251. Discovering Your Life's Purpose: A Profoundly Accurate System - Richard Unger

Hello and welcome to the meditation conversation. I'm your host, Kara Goodwin. And today I'm joined by Richard unger. Richard. Richard is the author of life prints. Deciphering your life purpose from your fingerprints. He combines the science of fingerprints and the related line and handshape designs with the ancient wisdom of palmistry. The life print system is a simple yet profoundly accurate means of mapping one's life purpose. It's like examining an egghorn to know what kind of oak tree may 1 day emerge. And reading our fingerprints reveals who we are meant to become. And I've personally had a reading by Richard and it was fascinating. So we can get more into that later. I want to just start by welcoming you Richard, thank you so much for being here.

Good to be here, Kara.

So can you talk about this unique modality of deciphering someone's life purpose from their fingerprints and their handprints?

Yes, I can. Perfect. First of all, what I'd like to say is that most people have a different idea about what life purpose is than what I am talking about. So when I do public speaking and I ask people in the audience, how many here have a good handle on what my life purpose is, or I ask people to write down on a yellow pad if I'm in. A workshop. My life purpose is. And then I ask people to read their answers to the group or to comment about the process of questioning themselves about it. Either I get people telling me I don't know my life purpose, that's why I came today. Or they say things like my life purpose is to grow and evolve and be the best person I can integrate my blah blah blah blah blah. That's what they say on the west coast. On the east coast you're kind of in between here. On the east coast I'll get more. My life purpose is to go public with my company by January 1. Fill in the blank. To have X number of dollars in my bank account by such and such a date, to canoe the entire Yukon River like that. Those are goals. I also get people telling me that my life purpose is to live my passion. And my passion is fill in the blank. My passion is stamp collecting. My passion is whatever they tell me their passion is. That's not their purpose, that's their passion. My passion is basketball. That has nothing to do with my life purpose. When I do workshops in Texas, I get more family and religious themes spoken. My life purpose is to be a good mother, good father, good husband, good wife. Like that, who's to argue? Do you want to be a good husband or wife? Do you want to be a good mother or father? Sure. But none of those are what I'm talking about. Those are universals. Those are like words to live by. You can be type of statements. The hand is much more specific. You have something in particular that you came to do. Something that I like to think of as an exalted destiny possibility for you. Something that brings the greater sense of meaning. My life, I'm living my life of meaning. That's what I'm talking about. With a life purpose. And that is printed in your fingerprints before you were even born. And not only that, that doesn't change. You're going to have the same fingerprints 20 years from now. Everybody knows this. You've watched TV. You can't change your fingerprints, otherwise Sherlock Holmes couldn't catch you, right? So your circumstances change, your passion might change, but you have a particular purpose that you came here to live and again that's you living as the best you that you can be finding deep meaning in your life. That's not about having things necessarily go well for you. That's not necessarily even doing what you think you want to be doing. But there's a destiny in there. I find this very interesting. There's a destiny in there and it's there before you were born. And it's your job to unlock that destiny, pay attention to it, and go along with its program if you can, or at least attempt to, and see how that feels as you're moving in that direction. So I like to tell people that life purpose is a daily practice. It's not something that you arrive in and then you're there. So if your life purpose was to canoe the Yukon, now you've canoe the Yukon. So like are you done?

Right.

If you're Picasso and your life purpose is to live your artistry, no doubt his life purpose was about his artistry. Does he ever arrive there and he's through? No, he's still attempting to live his artistry when he's in his ninety s and on Monday he's not doing a good job of living his artistry and Tuesday he is. It's an ongoing thing. It's more journey ish rather than you arrive. It's binary. You're there or you're not there. And to learn what your hands say about your life purpose is well, to me it's life altering.

Yeah. As you were saying that I was kind of seeing it as like a sine wave. Like some days you're in it, you're closer to that line, which might be the life purpose, and some days you're really distracted or you're really pulled into something that's very.

1 NS you're in. It's a state of consciousness to inhabit. So is Picasso trying to impress the pretty girl down the hallway or is he pouring his artistry on his campus of choice that day? What is going that's an inside job. We can't know. Is he being the artist or is he faking it for some other purpose? And I think he was perfectly capable of either. And in some moments maybe it was some of each.

