Getting Your Hands Read
What Makes Hand Analysis Different at the IIHA?
Life Purpose in the Fingerprints: Richard Unger's Unique Contribution
Soul Psychology from Hand Analysis

Getting Your Hands Read

There is nothing about Hand Analysis that needs be mystical or mysterious. Anyone can benefit from a hand reading. No special gift is required to do it. The hands contain coded information relating to a person's character and Life Purpose. Learning the code is like learning any other foreign language. Study is required, but when mastered, the hand shapes, fingerprints, and lines in the palm can be read like reading a newspaper.

Life Purpose from the Fingerprints:
Richard Unger's Unique Contribution to Hand Analysis

The Navajo Indians have a saying about fingerprints: "The Great Spirit breathes in the breath of life, and the tracks of that breath become our fingerprints."

Modern hand analysis is divided into two areas: the interpretation of line formations (chiromancy), and the study of comparative shapes (overall hand structure, finger, palm, and thumb shape), called chirognomy. Though the "rules" of line interpretation are still controversial, hand analysts are more or less in agreement about chirognomy and it is quite accurate. Each portion of the hand represents a different section of the personality: proportionally large areas reveal traits in abundance, small areas the reverse.

In the medical stacks, Richard Unger learned about a second topographic map hidden in the fingerprints. Unlike hand shapes and lines on the palm which can change, this "new" map is unalterable from prior to birth. Following the same logic as chirognomy, the present day fingerprint patterns would reveal the original ingredients of its owner.

The dynamics of fingerprint formation clearly points to a deeper connection to something larger than our conscious self. Whether this larger reality is the DNA legacy of our ancestors or some other plane of multi-dimensional existence, the fingerprints are our personal map to these otherwise uncharted waters.

The Life Purpose Map is made up of two parts: the Life Purpose and the Life Lesson. Your Life Purpose is what you have come to do in this lifetime and your Life Lesson is what you need to learn in order to do it.

Let's move to an analogy of an acorn and an oak tree. You can read the coded information in an acorn to learn that it can never become a rose or a willow tree. An oak tree is possible, but that is merely the potential contained within the seed. If you were expert enough, you could further determine its climate and soil requirements, which bugs it is subject to, etc.

Roughly speaking, the same is true about you and your fingerprints. Your fingerprints reveal your Life Purpose and also, what is required of you for your Life Purpose to emerge. This part of your Life Purpose Map we call your Life Lesson, and it is connected to your Life Purpose with a Formula.

Hand Analysis as developed by Richard Unger uses traditional Hand Analysis methods as well as focuses on the practical formula of how to live your deepest potential as revealed in the map of your Fingerprints.

Soul Psychology from Hand Analysis

Soul Psychology is a model for understanding a person's core nature and differs markedly from standard psychology. As a matter of fact, perhaps the easiest way to define Soul Psychology is to start with what it is not. Soul Psychology is not a method of analyzing personality, character or temperament; it is not a list of strengths and weaknesses. It is something much deeper.

From a soul level, each of us has chosen this lifetime to further our development. As evolving spiritual beings inhabiting a physical form, every person chooses a personality and physical identity as a vehicle of expression. Psychology and any number of psychological profiling systems can help an individual to understand and better integrate personality and ego functions. This can be quite useful, even life altering. However, psychological profiling does not ask the question: what is the purpose of this lifetime? That is the province of Soul Psychology. What is your Life Purpose? What are your Life Lessons? What would make you feel this has been a life well lived, that you have not wasted your time on this planet? Good questions, Soul Psychology questions.

Your Soul Psychology was marked on your body as fingerprints five months before you were born. Like an acorn containing within it a picture of the oak tree it may someday become, your fingerprints have a coded picture of your highest self-actualization possibility. Again, this is not the same as a list of your best attributes. Very often, a person's Life Purpose is not in an area of strength.

For instance, I recently read the hands of a man who was extremely successful in business. He came in for a reading because he felt something was missing but couldn't put his finger on it. His fingerprints revealed the Life Purpose: Successful Artist. Success but not in his creativity or creativity without being paid for it; either of these scenarios would not make him feel on track. He reported that he had considered a more creative career path years ago, but life intruded, he got busy and his creative side had faded into the background.

"Follow your creativity" is easy enough to say to anyone, but for this individual, Life Purpose satisfaction depended upon it. "But what if I can't make a living at my artistry?" "Good question. You may not be as skilled at your art as you are in business. And even if it turns out you are skilled, that alone is no guarantee of material success. We all know 'starving artists' who are great at what they do yet wait tables to make ends meet. But consider this: if you don't pursue your creativity and you get to the Gates of Heaven (whatever that means to you) without having given it a try, how would you feel then?"

This then is the essence of Soul Psychology. It is about what can fill that hunger for meaning deep in the core of our being. Personality psychology can help one become a better person, improve behavior and outcomes; but it is Soul Psychology that engages us at the soul level and challenges each of us to live the life we came to live. And it is the Soul Psychology Map imbedded in our fingerprints before our birth that is the real gift that hand analysis offers.

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THE THREE AXIOMS OF SOUL PSYCHOLOGY

The First Axiom of Soul Psychology: Experience Required
The Second Axiom of Soul Psychology: The Paradox Principle
The Third Axiom of Soul Psychology: The Validity of the Personality

The Three Axioms of Soul Psychology serve as the Legend to your Life Purpose Map, allowing you to understand what your Life Purpose and Life Lesson are trying to tell you. A more detailed description of each follows shortly. EVERY fingerprint chart will make ample use of all three.

An axiom, if you recall from your High School geometry, is something that is to be considered true, a priori. In effect, we agree that it is true just because. If your own understanding of how life is arranged differs from the one presented here, I suggest accepting this model for the sake of argument. Use the material to decode your fingerprints. Then, put it to the test. See if you can spot your Life Purpose and Life Lesson wending their way through your life. If you can, my experience indicates your life will begin to shift in mysterious ways to your everlasting benefit.

Axiom One: Experience Required

The earth plane is an arena for Advancing Souls to grow in consciousness.
As such, Advancing Souls seek experience in human form.
Experience includes trial and error, including the annoying consequences of error.

The Goldilocks Rule: Too much, too little leads to just right.

Progress is the key. You have Permission to Learn.
Service (or any of the other Schools or Life Purposes or Life Lessons) refers not to an action performed but to a consciousness to be inhabited.Let's take a closer look at the first axiom of Soul Psychology.

Principle #1 - The life goal is the experiencing process itself, not a specific outcome

Principle #1 states that the life goal, from a soul level, is the experiencing process itself, not a specific outcome. For instance, if your fingerprints reveal your Life Purpose to be Leadership, it is not your life assignment to become President. It is your life assignment to inhabit your Leadership consciousness and deal with whatever comes your way. That is what you came to do in this lifetime. That is where your life satisfaction lies.

