As previously explained, there are two distinct topographic systems revealed in hands, each associated with its own psychology. The unchanging fingerprints reveal our 'soul psychology,' and the constantly shifting line formations, finger and thumb shapes reveals our 'personality psychology.' The two psychologies coexist within us, but they do not always share the same view.

The soul psychology is permanent throughout life, indelibly hard-wired into our psyches. It is the template on which the developing personality rests, a bit unsteadily perhaps, like the floating plate tectonics of the Earth. The soul is timeless and expansive; its goals are life scale. It keeps the Life Purpose Map clearly and constantly in view.

Conversely, the personality psychology is ego driven and lives in 'now time.' Like the Flatlanders (two-dimensional beings often invoked to explain Einstein's Relativity Theory), the personality has limited vision. There is another dimension it can only imagine but cannot see. Hands have taught me that it is the interplay between these two elements of self, these two interdependent psychologies, that creates the dynamic tension that is the essence of life.

MONOPOLY

Let's pretend for a moment that each of us has a game board to play on for this lifetime, like a game of Monopoly. Each square of the game board has something written on it, one of the experiences that could possibly happen in your life. Your life goal is included in the game, but so are your life lessons. Taking the analogy further, the personality is like the hat, the car, or other game piece. When the dice are thrown, it can do nothing but move its designated spaces, incurring its good fortune or bad. The soul's view is broader: it sees the whole game board. It has its strategies. It makes a plan.

Now it is your turn. You roll the dice, move the hat six squares. Boardwalk and Park Place, Go to Jail; as you circle the game board the squares stay the same. But hopefully, as you learn from your experiences, you gain a map of the territory and become a more skillful player.

AN ALLY IN DISGUISE

My last client today is a case in point. Her Life Purpose, as encoded in her fingerprints, was Innovative Leader. But her concerns were more immediate. She felt stuck in a bad marriage, she told me, unable to leave for fear she could not support herself financially. Like the hat from Monopoly, she could see little beyond her current dilemma. "Should I stay or leave?" she asked, as I looked into her hands.

Her hands revealed her two psychologies in detail. There, in her fingerprints, was the Innovative Leader. There also, in the palmar lines and finger and thumb shapes, were her learned behaviors, relationship patterns, a series of talents and capabilities. It is her life's work to unlock the Innovative Leader that resides within, but the Innovative Leader has its own instructions: it is to emerge only when the personality is properly trained for the task at hand.

During the reading it became clear that whether she stayed or left the marriage, the deeper issue was, and always had been, claiming her personal power. In this context, could she possibly see her marital battles as a training ground secretly designed to bring out her best? Was her husband (and the power issues he represented) truly an ally, an ally in disguise?

Maybe someday, when the Innovative Leader had become fully operational, she would look back upon this time differently. "It forced me to see myself more clearly, to deal with my own mask of powerlessness," she would tell her interviewer. "That was a turning point for me. It led me directly toward my Life Purpose."

The reading was nearing completion. She felt excited about her future, she told me. She didn't have all the answers but she no longer felt so trapped. No matter what she did next, she would be making some changes in her life. She had a map now, and having it made all the difference.

LOOKED AT ANOTHER WAY

I see this often in my clients: powerful creatures with delicate wings, monarch butterflies peeking, one eye, oh so shyly through the gray cocoon.

Is this the human equivalent of the wave/particle duality of quantum physics? When looked at one way we are three-dimensional beings, discrete entities in space and time; looked at another way, we are spirit, the wave energy that leaves the frozen imprint of our fingerprints.

ICE SKATES

When I was thirteen I got my first pair of ice skates from a friend whose feet had grown too big. I was proud of my skates, speed skates with elongated blades, swishing on the ice, carving swirls in the quiet cold of the night.

Swishhh.