Yeah. That's fantastic. Well thank you for clarifying because I think that's a great baseline. Just what are we even talking about when it comes to life purpose? Because you're right, I think that we can get sidetracked and misunderstand. Oh, I need to do that. Our todos are bigger to dos are what we're here for. And it can be easy to just kind of let life lead us around and be like, here's what we're focusing on here, because it's just what is in our field of awareness at any given time. But to step back. That's what I found when I had my Life print session. It was a great way to zoom out and to have a 50,000 foot view of like, what even is this? What is even going on here? What's trying to happen? And the little steps that I'm doing every day, is that lined up with what I'm here for? Which is invaluable.

Yes. And for me to talk about it without knowing you at all. I looked at this. I have your handprint, and I'm not just talking to you. I do this each day, and I'm talking to the next person and the next person who I also know nothing about. And the fact that I can climb into your world as accurately as I can, first of all, that's really remarkable. I haven't gotten over how remarkable that is.

Absolutely.

That's just absolutely crazy. I mean, all I'm doing is looking at this. How should I know any of this stuff, right? I can imagine a world where what your hand looks like has nothing to do with what you're like. But that's not the world we live in. The way your hand looks has everything to do with what you're like in incredible detail and for many people. I was just earlier this morning reading an email from somebody who felt so seen, he just wanted to tell me he went on and on in a nice way. Thank you very much, gregor telling me about how seen he felt and how that experience was so important to him because he had lived for so long feeling unseen, and the way he is didn't match his family's story and trying to find his place in the world without even explaining himself. I'm talking to him, so apparently you're this way, that way, and you're up to things like this and that, or at least I hope you are, because that's what somebody with your hands would be up to, all things being equal. And he goes, yeah, well, you're describing me. That is incredibly freeing and alive. And to a person, again, to be seen without having to explain yourself, that's a beautiful thing about hands. But beyond that, that being seen has more to do with your handshape and line formations. There's a personality outline in there. I could see your strengths and weaknesses in your personality type. We talked about in your case, we talked about the philosopher who seeks to understand the world and her place in it and needs to talk to the world about what you find. That's your personality type, but you have a message in your fingerprints as well. And they're like two separate psychologies. One is your personality type and that's the part that's the map in your fingerprints. It's not a deeper level of your personality, it's something else. It stands outside of time. I call it your soul psychology because I don't have better phrasing for it. It's another piece of you that's there. And when you're connected to that, all your parts, well, we don't have good language for that. I have to, invent my own word against it and to line up your life so that your circumstances, your personality type and your soul psychology are lined up. That's when you feel well integrated, all your parts move properly together. But also often people make their choices based upon the map of their circumstances and at best, the egostructure personal identity, which I'm not debasing by calling it your egostructure. That's who you are. You have a name, you got born on a particular day, you have a history all that's relevant, but without including your soul psychology as part of your choice making, where is your life going? And all too often, that's an invisible compass for people. And what I try to do is help people see that compass so that they can use it to find meaning and direction in their life, no matter what their circumstances turn out to be. Ten years from now, there's going to be new people in your life, movie circumstances that you can't imagine, but you still have the same fingerprints.

That's so fascinating. And this was one of my takeaways, too, from our session together, because I was sharing a little bit of our conversation with a friend of mine and he was like, yeah, and it's so cool how we have these different modalities and it's kind of like you can read the tea leaves with it. And I was like, well, the difference, in my opinion, is that tea leaves, reading tea leaves is so open to interpretation. And when the session with you, it was very like, you explain, you go into the length of your fingerprints, of your fingers and how they are rounded or not, or you've got like this line is straight instead of curving upward. There were fixed data points that are unique to different people and they signify different things. And it's all and with your level of experience, you've done this a gazillion times. So it's it's like, predictable, you know, it's and with tea leaves, not to say that that's not its own art with its own validity, but it's also, in my opinion, more open to interpretation because it's very fluid. It's going to change from time to time. The handprints, like you mentioned, they are what they are. And so that, I think, is just fascinating that you can get that from those images.

