centuries, even millennium ago, all the way up to the present time.

You can find them even on the internet, with no authors listed, but just love coming out of the woodwork…the internet woodwork, if you will. And so what I started to do as I was collecting these quotes, I started to put them into buckets, what I call buckets, meaning categories, topics of love. And I realized actually there’s a very rich discussion, a very diverse ecosystem of love, and yes, romantic love, sensual love, there’s all kinds of love, many conversations to be had. It’s not that one is better than the other. But what there is though, is that there is an ecosystem of love and there are many types of love. I said amazing to me. I want to know more. I’d love to have a degree in love. You can get a degree in making nuclear weapons. You can get a degree in how to kill people. I mean, you can go to a military academy and become an assassin. You can make chemicals that cause cancer. You can learn all kinds of things in college, but can you go to college and study unconditional love? No. I even started looking for professors who professed love, and who believed that you could teach love at the university level. It turns out I found several professors, and eventually I found a professor of neuroscience, Dr. Julia Mossbridge. And we founded an organization together called the Institute for Love and Time.

The whole point of this is that when you start to look for love and you want to deepen the conversation, there are so many aspects to this subject matter to explore. And, you know, just like any field, you could become an expert in romantic love or sensual love or filial love, or agape love. The Greeks define five different types of love. Well, in radiate, perpetual love, there are 108 radiances, or facets of love, that I try to cover. They’re grouped into four main topics if you will. So if you know how diamonds are cut, diamonds are cut. You have facets, but usually, there’s a structure to a diamond. The diamond might have four sides, eight sides, or any number of sides. And so I started to cut that diamond of love, if you will, into a shape that made sense for me. When I got up to 108 topics on love, I felt like, well, that’s enough for this book. Of course, it’s limitless, I believe, because love is one of those subjects that I feel is literally a limitless subject.

But I not only wanted to collect the love, but I wanted to share the love. One of my favorite activities as a child was show and tell. And I love to show and tell. I love to not only tell the story but swap stories, and share stories. I want to hear what other people think. Of course, if you bring up the subject of unconditional love, many people will even tell you there’s no such thing as unconditional love. It doesn’t exist. All love is conditional, they’ll say. Others will say, well, love, no matter what kind you’re talking about, these are simply biochemical quirks. These are machinations of a really messy, marvelous neural network, what we call the human brain. And it’s wrapped up with all kinds of hormones and other chemicals in our body. And basically, the main purpose of all this stuff is to procreate, et cetera. And so you’ll get sort of this ultra-rational, ultra-scientific explanation. And love only exists as a sort of neural network in the brain, and has nothing to do with the heart or with Valentine’s Day or anything else. But that’s fine. That’s all part of the conversation. But I do want to have the conversation, in some cases even the debate, because I feel that, again, my hypothesis in the book has everything to do with what I believe, which is I believe that love is something that is not created by human beings.

It’s something that’s transmitted to us through us, that is engendered in us, whether it’s in the molecular, the atomic matrix of the stardust that Earth is made of, and of course, all humans are made of. And there is some existential thoughts. There are existential thoughts that I have about love. And so, again, all of this is to say that I find this subject so fascinating. And once you begin to really gather around the fire and tell stories about it, it can be a very deep and a very long conversation, a very rewarding conversation, and I think it can help people. We have a rather unhealthy rate of divorce in the world today, and the turnover rate, if you will, of long-term relationships is certainly something to look at. I believe that one of the problems is that perhaps that sensual love, romantic love, the early kind of falling in love if you will, aspect of relationships eventually wears down quite a bit in some cases. You see people who just seem fabulously in love no matter how long they’ve been together. They’re especially blessed. But I think part of the secret sauce, if you will, to maintain long-term loving relationships is being able to deepen the conversation about what love is.

Love is not just the typical or the more conventional aspects of love, but also some very simple but beautiful and rewarding things like kindness to strangers, and charitable acts to people you’ve never met. When you make a donation to help refugees in Ukraine, you’ve never met any of those people. Why do you find that rewarding? Why do you give money to help the environment or plant a tree? Those aren’t personal forms of love. You’re saying, I love my planet, I love my environment. I love humanity. And this is transpersonal love. And I think that kind of love can sustain us. And when you spend ten years, 20 years, 30 years, 40 years with people in your life, whether they’re your brothers and sisters or your husbands and wives or your best friends, your love will be tested. It’s inevitable your love will be tested. I don’t think that there is such a thing as love that isn’t tested. And so if our love will be tested, what’s going to carry us through? What’s going to carry us beyond or in addition to the physical, the romantic, et cetera? And I think it’s this kindness, this unconditional form of love where you don’t expect anything in return, where you just do things to be nice, to be kind, without expecting anything in return.