Fulfilling a Leadership Life Purpose can occur in any number of ways, including becoming President. Or perhaps Leadership takes an unconventional form: your visionary poetry influencing a generation. There is no one 'correct' way to live a Leadership Life Purpose.

So what does it mean then to have a Leadership Life Purpose? It means two things: one - it is in your interest to gain in experience so that your Leadership consciousness has a full opportunity to emerge and, two - if and when it does, you are challenged to live with a wide range of experiences in this realm. Let's look at both halves of this equation.

A) No matter the events in a person's life, experience seeks to unlock Life Purpose

Staying with Leadership as the Life Purpose, then just by being you and having events take place, given time and opportunity, the Leader element within you naturally finds a form of expression. This is not necessarily as easy as it might sound, as we shall see. Nonetheless, the Leader is inside you and always has been. It merely awaits sufficient experiential material to reach a kindling point where its presence becomes obvious and everyday. When this happens you can say that you have reached the Main Sequence of your Life Purpose.

To illustrate, let's look at two people reacting in their own way to a similar set of circumstances. Bob from Boise has a Leadership Purpose and a history of abuse. His father beat him, physically and emotionally; at school, Bob got bullied by the bigger kids; even his parakeet showed him no respect. Fred from East Frasalia had a similar childhood.

At the Citizen of the Year Award Ceremony Bob credits his early experiences as key in his development. Having been on the wrong end of the stick, his threshold for stoic resignation gone, he found he could not sit idly by in the face of injustice. Someone needed to set things right. Surprising himself with his assertion, he rose to the occasion and took the actions that lead to this award. Now that he has gained some standing in the community he would like to dedicate himself to community service.

Bob becomes Boise's mayor (Why not? It's just a story.) When he exercises his power and authority the application is appropriate to the circumstances, others' needs taken into account in the context of the larger picture. With Bob's prior experience on the wrong end of power abuse, how could he do otherwise?

With a similar background, Fred moves in the opposite direction: he becomes a power abuser himself. He is too controlling in relationships, has power battles with legitimate authorities in the world and at work, and he treats his parakeet poorly. At his best, Fred eventually learns first hand what too much power applied unconsciously can do. An incident occurs that changes his whole life around. The details are not important here. The important point is Fred's awakening.

"Oh my God, what have I done?" It hurts Fred deeply to realize the pain he has caused. In therapy he comes to realize how he came to behave this way and scrupulously seeks to clear this behavior pattern in all its manifestations. He makes amends where amends need making. He becomes particularly sensitive to any possibility that others may become uncomfortable with his actions. When Life presents Fred with opportunities to become a Man of Influence, having learned from past mistakes, (still assertive but now empathetic as well) Fred is better qualified for the bigger role on the larger stage as outlined in his fingerprints before he was born.

In our illustration, similar circumstances yielded different experiences, but both led to Life Purpose emergence. Of course, there is always the alternate possibility: Bob and Fred learn nothing from their earlier experiences. Unconsciously trudging through life, no progress is made towards the Leadership Purpose they share in common. Instead, Bob and Fred live in their Life Purpose Inverse (powerlessness for Bob, tyranny for Fred) ad infinitem. If they stay here long enough, maybe they will gain some momentum forward on their life path, but there are no guarantees. The planet is plenty big enough for any person to stay in The Big Gaping Hole (life without meaning) for an indefinite period of time.

The more likely outcome for Bob and Fred, however, is some combination of the examples given above. Life being the messy business it is, rarely does a straight line diagram describe a person's life. In retrospect, we can see The Leader slowly going through its phases of development. In the short term, however, each zig and zag seem random and all consuming.

The essential point here is that experience, any experience, can serve a person's progress towards Life Purpose. Too much power applied unconsciously (Fred), not enough power employed when necessary (Bob); both created uncomfortable outcomes but both advanced the Life Purpose. Conversely, either could have become a life-sized trap lasting for decades or more. In a similar vein, if Bob and Fred had wonderful parents and wonderful bosses who used power fairly and effectively, these experiences could also be a model to work from on their Leadership life path. Or Bob and Fred miss the point, ignoring the opportunities laid before them.

Being alive creates opportunities for experience. It is up to each of us to gain from our experiences and, in so doing, move our Life Purpose forward.

B) Living your Life Purpose means experiencing all that your life path brings you

As stated before, Leadership (or any other Life Purpose) is not a position to get into, it is a consciousness to inhabit. If you quit your job at the factory to become a painter does that make you an Artist? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe you are a hack. As we have seen, the actual role you play, your title at work, is not the key.

Let's say, however, that you do learn enough from your experiences sufficient for your Life Purpose to clearly emerge: you are living your Leadership and gaining satisfaction points on a regular basis. Your lifestyle supports and is structured around your Life Purpose. Congratulations. Like Picasso discovering his passion for art, you have opened the door into the Main Sequence of your Life Purpose. Does this mean that everything is now automatically rosy? No way. You have problems (or you do not) like everyone else. However, now when you have problems you have Leadership problems, the exact problems you are supposed to have.

I love to use Jacques Cousteau as an example in my readings. I never got to read his hands, but he seemed to epitomize a person who knew what he wanted. For Jacques, boats, the oceans, etc. is his life. QED, nothing else to say. If he wins the lottery, how much changes? Not much, I suggest. He can now afford the more expensive sonar for boat number two, that's all.

Let's put Jacques into our illustration, assuming he is right On Purpose with his life. Is Jacques' existence trouble free? What do you think? As the world's top ocean explorer he gets to explore the toughest ocean environments, address challenges beyond the scope of anyone else. Difficulties abound. Nor does Jacques want a life free of all difficulties. When he gets to the Gates of Heaven (however you interpret that phrase) Jacques will want a good story or two about how tough things were in his day so he can hold his own with the ancient mariners already there. "We had to make our own boats," one will say. "That's nothing," an even more ancient one will suggest, "We had to invent sailing itself."

The point is that for Jacques, boat problems are exactly the type of problems that should occur in a life like his. Factory problems: the foreman is a real idiot, I can't take another day on this assembly line, etc. - these are not problems that move Jacques' Life Purpose along. Fix any one of these and new problems take their place. "The problem, Jacques, is that you don't belong in the factory. You are in your wrong life here. Go find you a boat."

So you find your boat, come into your power. Good for you. Are you done, is your Life Purpose complete? Not at all. You are just beginning. Welcome to your right life. Now, what are you going to do about the XYZ situation? How about the mutiny in the Miami office, the hostile takeover, the health care issue? What about time for your family, now that you are so busy? Etc. Etc. Similarly, when Picasso unlocks the Artist within, when he fully inhabits his Artistry, has he finished his Life Purpose? Of course not. Now it is his job to have a lifetime of Artist experiences and express this life on his canvas of choice.