There's a certain leap of faith required to use tea leaf reading as if how you arrange the tea leaves somehow is connected cosmically to all levels. By the way, that's a leap of faith that I have made at this point in my life. I've played around with I've actually read somebody's tea leaps once. Just I was at a I'm remembering this now. I haven't thought about it for a long time. I was at a White Thai Museum of Modern Art, thousands of dollars per plate fundraiser, and as part of the entertainment, there were a group of, let's call them psychics, okay? And I was hired at, like, $0.01 an hour or something, reading for all these billionaires who were doing speeches and congratulating themselves for raising money, which is a fine thing to be doing. So during all the speeches, myself, the tower reader, the tea leaf reader, et cetera, we were just doing readings for each other. And I have a database that I use. I mean, I moved to California in the early 1980s to start a school. We have a three year training program to be an advanced hand reader. There's a skill set required to do this. There's things to know. There's an alphabet in there. You can just make stuff up. Most hand readers just kind of close their eyes and make stuff up, and some people are good at that. Anyway, at the event, I did a hand reading for the tea leaf reader, and she turned the teacup around for me and asked me to do a reading for her based upon the teacup. And before I can tell her that I didn't feel like doing that, why should I argue that I can't? So I did a reading that way, and it turned out just fine. And there's been times that I was doing readings and the lights went out in the house or something, and okay, let's just go impressionistic the rest of the way. And let me just say that this is subjective impressions. Or in a reading, if I'm reading for you, I easily can have a picture show up in my mind from a movie, a song, a remembrance from 27 years ago at the grocery store that I haven't thought of. Who knows what pops into my brain during a reading, but what I tell my students, let your psychic self be part of your reading. That's perfectly fine. But if you're doing that, it's your job to tell the reader that that's what you're doing. In your case, your ring finger looks like this. The middle section of your ring finger is configured this way, and the interpretation in hand analysis world is as follows the picture in my mind's eye that I can't seem to get rid of is this. Let me share that with you, and maybe you and I can have a discussion about that. So if you're studying at the Institute of Hand Analysis, and if you do your readings and you conflate your imagination with what the Hands are saying. You're not passing the exams in Palmistry class because you're making stuff up. But if you're making stuff up and sharing that, that's what you're doing, that's perfectly fine. The two of you can have a great discussion. And a lot of times the stuff that's made up is incredibly prescient and useful in ways that, me as the reader, I couldn't know, why am I thinking about that car that I once owned? And I hadn't thought of that in 40, but there it is. I'm not going to discard it. I'll put it into the reading. But again, it's my job to declare it as such.

Yeah.

Compare it to the database that the hand presents.

Right. I love that. I really appreciate that, too, because even in casual conversations with people, a lot of times I will offer some things to do with consciousness, with what they're going to try to put a different lens on what they're going through from a consciousness perspective. And a lot of times the response back is, yeah, but why? And that's where I have to be like, okay, I can hypothesize. I can tell you what kind of comes up for me. I don't know if this is accurate. I've told you what I have to tell you in terms of possibilities, but as far as your specific case and why it's happening for you, maybe it's a life contract thing, maybe it's whatever, but I try to always be clear about what's conjecture versus just how things are, and so I really appreciate that.

So I think we have life contracts. I believe that. What if I'm wrong? It doesn't even matter. It says if you have a life contract, Bob or Mary, and the life contract says this, and when you stay within the contract, you like, what's going on? And when you step outside the contract, the particular type of difficulty emerges. So even if there is no such thing as life contracts, it's as if there is, because your life seems to be following that pattern, is it not?

Yeah, that's a great point. Yes.

Well, somebody was just talking to oh, excuse me.

No, please.

Somebody was just talking to me the other day about the work of Carolyn Mace. Are you familiar with Carolyn Mace?

No.

You might want to Google her at some point.

Okay.

She's not as famous as she was 20 years ago, by the way, some of my younger students don't know who Oprah is. They've never heard. It's not that they like or don't like her. They've not heard of her. How old are you, Kara?

Oh, my goodness. I'm 44. I know.

Older. I know how old you are.

Yeah, well, my daughter, just yesterday I asked her if she knew what a Walkman was, and she had no idea what I was talking about. And I didn't know how to explain it to her because she doesn't know what a cassette tape is and oh, my goodness. But people don't know Oprah. Wow.

It's not that they don't know Oprah. They've never heard of Oprah.

Right? Yeah.

Think about that.

Yes.

Okay.

Different times.

Yeah. So in any event, I'm mentioning Carolyn Mace, who did incredible work and has a blurb on the back of my first book, Life Prints. And so somebody was saying they were looking at my book, and they turned it over. Carolyn Mace, I took her seminar, this and I read her book that and her work is about archives. That's central to her work. That's unfair to describe her work in just a phrasing. And you read her material, you attend her seminars, you get a session from her, and she says you're the Priestess archetype, or whatever, and then tells you the implication. It says, if you have a contract in this lifetime and the nature of your existence includes the following themes and the best way to play is as follows and the way to not play well, looks like this. And that's really interesting. And I've had any number of students be students of mine and Mace's at the same time and talk about how the handshaped archives and the archetypes as described in Mace's work link up together. But in that system, similar to the Inagram, you're familiar, probably, with inneagram. Not everybody knows about the not everybody knows about the Inagram. But nonetheless, in those systems, you decide which archetype you are. You learn about the different archives and you say, The Priestess, that's me.