In that icy mirror my face looks back at me, imperfections clear to my eye, as if the mirror had cracked somewhere in my distant past, and the cracks had yellowed and grown deeper with time. Captured within the mirror, maturity and frailty twirled around each other, like a double helix, circling, again and again.

There is my captive face now. I track its ancient lines with my fingers; the child and the man dancing together forever, my cosmic dance.

Child and man, particle and wave, reality and the dream; where is the line of demarcation? And who gets to draw it?

The night is late, the boy is finished skating. As he disappears in the distance, skates slung over his shoulder, the frozen lake now quiet and undisturbed, a thought ripples through my mind: can it be I see him now only because a part of him had seen me then?

ONE HUNDRED YEARS

James Hillman, in his book One Hundred Years of Psychotherapy, takes a similar view. "The soul knows who you are from the beginning," he states. "You have an acorn in you, you are a certain person and that person begins to appear early in life, but it's there all the way through." Using Manolete (the great bullfighter who was a frightened child) as an example, Hillman challenges us to read a person's life backwards:

"[If you do that] then you say Manolete was the greatest bullfighter and he knew that. Inside his psyche sensed at the age of nine that his fate was to meet thousand pound black bulls with great horns. Of course he fucking well held on to his mother! Because he couldn't hold the capacity - at nine years old your fate is all there and you can't handle it. It's too big. It's not that he was inferior, he had a great destiny."

"Of course [he stuttered]. This little boy was a Nobel Prize winner in literature and had to save the Western world through his speech. Of course he had a speech defect, of course he couldn't speak easily when he was eleven or fourteen. It was too much to carry."

"[These parts] have to be respected, because [they] know more why [they] resist change than you do. Every complex, every psychic figure in your dreams knows more about itself and what it's doing and what it's there for than you do."

"And if those elements did change, could change, you would be so fluid that you would not, could not be you."

"This is one of the great riddles that Lao Tse talked about, the changing and the changeless."

TWO PART HARMONY

Your Life Purpose Map is made up of two parts: your Life Purpose and your 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 return to the acorn analogy. 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.

THE FORMULA

Hands have taught me that you must make progress in your Life Lesson for your Life Purpose to emerge. There is no way around it. If you seek to avoid your Life Lesson, your Life Purpose aches, and a specific set of challenging circumstances comes your way.

This Formula stays with you your entire life. It is your life sentence. No exceptions. Let's look at this in more detail.

THE DELICIOUS DILEMMA

A woman whose hands I recently read serves to illustrate just how ticklish it can be to make your Formula work in your favor. Her Life Purpose was The Artist and, in the lines of her palms, she had the Star of Apollo, the highest marker for creative capability; perfect equipment to achieve her life goals. But not so fast. Her Life Lesson, loosely translated, was Family Service. According to The Formula in her fingerprints, without first learning to be a supportive family member, her Star of Apollo would bring nothing but frustration.

Why? Who knows. Perhaps in other lifetimes she had been a great opera star, but her single-mindedness had estranged her from her family; fame and success only emphasizing her loneliness. In her soul's wisdom, this life would not be worth living if only to repeat the error of her past.

Past lives? Karmic influences? Regardless of its actuality, the past life scenario is a convenient way to frame her current circumstances. On a life scale, her goal is to balance the two sides of her nature: self interest vs. service to loved ones; her art vs. her family. The truth is that she feels a creative urge too strong to ignore. Yet, in some mysterious way, whenever she runs away from those she loves, her creativity invariably gets stuck. This was her story as she told it to me: a series of events held together with this common thread. Now in her thirties, here she was again, dealing with the same theme one more time.

Lights…Camera…Action. The Director is pleased, all the props are in place. Act Two: the Delicious Dilemma emerges. Carnegie Hall is on line one; they want her to do a one-woman show, and they need an answer today. But Dad is on line two. "Mom is sick and we need you to come home." What to do?