You don’t have conditions on the love, there’s no contract, et cetera. Again, that’s a long way of answering your question. But for me, that’s where I’ve arrived in life, and that’s the story I want to tell, and that’s the conversation I want to have with others, because I find this conversation so deep and rewarding and it’s like I said, limitless. I feel like we could be talking about this from now until forever and still have plenty of territory or places to go with this conversation. And that’s what I hope to do with the book, is not to be a professor of love or guru of love or come up with some new philosophy about love. Quite the opposite. I’m just interested in deepening the conversation and creating perhaps a safe or creative space for talking about unconditional love in a way that we feel that’s rewarding and can enrich our lives and perhaps enrich other forms of love that are more conventional to us. There’s just so much emphasis in our media and social media and advertising on, frankly, the sexual nature of love, the romantic nature of love. It’s in our movies, it’s in our culture.

But occasionally we get some amazing films and books which kind of speak to this transcendental love. And oftentimes it’s embodied by some great figures or a well-known philosopher or spiritual leader or something. But there are also wonderful stories like Pay it Forward. This would be a great example of a movie that I just find embodies this conversation so well about everyday people and how this idea of paying forward love, making unconditional acts of kindness actually like a goal in your life and how that ripples outward and affects so many people. And I think it’s going on actually all the time. We just don’t celebrate. It doesn’t make it into the headlines. If it bleeds, it leads, as they say. These everyday people, this common love, this amazing fabric of love which I think actually keeps us all from blowing ourselves up in a big nuclear cloud. It’s what holds the world together. And yet we somehow don’t have the conversation about that fabric of love that’s holding everything together as much as I think we could. I don’t want to say should, but I do believe that talking about love should be an important part of our social fabric and I’ve actually seen it creep into the business world.

Jack Ma is the CEO of Alibaba, one of the largest corporations on earth. And he has made some very concerted efforts to talk about not only IQ and EQ emotional intelligence, but also LQ love quotient love intelligence as a fundamental aspect of running his business. So if one of the most successful and wealthiest business people on Earth can talk about love in a business context as being essential to success in business, then I think we’re actually this conversation is starting to reach very well, let’s just say, interesting levels in our culture and society. And so I’m very encouraged and I hope this book will open up more possibilities of having these conversations in more and more circles.

Roberta

I don’t want to say the word excellent, but it gave us such a look and a background into the author and that’s what I wanted to do with it. These last two podcasts and I’m more excited to see it finished, go to press, and be launched. As I said in February, I can’t wait for the audience and everyone to read it. But what I’m even more excited is that in the next podcast that we do is that we’re really going to start getting into the nitty gritty part of the book. We’ll start with the quadrants, we’ll start with the conversations, the revelations, the whole inside of the book. And I think that’s what the audience now is waiting for. We know you. We know the reason, and I know I am. And I hope they are even more excited to read it and to hear the future podcast about the book, the book itself. But it was great hearing about the author, and I want to thank you for taking this time, and I want to thank the audience for listening. Until the next time we get together, stay well. Stay safe. This is Roberta and Wolfram.

Wolfram

Thank you, Roberta. And thank you for having the courage to step up to the leaky fire hydrant that is Wolfram, and, you know, turn it on and see what comes out. And thank you to the audience for listening, and I look forward to having many more of these conversations where we can not only converse between the two of us, but also converse with others out there in the world who find this subject as fascinating as we do. Thank you.

Roberta

Can’t wait. Bye, now.

Just breathe. Really?

The guru told me that it is only necessary to inhale, exhale

Really? I’ve been breathing since my first breath, and I think I’m breathing now, so really?

Looks like I haven’t been breathing

Just panting, pulling, pushing

The tenser I get, the more constricted my breathing becomes

My muffled breath tightens around my heart like an anaconda

I cut myself off at the pass, bandit of respite, thief of heart

The guru is right

I don’t just need unconditional love

I need unconditional breathing

The guru says that there is a moment between breaths

A moment where time stands still and you can hear your self, be your self

Just listen to the breath

Just listen and breathe

It sounds so damn simple, but this wisdom requires vigilance, presence

Right now, the eternal now, is the only thing I can control, or not

Here in this moment, present with my breath, I let go of my heart and let the air flow around it.

Hey fool, can it be that simple?

As I let go, my heart thanks me

Love radiates around me

I breathe in, I breathe out

Love flows

– Wolfram Alderson