Okay.

In the anagram. You go, oh, yeah. I'm the seven. I'm the eight, whatever. With a two wing or something like this. That's fine. Hands, you don't do that. The hands are printed out.

Yes.

You don't have to like your reading. You don't have to accept your reading. You could disagree with what you want. You said, I've done this a lot. I've read over 60,000 pair of hands.

Wow.

Think about that for a little bit. 60,000 pair of hands over all these decades, and this is what I do every day. So your hands say that to me. This is objective, factualities. It's your job to put it to your own test. It's your job to examine yourself and to consider whether or not I guess I do do that, don't I? Or sometimes I'm reading and the couple is present, and I'm reading for person A, and person B is the observer. It could be a best friend. It could be a life partner or something. And the person goes, Hold a second. I'm not sure that that's me. And the person sitting there is going, oh, yeah. So the person I'm reading for is not always the best arbiter of what is. So but I'm just a hand reader. I could also be wrong. And the idea would be to observe and to take your reading and then carry it with you over the next five or ten days. And put it to the test, see what you notice. I could be sitting on your shoulder like a three inch figurine and I'll ring a bell every time I see that going on in your life. You can catch the bell ringing in your case when you are searching for truth and you just want to bring the world by its lapels to some important truth that the world needs to hear about. How many thoughts per day of that type do you have? How many dreams per night of that type do you have? I submit that your neurons are just loaded with that type of content.

Yeah, absolutely. It's so fascinating and it's interesting how it plays out in the fact that we have life journeys and we can have a lot of twists and turns. And when I had my reading with you, not immediately, but as we were going on it, I started to remember a couple of numerology readings that I've had in the past. And I think I had them both done by the same person, but years apart. And one of them was like, when I was in corporate America and I was, like, very mainstream, like motherhood career, just fast paced life. And I had my first session with this numerologist again, going off of birth dates. So very fixed information, just like a handprint in that those don't change. I have the date and time that I was born and it just is what it is. And she was describing my life's purpose from the numbers perspective and I could get a sense of what she was saying, but I was attracted to what she was saying but it wasn't really reflected in the way I was living my life. So it was a little bit confusing because she was talking about spiritual teacher, for instance and that was like, well, I would be happy to, but I have no authority for that. It was so not applicable. I mean, I was in It sales, it was a far cry. And then I met with her again years later and by this time I was starting to teach meditation and my life was going in a more spiritual direction and I had the podcast, so things that she was saying again, it was like the same numbers, same reading, but it was like my life prism had changed. I was looking through the prism and having a new kind of reflection. But my life prints reading with you was very consistent with what I remember from the numerology and this was probably back in 2019 or something that I had that done. So I'm going off of my memory but it's like there were a lot of things that matched up. So that fascinates me too because it's these two different data points, but fixed data points for this life.

So take a look at this. So you have a handshape and various law information in your set of fingerprints and that gives me the basis to do my reading. But the type of person that you are in the right path for you is not mainstream in North American culture. In effect, you're anticultural. And when I say that, let's say that you had a hand that was more business idea, business savvy. Okay? I'm not saying that you couldn't mainstream yourself in corporate America. I mean, I left corporate America to be doing this over 50 years ago, and I was fine in corporate America. I was doing well, and I was meeting interesting people, making a living, supporting my family, moving up the corporate chain like that. But something big was missing for me there. Not that things were bad there, but something big was missing.

You are singing my song, Richard. Yes.

Here, here. Well, both of us are anticultural. If we were built differently, you could have had a more rectangular hand. You could have had flat sides to your hand. You didn't need to have extended blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You didn't need to have that. But no, your design is for a particular type of way of being in the world. And read, write, teach, learn, bring to the attention of others what you have learned and awaken people. That all suits you. As my boss used to tell me, I was a financial planner. That's the job I quit to do this full time and again. I was good at that. I mean, I studied, I learned. I worked with clients. I had a few hundred clients. Blah, blah, blah. As my boss would tell me repeatedly, hunger. We didn't hire you to help people. That's not what we do here. We have products and services. They buy our products and services. We make a profit. We pay you. What's all this helping people's stuff? That is funny.