A Moment of Truth has arrived; another defining moment in this young woman's life. She can run away, hide, blame others for her problems. Who amongst us can truly say we have never chosen from these options? But doing so will not move her forward on her Monopoly board; the suppressed feelings will inevitably exact their toll. If she is ever to do her Life Purpose, she must transcend her emotional boundaries, personal and artistic.

WE EACH HAVE ONE

The Delicious Dilemma carries no automatic solution. It is this woman's destiny to face choices of this kind, with slightly less melodrama perhaps, but with absolute certainty nonetheless. Circumstances will continually conspire to place the Delicious Dilemma in front of her. The life choices are hers to make, the consequences real. The only question is: how will she handle it?

If I were reading this I would be skeptical. I would be double skeptical. If I hadn't seen this dynamic in tens of thousands of cases I wouldn't believe it myself. New people come and go in a person's life, new jobs, new circumstances enter and leave the stage, yet the Delicious Dilemma remains. As a teen it looked like this, as an adult it looked like that. The life theme prevails despite the most ardent attempts to alter it.

So it is for each of us. We too have our Life Purpose and Life Lesson. We too wrestle with our Delicious Dilemma. Such is life in human form. Whether we are consciously aware or operate in the dark, our drama unfolds, our life takes place, following The Formula printed on our fingerprints five months before our birth.

"ARE YOU...EXPERIENCED?"  (Jimmy Hendrix)

In the late 70's I was fortunate to find a very special person who had a great influence on my life. This wonderful, profound, impish wise man taught classes at the Esoteric Philosophy Center in Houston Texas, and I was his pupil. I had been reading hands for almost a decade, but had not as yet decoded the fingerprints (perhaps he held the door open for me). Had I, I would have known then, rather than later, that his fingerprints held the Life Purpose: Spiritual Teacher.

I studied with William once a week for two years. And the one thing that most stays with me years later was at the very center of his teachings: "From a soul level, we have each chosen this lifetime as an opportunity to gain experience."

Week in, week out, William would laughingly help us to see ourselves more clearly. I can see him now, slapping his thighs, tickled by the irony of our life stories as we presented them in his classroom. "So Mary, now you have finally 'fallen in love' and you still have problems? What did you expect?" "It is one thing to study 'love' in the abstract," William would say. "But can you demonstrate love with that spouse, that child, that parent, under these particular circumstances? Perhaps a semester or two at the Earth University will assist you. Perhaps feeling what it is like to deny someone love or to be the one denied will help you know the meaning behind the word. Experience can be the best teacher."

This view helps explain why we each have a Life Lesson: it is part of the experiencing process we need to accomplish the life scale goals set from a soul level.

YOUR LIFE LESSON

So, back to your Life Lesson. By definition, your Life Lesson is your area of greatest resistance and avoidance, your biggest blind spot, largest obstacle, tallest hurdle. Your Life Lesson has many names. Jungians call it your shadow. George Lucas, in the Star Wars Trilogy, referred to it as the "dark side." Still others have named it the "gremlin within." It is your 'stuff,' your 'old baggage,' your 'dirt,' visible now that the corner of your rug has been lifted.

Your Life Lesson is your weakness exposed, that part you most hope no one else (including yourself?) will notice, the last part of you to come forward when you take attendance, call the role, count noses, deep in the night. It is your worst fear(s) about yourself fully personified.

Your Life Lesson is your least evolved skill at the Earth University from a point five months prior to birth when your fingerprints took form. There is no way around it. You must contend with your Life Lesson for your Life Purpose to come forward.

To be totally immersed in your Life Lesson is to feel the cold draft of the endless pit wafting around your ankles, pulling you downward; knowing it will never get any better, and worse, it is all your fault. There is no escape. No exit. Oh my God.

But wait! All is not lost. We are not Flatlanders. We know we are more than this mere sliver of our full self. And we know too, in all our humanness, that this part, this God-damn-can't-get-rid-of-it part of ourselves is somehow necessary, essential, useful to our growth process; part of what it means to be a human being.