Principle #2 You must be conscious of your feelings to gain experience

I have been talking about experience as if you and I mean the same thing when we use the word. Maybe I should check up on this. Webster says experience means
a: direct observation of or participation in events as a basis of knowledge
b: the conscious events that makes up a person's life
c: something personally encountered, undergone, or lived through
d: the act or process of directly perceived events or reality
Thank you Daniel. Experience comes right after expensive in Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, an apt position I might add.

Notice if you will the emphasis on being conscious. In Soul Psychology, you gain experience as you go through an event with consciousness. You do not gain in experience, you do not bring your Life Purpose forward, by staying unconscious. What is so challenging here is that to bring your Life Purpose forward you must consciously experience your Life Lesson which is (by definition) the hardest thing in the world to stay conscious for. This is worth some further exploration.

For about a quarter a century now I have been using the movie Ordinary People as an example of what it means to be conscious or unconscious. You don't have to watch the entire movie to get the gist. A boy is in a boating accident; his brother drowns just beyond his reach. He gets amnesia.

Everyone in the audience understands the problem. The trauma of his brother dying right before his eyes is so great, the young man cannot cope with it. Actually, to be more accurate, he is coping with the calamity by giving himself amnesia. As a matter fact, this may be the only and most elegant solution available. To consciously feel the pain and helplessness surrounding his brother's death is more than the young boy can bear.

We all know that he will have to deal with the feelings at some point or he will not be able to get on with his life. He sees a psychiatrist. Bit by bit, as his therapy continues, he gets little glimpses of the accident but not the full picture. He is straining against his unconscious, willing the scene to play in his mind's eye, the better to end the amnesia that has put his life on hold. We in the audience strain with him, but we have the larger view. We know what he is straining against. Finally, in one fateful therapy session, the floodgates open and it all comes pouring out. Two months earlier would have been premature, but now he is strong enough to bear it. "My brother, oh no, he's drowning. OWWWW." He let's out the guttural cry that had been frozen in his throat since that day on the lake and we know he is on the road to recovery.

When I started reading hands over thirty years ago, the need to actually express your feelings in order to move forward was just taking hold in the public perception. This was before Kubla Ross and the Five Stages of Death and Dying, before men were encouraged to cry if they felt grief, etc. Now it seems like old hat. Everyone knows that not expressing will keep the boy from Ordinary People stuck indefinitely. But it can be so hard to do.

The Goldilocks Rule

You know the fairy tale. Goldilocks is lost in the woods and comes upon a house. She goes inside to find a table set for breakfast: three bowls of porridge, steam rising (what, no cappuccino?). Hungry, Goldilocks tastes the first porridge: too hot. The second is too cold but the third is just right. She goes into the next room where she finds three beds. The first one is too hard, the next is too soft but the third is just right. If you don't know what happens when the three bears come home to find a dumb blond asleep in their bedroom, you can look it up on the internet.

However, far from being a dumb blond, Goldilocks is a true master of this three dimensional plane. She tries something out, it is too this or that. She tries again, this time going to the opposite extreme. Again she goes too far. But she perseveres and finds that which is just right. Too much, too little, just right - that's the master's formula.

Have you ever watched one of those black and white World War II movies? The GI's are in a foxhole, a mortar shell lands in front of them, another shell lands behind them, they leap out of the foxhole just before being blasted to kingdom come. They knew they had been bracketed. The enemy found out what was too much and what was too little. Just right could be expected momentarily.

These exaggerated scenarios were designed as a memory device to remind you of this key element of Soul Psychology. To gain experiences, humans go too far and not far enough on their way (one hopes) to just right. The trick is to learn from one's experience, to follow Goldilocks' example and not get stuck forever playing ping-pong between uncomfortable extremes that represent inappropriate responses to the environment.

Remember Bob and Fred, our Leadership Life Purpose persons from a few pages back? Bob started his life facing repeated violations of his territory. Only by reacting against those who insist on stepping on his toes can Bob start the pendulum in the opposite direction. In this way anger is Bob's Ally, informing him whenever the pendulum is getting too close to its original out of balance position. On the other hand Fred over-did his power and had to face equivalent (though opposite) discomfort before he could learn from his mistakes and take the corrective measures necessary to move his Life Purpose forward. Too much, too little, just right: The Goldilocks Rule in action.

Permission to Learn: The Big Poobah

The last piece of Axiom One that we will look at here is Permission to Learn. Sometimes the best I can hope for in a reading is that a person will ease up on themselves as they go through their Life Lesson. Life Lessons are supposed to be difficult. It is no mark against you if you are struggling. The idea is to do your best and learn from your experience.

I am remembering an incident from my own Life Lesson battles that demonstrates this principle. I was being power played, marginalized in an organizational setting. Looking back, I had vague feelings about this early on, but this is my Life Lesson and Life Lessons imply blind spots. Eventually, an incident occurred and I could no longer lie to myself. So and so had deliberately done such and such. I decided to confront the situation head on. "Tomorrow, yes tomorrow would be a better day to do this than today," a voice inside my head said. Good. I didn't want to have that conversation today anyway. I let it pass. A few weeks later, it all boiled over again. I was being bypassed and it would do no good to bring it up with this underling. The problem was with the Big Poobah.

I decided to talk to him as soon as possible. I called up Poobah the Big and, reaching his secretary, set an appointment to get all this handled once and for all. The appointment was twelve days hence (Poobahs are busy, you know), so other than a bit of stewing, there was nothing to do for the time being. All the better.

Twelve days hence came and I was ten minutes early for my appointment. Fifty minutes passed. Poobahs like to do that, I thought; a power maneuver. I can see his game a mile away. Hah! Finally, Mr. Big came out of his office with a smile and handshake, welcoming me into his office like a long lost brother. He had to leave for an important meeting in only five minutes but he was so glad to see me. I launched in, starting with two acknowledgements (he had taught me that tactic himself, people listen better if you start that way) and worked up to my complaints. He listened ardently. Hmmm. "Yes, I can see you feel upset by what happened. Look to yourself and the answer will be clear, Richard. Gotta go. Nice to see you again." He almost said let's do lunch. If he had, maybe I would have punched him in the nose like I had wanted to from the beginning.

But I never did punch him in the nose. I didn't even get to my biggest point: that he was the source, the decision maker whose dictum was now impinging on my territory. Of course he knew what he was doing, making me wait and leaving five minutes for our meeting. Of course he knew why I was there and what I was going to talk about. He had orchestrated the entire deal. I know that now, now that I am not in the throes of it all. But at the time I couldn't be sure of anything. I was so worked up. I was angry, scared, unsure, guilty, and who knows what else all rolled up into a ball of confusion and frustration.