Focus, Richard. Come on.

By the way, I was living in Texas at the time, and I had to overcome my New York City accent when I moved to Texas. That was my biggest obstacle point. And people looked at me like, how can we believe somebody like you? You don't sound right. I had never faced that type of discrimination. I had faced other discriminations. New York, where I grew up, was ethnically separated into different neighborhoods, and you took one step into a different neighborhood, you can get your bicycle stolen, and you can get beaten up. So that was a different thing. But here I'm just talking, and people would look a certain way. So in any event, I found my way into a comfortable career. When I say comfortable, something I could be good at and earn a living and help people all at the same time. But it was weird. I mean, as weird as being a hand breeder is, it's not like, on the list of possible occupations, you're graduating high school, let's see, doctor, lawyer, handle it's not on that list. And it's something that would have to be invented rather than chosen in the way that you choose to be an engineer or something. My boss, who is as straight laced Texas Republican as you could possibly be, and I'm in my 20s, he's in his 50s. He looks like he would walk out of the shower and his hair is already combed before he leaves the shower. It's like every part of him is exactly a certainty. I'm sure he wears a jacket well, he'd be 100 now, but I'm sure he wore a jacket and tie to breakfast every morning. Because my image of, oh, no, I hope that I don't become that. But nonetheless, he had me sitting in on all his job interviews, and he was good at it. That's how we got to be the boss. He was good at what he did. And we would just compare notes and he would be just getting a feel for the person. He'd ask his list of questions, and his sense was this, and if we're going to hire that person, we put in a lot of investment time into making that person fit in and succeed in our corporate culture here. We don't want to waste our time, nor is it good for the other person to get rid of them nine months into the program after we've invested our time, until they and I would look at their hands, because sooner or later, the person would start going like this during their interviews, and we would just compare notes. But he couldn't tell anybody he did that.

Yeah, I need to feel into the person and get a sense of their vibe.

You can't tell somebody that he didn't hire them because their thumb looks this way.

For thumb hand discrimination.

Thumb discrimination. But of course, I wouldn't say that you shouldn't tire this person because of their thumb. I'd say that that person is a self starter. You don't have to worry about their get up early, stay up late, get the job done. If they falter, it's because of who knows what. But it's not that with the other person. I'm saying they're going to need somebody to poke at them because they're more inertial once they sit still. They don't get moving on their own.

So you could tell that even in the interview just by them kind of using at a glance wow. Just by the shape. Because you're looking not just at the prints, not just like the fingerprints and the lines. You're looking at the shape. You're looking at the length, the proportions and the lines.

If you lift your hand prints on a Mayan cave 1000 years ago, if you left your handprints on a French cave 38,000 years ago, they're handprints handprints all over these ancient caves, different caves, different type of hand prints. This is a group of artist type people who left their handprints. This is a group of shaman, spiritual type of people who left their handprints. There's a. Group of type A get the job done. I'm going to be the top of the heap type of people who left there. But what I don't know, and I can tell that from the handshake alone, so I have about 120 handshapes that I have nicknames for that represent different personality architects. You have a philosopher type, you have a subset of the philosopher hand. And the philosophers like to learn, they like to teach, they like to understand the deeper meanings and how it pertains to the larger meaning of life. And you and others with your handshape are like that. But what I wouldn't know from your handprint on a cave was the context of your life. What if you were born into royalty and you were living this way, not that way. What if you're born into slavery and you're working the salt mines? Who knows what? I just have your handprints. I know what you could be up to, all things being equal, but all things aren't equal. But I can tell you, that the philosopher archetype, that's the family that you belong in. In my jargon, that's not your fingerprints, that's your handshape. Books from the early 18 hundreds have the philosopher type listed as one of the major archetypes. Handwriting is demarcated into ancient palmistry, if you will, and modern palmistry. And the demarcation is the early 18 hundreds. And authors in France in the early to mid 18 hundreds designated different handshape archives and other things, line formations, blah, blah, blah. But that's the first formal writing in the Western world that designated those handshape archives. And the researchers were very thorough and did a good job. And the philosopher type was one of the seven major archives. The only way that could have happened was if the person writing that book had read hundreds of people with that handshape and had a sample size large enough to go into the immense detail that that author did as well as the author did for other archives as well, which turned out 200 years later to be kind of accurate. Minus the well, the people from this country or this religion are the inferior version of these archives, and therefore you have to treat them differently because they're not like the elevated people from the country that I come from or from the religion that I belong. There's so much of that type casting of people, not that that's disappeared completely from the planet, but it's more blatant from a couple of hundred years ago, but nonetheless, your family of archives was more prevalent. This is the conclusion I've come to the other archetypes from those writings from 200 years ago, those hand shapes have morphed into slightly different archetypes. I could still see the wisdom of that system put together hundreds of years ago, but it's not completely relevant. Your handshape type in personality type and attributes matches the exact descriptions, but there's hardly any of you around. Your type is not replicating. Well, so you're a leftover, you're a remnant.

