Stated briefly the Paradox Principle is as follows:

Life is purpose driven and totally random, not one or the other.

The entire Universe is conscious. There are no accidents. Miracles abound. We create our own reality. Time is an illusion.

There is a rational explanation for everything. It was just a coincidence. This is it. When you're dead, it's over. There is no ghost in the machine.

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.