I stomped out into the parking lot and sat in my car for who knows how long, until a voice inside my head popped up: "Richard," it said. 'That would be me." "Three months ago you blatantly disregarded the clues and your feelings on this mess. Two months ago you recognized what was going on but you did nothing about it. Last month you tried to do something but let it get away. Today you confronted him and got about half of what you wanted to say off your chest. That's progress young man. Not too bad. This is your Life Lesson here, as tough as anything gets for you. You're not supposed to be good at this stuff. You have Permission to Learn. Keep it up and you'll be OK."

I felt a little better. Not a lot mind you, but a little was a lot if you know what I mean. Three months later I left the organization and as I look back on things, I learned so much while I was there and, whether Mr. Poobah saw this or not, I needed to move on. Mr. Poobah had helped me to do so

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Axiom Two: The Paradox Principle

We are temporal and timeless, personalities with ego systems and Spiritual Enterprises. Life is purpose driven and totally random, not one or the other.

The entire Universe is conscious. There are no accidents.
There is no ghost in the machine. It was just a coincidence.

Both versions are true.
The quest for any Life Purpose puts one into direct contact with its opposite.
No pair of hands is without its saving grace; no hero(ine) without his or her Achilles heel.

Random and Non Random

It is not as if the debate began with hands, the Random vs. Non Random debate that is. Even in the world of science, a bastion of non random thought, the battle continues. From Lamarck and Darwin to Einstein and Bohr, so far the momentum of history has come down on the side of the Random Faction. But the war is far from over. Here is what 52,000 pair of hands have taught me.

People come into my office. I read their hands. They tell me their stories. Inevitably, each story follows the line laid down in the fingerprints before birth. Not an event by event pre-biography if you will, but as I listen to my clients description of their lives, I hear either a rendition of the specific Life Purpose or a rendition of the Life Purpose Inverse (or some in-between, pendulum style version of the two). That's it, each and every time. Incredible.

Whether male or female, sixty or sixteen, Borneo or the Bronx, each life follows a prescribed possibility formula. Clearly, specifics vary. Randomness intrudes. But the outcome menu is already printed. It's like a giant jigsaw puzzle with a limited variety of conclusions. Piece by piece the picture comes into focus, merely awaiting the tick of life's clock to take form.

Someone with a dualistic Life Purpose, say Businessperson + Artist, is born into a wealthy family. The progression of events will differ markedly from someone else with the same Life Purpose born into poverty. MBA from Harvard, corporate connections - this is certainly different from growing up in the circus, for example. But give it time. Sooner or later the fingerprint theme emerges. Ms. MBA seeks escape from the doldrums. She finds her Artist and fulfills herself (or does not). Ms Circus settles down, finds a way to make some serious money with her creativity (or does not). In both versions, after enough time has elapsed, the two-pronged life path is easily visible.

Switch location. Must the last Borneo mask maker work in a widget factory to support his family of six? If the fingerprints match Ms. MBA and Circus Woman, the life theme remains the same: Business and Creativity - can they combine or not? In all three cases events conspire to bring this issue to the fore. In each case, life satisfaction depends on it.

Womb Dwellers

Or take this example from a therapist's hands I recently read. "You're right about that behavior pattern of mine. It is interesting that it shows up so conspicuously in my hands. It all stems from a childhood trauma when I was in third grade." True enough, as far as it goes. But if I can see the same issues in her fingerprints and her fingerprints preceded third grade by eight years, then the events of third grade were not quite as random as they appear to be.

This is not a matter of simply finding an earlier random event that created the foundation for third grade's trauma. The therapist and I batted that one around for a while. We are womb dwellers when our fingerprints take form. There have been no random events. (Unless you want to count conception, but that is a discussion for another time.)

Coincidence

Again and again I see life story and fingerprints match up perfectly. Tens of thousands of times by now, the parameters of possibilities are already listed before we have left the starting gate. My students report the same with their clients as well. Incredible. There are no accidents. It all fits.

But the opposite is equally true: it is all random. Coincidence: that's all it is. Coincidence plus a dash of wishful thinking, the skeptic would say. "If I hadn't cancelled that flight, I wouldn't be here today. If I had stayed home that evening I never would have met your mother, son133;" The list goes on. Every life is an endless series of forked roads. Evolution itself is a random chain of improbable events. So is human history. Who could argue otherwise?

And yet, there are the fingerprints and here is one more person in my office with a life story to match. The entire idea of fingerprint analysis, the acorn containing the picture of the oak tree, the Personality and the Soul linked together, is based upon this paradox. It is not one or the other: random or purpose driven, free will or destiny. It is both at the same time. Either side of the coin is visible depending upon your point of view.

In quantum physics, you can measure either the wave or the particle aspect of an electron. Both exist, you just can't see them simultaneously. The Paradox Principle is a bit like this. Those who prefer the concrete, tend to be opaque to the wavy and vice versa.

Two Camps

The world we live in seems to be inhabited in the main by two rival camps: let's call them the Rational Camp and the Intuitive Camp. Each group appears to claim the high ground over their rivals who are, at best, short sighted and at worst the scourge of the planet. Like Democrats and Republicans, each group is subdivided into splinter groups that include more moderate factions and extremist elements.

Currently, the Rationals are in charge of things like government grant money and the Six O'clock News. They base their credibility on scientific methodology and proof positive (just like the dastardly no-goodniks they are). The Intuitives have faith on their side and a stream of anecdotal evidence that the Rationals will not accept until verified by double blind studies.

To the Rationals, you're born, you live, you die. What you see is what you get. You just have to accept the Universe the way it is, like it or not. To the Intuitives, there is a plan (even if not visible), a higher reason behind the apparent blind irrationality of life. You can't prove it scientifically, you just have to accept it. Two divergent schools of thought: one sees a series of random events with no directing intelligence, the other sees the reverse: the hand of God visible in every detail.

My experience with hands impels me to this view: coexistent with randomness is a purpose / consciousness driven Universe. Both Camps have it right.

Looking Back

Looking backward at our lives, sometimes we can see a thread that had been there all along, even if it had been invisible at the time. When Mathilda met Fred at the dance their eyes locked in and she though to herself, "What a great opportunity to learn more about Surrender Skills." Not hardly. But the pattern was operational just the same. Similarly, when I bought a used palmistry book for $1.50 in the summer of 1969, little did I realize my whole life had changed.

Hand Reading in the Snack Bar

By the time I returned to college that fall, I was hooked on hands. I would carry around The Laws of Scientific Hand Reading by William Benham, cut classes and read hands in the snack bar for hours at a time. I didn't know much, but I was already convinced this stuff worked and in the proper spirit of collegiate inquiry I wanted to learn as much as I could. I looked at hands as often as possible. I would tell people a thing or two and ask them to fill in the blanks about their interests, relationships, etc. I would compare what they told me to the differing versions presented by different palmistry books. Like filling in the Sunday Times Crossword, I gathered clues slowly and the larger puzzle began to fill itself in over time.

I was a Literature major and a member of the National Guard. Apparently I was already interviewing for membership in both Camps, but in the early years of reading hands I approached the subject as a solid member of the Rationalist Club. I was upset that I had to go into metaphysical bookstores to get palmistry books. I was appalled at the titles of the books on the next shelf. I would slink out hoping no one had seen me in such a place. "This is a science," I explained to those who would listen back then. I still believe it is.

It wasn't enough for me if I found a marking to corroborate with a certain personality trait. I needed to understand why it meant what it did. And that wasn't enough either. It needed to fit into a larger picture of why things meant what they did in hands. Is there any connection between a straight Head Line and a straight Heart Line? Does straightness mean the same thing no matter which line we are talking about? Why should that line be the Head Line anyway? What exactly does a Head Line indicate? Do Heart Lines with similar markings follow similar rules? Is there a simple set of rules for all the lines? (Yes, it turns out there is.) There had to be a logical base to all this or there was no reason to do it. It had to work every time, not nine out of ten times or something was off.

Symbolism

It was the first week of class and we were all neophytes at this. "Because his hands were dirty?" the guy next to me said to a roar of laughter. The Professor laughed too. She probably heard this same answer or something equivalent with each class. "No," she stated when the laughter had subsided, "the author didn't add this detail without reason. It means something or wouldn't be here." The rest of that class was a discussion of symbolism and its importance. The authors we were to read were not being paid by the word (Dickens, famous for starting out as being paid by the word, would come in Lit. 103.) If it is in the book, it is there to be interpreted.

"Even if the author did not mean for it to be interpreted that way?" "Yes. Even then." Some students argued this point. It seemed too much to believe, but the further I got into literature, the more obvious it was that my Professor knew what she was talking about. Telemachus, by the way, felt guilty. At least some critics think this is what Homer meant. It is hard to prove anything for sure in the symbolism business.

Character is Cumulative

Rationalists like evidence, however, and my tiny database of hands was slowly enlarging. One of the first things I noticed was how the hands matched up with a person's life experience. If their Fate Line was a mess (the vertical line that moves up the hand toward the middle finger, a line associated, among other things, with discipline and completing tasks) they were much more likely to miss deadlines for term papers, etc. They had a good reason they said: an emergency with a boy friend or girl friend, the dog had eaten their homework, whatever. But wasn't it interesting that those with straight down the middle, clear unbroken Fate Lines ('straight arrows') almost always got their papers in on time. How did the dogs know whose homework to eat? Dumb luck? Sure that happens too. But, as Emerson said, "Character is cumulative." Bit by bit the straight arrow takes a straight path and his or her life looks that way; the zig-zag guy, the same.

As obvious as this seems to me today (and probably to you as well - we are, after all, the Captains of our own ship, wouldn't you agree?) it was revolutionary thinking to me then. I could easily agree that my successes were the result of my own hard work and inner strengths, but my failures looked more like accidents or the result of other's actions.

Soul Psychology and the Paradox Principle require a greater leap than the cumulative result of character, however. Could a Rationalist accept fingerprints as indicators of a guiding theme that trumps character and affects the over all outcome in a person's life? That is a leap I have since made, but I didn't start out believing such stuff.

Walking on Glass

Looking back, maybe my Intuitive Camp indoctrination started with watching the Sonny Fox Show when I was nine years old. That's the show, by the way, when I first came upon the Great Randi, resident magician and current member of the Extreme Rationalist Camp (more about him later). My hobbies at the time were collecting baseball cards (and memorizing the statistics on their reverse side) and astronomy (I'll leave to the psychiatrists among you to analyze that in terms of my profession today). I also loved playing sports. And watching the Great Randi. He was truly great. But I remember only one incident from one Sonny Fox show so I'm guessing this must be significant.

A man comes on who walks on glass. He shows the audience how sharp the glass is by cutting a piece of paper on a shard, then proceeds to walk across about six feet of broken glass without any ill effects. The in-house audience of children applauds. Then Sonny Fox calls for a volunteer. Someone comes forward, the man whispers something to her and she proceeds to walk on the broken glass, unharmed as well. She was returning to her seat when Sonny Fox called her back and asked her what the walk on glass guy had told her. She said he had told her not to worry, it was all taken care of. She took her seat and Sonny turned to the guy. He said "I looked in her eyes and knew it would be OK. She believed nothing would happen so nothing did."

I don't know if something like that could happen on TV today but it did then and nobody sued the show or anything. Of course, it was TV. I was nine years old. The whole thing could have been a trick. All I know is I believed it then and I still do.

The Other Side

I do not wish to go through every incident in my life that bit by bit convinced me there is more to this Universe than meets the eye. Suffice to say, it took untold number of incidents and thousands of hands before I came to believe the Intuitive Camp's half of Axiom Two. I'll tell you just a couple of stories that I consider evidential and two others that could be just coincidences.

I'll limit myself to the world I know so well, the world of hands. It's early in my hand reading career, mid 70's, and I'm reading for a couple after dinner at their house. I don't remember the reading itself, but the incident afterwards sticks in my mind. They thank me and affirm how valuable the reading has been. "You are so intuituve," they tell me. I start to argue. "This is a science. Each statement I told you has a good reason based upon a logical system of analysis." They tire quickly of my argument, and so do I. The more hands I read the more the Intuitive Camp was getting my attention. I was still not ready to switch sides, however.

My host and hostess decided I needed some convincing of my own intuitive powers. The wife took off a ring from her right middle finger, handed it to me, and told me to close my eyes and tell her what pictures came forward in my mind's eye. I wanted to object, to tell them that hand reading is not like that, but instead I kept my mouth shut and took hold of the ring. I closed my eyes. Nothing happened. "How long should I keep my eyes closed in order to be polite? At least a few seconds more," I figured, so we sat in silence for about forty five seconds. "That's long enough," I thought, but just before opening my eyes a picture appeared on my screen. Long wooden boxes (like the ammunition boxes I had seen in my military service) in the back of a wagon (like a Conastoga wagon from cowboy movies). The wagon travels over bumpy unpaved roads and across streams, shaking the cargo in the back, and� I didn't want to watch anymore. I told my hosts what I had seen.

The wife was jubilant. "This ring belonged to my grandmother," she explained. "She and my grandfather rode around Europe in a covered wagon. Grandfather made caskets, long wooden boxes that he sold as they traveled from small town to small town. Tell me what else you see." I made one more visit to my mind's eye with similar results. It was getting harder and harder to claim I had zero intuition. I had met intuitive types before and I was sure I was not one of them. But incidents like this one were starting to pile up.

Aaron and Arthur

Like the reading I did in Bellingham, Wa. I was looking at a damaged little finger and reporting to its owner the implications. There was a connection, I suggested, between the circumstances around her current love life and what had transpired between her and her father. A mental picture leaped into my mind: a woman's hand going through a phone book, trying to point to Aaron and the finger slipping and winding up on Arthur. I told her it was as if she wanted Aaron as her father but got Arthur instead. I was merely trying to illustrate a point. She reported to me that her biological father, Aaron had divorced from her mother when she was young and her Mom had remarried Arthur. Her new step-dad had taken the role of abusive father figure that I was referring to in her reading.

You can roll your eyes and play the woo-woo music now if you are a Rationalist.

The Vikings

Soon afterwards I got a shove in the same direction. I was attending a seminar in L. A. and one of the participants wanted a reading afterwards. We had no place to go for the reading, so we went to a diner nearby. The diner, empty except for two hippie types at the counter, was quiet enough. We chose a booth, had a cup of coffee or something and I began to read her hands. Things were moving along swimmingly when that little TV screen in my brain flashed on and I saw her in a Vikings outfit and long yellow braids. A little story ensued with her as the lead character. I wasn't sure exactly what to do. I didn't want to risk the rapport by talking about past lives or something like that, but that's what I thought I was seeing even if I wasn't sure that I believed all that past life stuff.

She was telling me something about her current circumstances while I hovered between telling her what I was seeing or integrating its information in the reading without letting her in on the details. As I was about to take the latter course, one of the hippies jumped up at the counter and yelled loudly at his friend, "The Vikings, goddamit, the Vikings!" They were arguing football, it turns out. The incident left its impression on me and I shifted course and told her about the Viking woman. We continued to proceed swimmingly.

Lines Change

1995. I have already taken the leap across the Rational / Intuitive divide and no longer feel uncomfortable in either world. They both have validity for me. I know I said I was only going to tell you about two stories from my hand reading career, but I just have to tell you one more about this woman I read for in St. Gallenkappell, about thirty kilometers outside Zurich. Marianne is translating and I am doing a group session. I'll read about twenty pair of hands that night, out loud in front of the group. It is a larger than normal size group (I prefer twelve) so I am hopeful that things will go smoothly. As the evening progresses I cannot help but notice the strange looking woman in her twenties twisting uncomfortably in her chair. Her eyes seem kind of strange and she is extra fidgety, but I can't do anything about it now and I just keep reading hands. In the back of my mind I wonder what will happen when it is her turn.

Her turn arrives and she comes forward, accompanied by a sharply dressed woman in her 50's with a strict military bearing. They sit in front of me and Marianne tells me that this is the mother. Her daughter is retarded and she has to take her everywhere. The mother wants me to help her daughter and instructs me to begin (I don't need Marianne to translate that.) I try to begin but her daughter's hands are a mess. Lines are going every which way with no pattern whatsoever, as if someone had dropped a mirror from ten feet up and this was the result. Never before had I seen hands with no major lines visible. I took a deep breath. I was stalling for time. I didn't know what to do next so I asked the daughter and her mom to take a deep breath also. I suggested they relax and trust that something good would happen (or words to that effect) and that we would all be pleased with the outcome. The daughter's strange eye movements and squirming slowed.

Nervously, I looked back and saw a normal pair of hands. Too many lines to be sure. Troubled. But normal patterns I had seen before. Marianne and I looked at each other. "Do you see what I see," I asked. "The lines have completely rearranged themselves," said Marrianne. "Yes they have." I proceeded to read her hands and her mother's hands and good things did happen. (Postscript: They both came in for a lengthier session three days later and the daughter's hands had retained the discernable patterns from the other night.)

Ho hum, just another day in the life of an ordinary hand reader. Really though, I have picked what I consider some of my better stories, but the key point is that this is more the norm than not. Something big is afoot. I have asked other people if they have had experiences that are like the one's I just described. I am no longer amazed that most people have similar events to report. Of course, these are their stories and I cannot vouch for them. I wouldn't be surprised if you have a few your own.

THUMP

Shannon told me how she had gone crazy looking for some missing papers that were very important. She looked everywhere, but they were gone. Two weeks later, sitting at her dining room table, she heard a loud thump a few feet away. She got up to investigate, and there on the floor near the entrance to her kitchen was the entire missing file folder with all the papers. Hmmm.

Here's one of my favorites. I had just read for this man and he wanted to tell me something that had happened to him years earlier that his reading had brought back to mind. When he was a college student in Berkeley he had been walking down the street barefoot and his feet were getting hot. Very hot. It was getting so uncomfortable that he didn't know what he was going to do. Just then, from out of the sky, thump (there's that thump thing again) a pair of size eleven sandals landed on the sidewalk in front of him. Apparently someone was tossing stuff out an apartment window: books, records, and the magical sandals that landed at his feet. He was a size eleven. He put on the sandals and continued on his way.

The Hammer and Saw

A skeptic from the Rationalist Camp would say it is just a coincidence. The Intuitive Camp would say he created his own reality. Both versions seem true to me. My own version of the same type of story involves my red headed daughter. We were in the process of unloading boxes, having just moved into a new house. My daughter was about seven at the time and was getting bored with all the goings on. "Can you get me my hammer and saw," she asked, politely at first and more insistently as time dragged on. The house included a workbench in the garage and Andrina had been recently fascinated by carpentry projects. Nothing big mind you. She just seemed to enjoy pounding nails into pieces of wood and sawing the whole thing up. "Look what I made, Daddy." "Great, Honey."

She has since shifted her interests to other matters. But her hammer and saw must have been in the back of the truck and as box after box was brought into the house and her tools were not forthcoming, she became more animated in her requests. If there was any way to get her hammer and saw and quiet her down I would have done so, but I just couldn't find them.

The door bell rang. It was our new landlord. He lived about an hour away and just wanted to check in and see how things were going. "Fine," we answered, resting a bit from our labors. "Oh, I've got something for you," he said and went back out to his car. We expected an apple pie or some housewarming type gift. Instead, he brought out a hammer and saw from the trunk. "I just had the idea you might could use these," he offered. We accepted more happily than I suppose made any sense to him. He waved and drove off. Andrina went to the garage and happily thumped away on the new workbench.

Palmese Is A Foreign Language

I never did give up my membership card in the Rationalist Club, but as time went by, a second membership card for the Intuitive Club joined it in my wallet. (I still have my 'I Like Ike' campaign button too.) A person could read hands with membership in either club alone, but that is not what we teach at the IIHA.

The Great Randi, famous debunker of self-proclaimed psychics could learn to read hands if he studied the database. It is like learning a foreign language. How hard can that be? Little kids can do it. The hand reading coding system is easier to learn than German or French and there are no irregular verbs to memorize. It is an elegant language, both economic and information laden. If The Great Randi learned the code, he could tell you your Life Purpose. But he probably won't.

On the other side of the coin, every now and then I get a student so intuitive they hardly bother with the rational. No need to study the database. Pictures just come flying into their heads as they look into someone's palm. But there is a danger lurking with this type of student. When Miles Davis makes stuff up, it is highly creative. But he had to learn his notes first. In his early notebooks, Picasso drew life like faces. Later, when he had one eye here and one over there someplace, it was art. Making stuff up is OK, but making stuff up without any database is not reading hands. It may be accurate. It may be inaccurate but useful, But more often than not it slides down a slippery slope the I don't want students at the IIHA to take.

Let's Here It For the Rationalists

Before I leave this topic, I'm recalling another seminar I attended about two decades ago. There were about sixty of us in the room and early on we each had to introduce ourselves, say what we did and what we wanted from the weekend. There were therapists, artists, and some mothers in attendance. I got a nice ooh and ahh for introducing myself as a hand reader. The guy to my right was an engineer and worked for the city. Light hisses and a boo or two was his audience response. "My, my, aren't we being a bit unfair," the workshop leader offered. "The world needs engineers." "Here, here," I chimed in. I had been getting tired of all the left brain bashing that accompanied workshops like these. "What's wrong with logical thought," I thought logically enough. There is a lot to be taken from the Rationalist Camp.

We Need Each Other

There are thousands of books and articles in the medical literature on hands and disease. I have studied them carefully as I have the palmistry books as well. My rational mind needed to feel confident that all this hand reading was on a solid foundation before that leap forward into the intuitive side could take place. And, the biggest leap I took, I took in a Rationalist cathedral, the Jessie Jones Medical Library. It was during my reading of Fingerprints, Palms and Soles by Drs. Cummins and Midlo that the entire fingerprint system came popping into my being in one fell swoop.

So despite my anecdotal tendencies, I am not an Anti-Rationalist. After all, some of my best friends are rational. I do wish however, they would open up their minds a bit to possibilities outside the box. It wasn't that long ago that science itself was outside the box. By the same token, I wouldn't mind too much if at the Convention of Intuitives (assuming the Intuitive Camp would ever get practical enough to get everybody to show up at the same designated time and place) a bit of rationality would tippy-toe in on occasion. What's wrong with a dose of reality now and then?

The Paradox Principle depends on both views. For Soul Psychology, it is axiomatic.

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Axiom Three: The Validity of the Personality

The Personality is the vehicle; the Soul sets the agenda.
It is incumbent upon each of us to let our personality emerge in its inherent form, to work with this personality on the goals that, from a Soul Level, we have selected for this lifetime. Errors arise when we either attempt to void the personality or seem to forget that it is only the vehicle for our Life Purpose, not the Purpose itself.
To become the advanced version of your personality type, follow these two rules:

Rule #1 Be Your Type
Rule #2 Integrate Your Opposite

Let's take a closer look at each of the Three Axioms upon which Soul Psychology rests.

So often I find people who are not living their lives as the person they have built themselves to be, as if by becoming something else, things would somehow be OK. Hands have taught me that it is incumbent upon each of us to let our Personality emerge in its inherent form and to work with that Personality on the goals that from a Soul Level we have selected for this lifetime. Errors arise when we either attempt to void the Personality or forget that it is only the vehicle for our Life Purpose, not the Purpose itself. Allow me to explain.

Three Peas in a Pod

Last night I came across three pairs of hands that, although they couldn't be more different in appearance, the key line marking and the Life Purpose shown in the fingerprints were the same. This curious juxtaposition of divergent personalities affords me the opportunity to illustrate a key aspect of Soul Psychology.

The first pair of hands belonged to a slightly built woman, angular in appearance and serious in manner. Clearly, all unnecessary fat molecules had disappeared from her body years ago, banished in disgrace. A trace of mirth peeked out from behind her eyes, furtively watching me, slightly amused at the process of having her hands being read. The rest of her face seemed haggard, as if she alone was responsible for taking inventory at the world's largest Wal-Mart. Halfway between stand-tall 'attention' and indifferently-slouched 'at-ease', she opened her hands for inspection.

She had one of the Artist-type Life Purposes (right Apollo as the dominant fingerprint) and her hands showed a Star of Apollo, the perfect marker for creative endeavor. The Star of Apollo represents "Fame and Fortune in the Arts" according to the ancient palmists; modern day hand readers more or less agree, seeing the marker as representing inclination and capability for self-expression on a grand scale. In typical form, however, the Star of Apollo is incredibly more revealing than simply indicating artistic intent. Let's look at this marking more closely.

The prototype Star of Apollo has six points with a common center and is located midway between the Heart Line and the beginning of the ring (Apollo) finger. Each of the six pieces represents another ingredient necessary for the creative urge to turn itself into successful creativity. The exact location of the center point (closer to the finger or the Heart Line, slightly off center towards the middle or little finger) the condition of the nexus (precise or not), the condition of each of the spokes (clear or broken, evenly spaced or not) and how they interact with other line formations as they radiate outwards over the palm allows the coding system of the hands to convey a large amount of information with economy and elegance. In the hands of my client, one of the 6 spokes was missing.

This is a common malady (see diagram above). Her Star of Apollo was 5/6 complete, awaiting the appearance of the line that represents Discipline and Due Diligence. No wonder more Stars of Apollo are missing this line than any other. When was the last time you met an artist-type person who was precise in appearance and perpetually on time and under budget? The irony in this case is that the woman in question couldn't be more exacting in her personal accountability if she was head timekeeper at Greenwich. So what, if anything, is the problem?

Her Fate Line was deep, clear and uninterrupted, ranging from the wrist all the way up to the middle (Saturn) finger. This is the marking of the straight arrow, the completer of tasks; the type of Fate Line seen on those with the strongest sense of duty and responsibility. Apparently, although she had all the discipline one person could possibly need, none of her discipline was devoting itself to creative endeavors (hence the absence of this 1/6 of the Star of Apollo).

As a matter of fact, in a creative twist, she was using her Responsibility Department as a hiding place to avoid the performance anxiety also visible in her hands. "I'm too busy to pay attention to that creative stuff. I'll get to it when things settle down around here. Besides, it's kind of frivolous anyway compared to the big responsibilities I must attend to. Excuse me, that's my beeper%#133;"

This might all be fine and dandy if her Life Purpose wasn't to express her Apollo nature. As long as this aspect of her self was ignored, she could not open the door into her Right Life. I can just imagine her at the Cosmic Laboratory, mixing the ingredients into the pot that eventually would be her personality make up. "Let's see, I'll pour in a lot from the Jar of Creativity (after all, this is going to be a lifetime devoted to creative pursuits, at least, that's what I really want), but let's add a solid dose from the Jar of Responsibility (that last lifetime was such a waste: all that talent never amounting to anything). Oops, maybe that's too much Responsibility. Oh well, let's see what I can do with it."

Next thing you know, she is walking through Wal-Mart with a clipboard, light years away from the art classes that energized her in High School. Then again, it is still early in her life movie, plenty of time for breakdown and breakthrough. We'll just have to wait and see how this one turns out.

Pea #2

Next up at the palmistry seminar was Sponge Lady. Her hands looked like they had been soaking in water overnight: not quite bloated, but getting there. The fingers had a sausage-like appearance and her body, although still attractive and only marginally overweight, seemed poised to add on thirty pounds at a moment's notice. Consistent with the wideness theme, her Mount of Moon bulged wide dominating my field of vision. She smiled with extra-genuine sincerity as she leaned forward, hands slightly too close to my lap, ready to hear what her hand reader would say.

Spongy looking hands are not all that common, but do show up from time to time. Sometimes they are Advanced Sponges: persons who soak up information, keenly aware fonts of wisdom. Other times they are from the Less Advanced Sponge group: a bit lazy (or more than a bit), short of backbone, too easily influenced by everyone and everything. The consistency of the hands often tells the story. Springy feeling hands most often are of the first category, marshmallowy feeling hands, the latter. My subject was somewhere in between.

I couldn't miss the irony, however, as her Star of Apollo stared out at me, also 5/6 present as her fingerprints revealed another right Apollo Life Purpose. Border line bon-bon queen and ascetic disciplinarian, one right after the other. Each pair of hands with the same key marking, each with the same Life Purpose, yet each with a Personality distinct and apart. Could Pea #1 use her discipline to focus her creative skills? Could Pea #2, take Advanced Spongeness to the level of art form? Two Souls in search of their Creative Voice: they couldn't be more different; they couldn't be more the same.

For Sponge Woman, the missing spoke of her Star of Apollo was the Moon spoke: the line associated with imagination and spirituality. Yet, the hands in front of me were the hands of a decidedly Moonish nature, so much so that she was in danger of going over her edge. Usually, when a spoke of the Star of Apollo is missing, the owner has an absence of the quality in question. In these two hands, the opposite was true: each woman was faced with an embarrassment of riches (too much of a good thing). For Pea #2, imagination was rampant, but would it fuel her Star of Apollo or would she spend her days staring out the bay window, immobilized, lost in a private domain? Good question.

Pea #3

Two readings later, the third pea of the pod showed me her hands: the hands of a tortured poetess. Staring into her hollowed out palms I was reminded of a reading from years ago. A fourteen year old boy, unusually creative but not the happiest camper was the readee; his reading being a birthday present from his mother, also present. Unlike so many other teenagers who are dragged into my office, the young man was eager to claim his gift. Like the older woman in front of me last night, both had a degree of torment easily visible: Cup of Tears, Discoloration on the Mound of Venus - no need for all the details here. Also visible: the Star of Apollo, this time all 6 points in proper position. Here was creativity poised for action.

The mom wanted only the best for her son. She had introduced him to meditation and the like in every attempt to cure him of his apparent morbidity. The son, to his credit, had not turned into a total curmudgeon - he was more like the Cookie Monster from Sesame Street: personable, interesting, but with an edge. I told them both to revere that edge, because without it, his Apollo Life Purpose could not sustain itself. Would Bob Dylan's songs have been so popular if he was pleased with life? Should Barbara Streisand get a nose job? The apparent flaw is the very beauty of it all. "Nonetheless," asked Mom, "Don't you think he would be happier if he just did some yoga with me every day?" The teenager gave me one of those smiles that cartoonists convey with a wiggly line.

In the hands of the woman in front of me, Pea #3, the melancholic seemed to have taken over. I brought her to the Cosmic Laboratory to watch as she built her Personality for this lifetime, reminding her of the reason she included such a dark side. "Well, so much for the Creativity Jar… let's see what else shall I put into the stew. OOH, the Dark Side Jar. YES! I just hate all those goody-two-shoed-pollyannas. I'll have an edge this time." "Careful, her Guidance Counselor might have said, "too much of that edge and your creativity may get buried." "I think I can handle it, " was the reply. So far, at least, she hadn't.

Soul Psychology

These three women serve to highlight the validity of the Personality. In each case, the Personality could serve to animate the Life Purpose or repress it. For the straight arrow woman, her Creative Emergence is not a discipline issue (as her 5/6 Star of Apollo might suggest); nor could she expect that working harder would ever yield the security she seeks. Her Life Purpose (and hence her happiness) depends upon her Vulnerability Skills (as shown in her fingerprints: Life Lesson: Loops). If Pea #1 learns to open up, the process of doing so, with all its twists and turns, is what both supports and give structure to her Creative Voice. Of course, she stands to become a highly disciplined creative type. What else could possibly be expected to happen?

In the case of Sponge Lady, there is no shortage of Moon energy available to the Personality. However, to connect her imagination and spirituality to her Life Purpose, Sponge Lady would have to protect her boundaries, learn to repel violation (notice her left Jupiter Life Lesson). If and when she manages to stand her ground, she won't have to search for her Creative Self, it will find her. If it does, that font of wisdom that is the advanced version of Spongehood would be the culmination of her self-actualization and the doorway into her Life Purpose.

Nor does the unhappy / edgy woman need to change the type of person she is in order to do her Life Purpose. Staying away from people because she is too depressed to have company over is not the ultimate solution, but neither is swallowing some happy pills to dispel her angst. It is her life challenge to work with her own dark side, to give it expression through her Apollo Star.

In each case, the Personality is just fine the way it is. It is the person's job to connect that Personality to the Soul's Agenda by doing combat with the issues of growth shown in the fingerprints, permanent issues that at the IIHA we call a person's Life Lesson.

The Personality is both attracted to and resistant to the task at hand. It is only through experiences garnered by the Personality that the Soul has a chance to accomplish its mission.

The Personality is the vehicle, the Soul sets the agenda. Neither can exist here in this three dimensional plane without the other.

We are neither all Soul nor all Personality. The dance between the two is what makes life the interesting drama it is.

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