I'm a relic.

You're a relic. You're a dinosaur.

I love that. That's awesome.

And there's not enough jobs for your archetype for the number of is. You know, one in 150 has a hand like yours, and you're a subset of the philosopher type, which makes you even more statistically, less likely. But let's just stick with the philosopher type. It's less than 1% of the people have that handshape, even if in the ancient writings, it was a much higher percentage. But even at less than 1%, there are not enough jobs to keep your archetype employed. So that's what I mean when I say you're anticultural. You'll have to figure out your own job. You'll have to invent your own place, professor studying ancient traditions from Mesopotamia. People with hands like yours do stuff like that. But there's how many of those? There's hundreds of those jobs in our $330,000,000 330,000,000 people country, and there's only hundreds of those jobs. You basically have to invent your own.

Yeah.

And that's enough to be overwhelmingly defeating for many of those with your archive. My archetype also is underrepresented in terms of preexisting niches in the culture. I have to forge my own niche in a culture that it doesn't so much throw me in the dungeon and hang me upside down by my thumbs. It doesn't so much do that as just kind of marginalized and doesn't want to deal with me, basically.

Yeah.

And I read for a lot of people who are anticultural, and it's overwhelming. You could be ADHD, you could be OCD. They list your symptomology in the psychology manual, and then the teachers in school are trained to spot that, and they have special program. But what about being a different type who doesn't have a preexisting niche in our culture? What most people do is they adjust themselves to fit into the culture. It's just much easier that way. And then they live lives of silent desperation, and they come in for readings with me, and they're now 30, 40, 50, and they still haven't found their place, and it's more painful. It was one thing when they were 18 years old, 21 years old, 25 years old, looking for a place that they can feel like they belong. And that's one thing. Everybody else is kind of looking for their place as well. But they're 35, 45, 50, and the same problem is there. In effect, the problem is it has nothing to do with them. The problem is they're anticultural. Can I tell you a story?

Yes, please.

So I worked in Zurich for 29 years, two months a year in Zurich, and I stopped doing that just a couple of years before COVID hit. The travel was just getting too difficult for me. And my wife used to travel with me because she taught classes and hands. Also. She had her own students, her own lectures, and it became too hard for her to travel as well. And then there was a way, so it was too hard to do. But while I was out there, I worked at two separate clinics and I would read for children whose behavior was problematic enough to get them into the clinic.

Oh, wow.

And I might have read the hands of the mom or dad so that I was trusted enough to be consulted. The head physician at the clinic who were also a psychiatrist, so they have MD and psychiatry backgrounds, plus they were students of mine. They had learned this system. That's why I'm being called in to look at little Johnny, who from the time he was months old, his body would break out in rashes. And then by three, he was throwing things and was a problem in the family and nobody could figure out what's wrong with him. I mean, these are skilled people and that's their expertise working with. I'll call them problem children just because we don't have a good phrasing for it. Kids with problems. And I'm looking at their hands and two thirds of the time, three quarters of the time, I found nothing wrong with their hands. I mean, when people are really disturbed and broken, their hands look broken. Instead of lines where I could see the map, it's like a mirror was slammed to the ground and the lines are like jagged and not where they belong. And the basic equipment is broken in some way that I wonder what that would be like. I'll have to try to track things down. But most of the kids I was looking at, their hands were perfectly fine. Nothing was wrong with them. But they were anticultural for the family in which they lived. They were with everybody was policemen or firemen, and they were poetists, everybody was artists and they were corporate. Everybody was bankers in a Zurich family, and they were theater people type. They were just anticultural. And their family was trying to raise them right, to be the right type of person so that everything would be okay. And how is a kid supposed to say, I don't fit your format mom? I don't fit your format dad?

Yeah, I think that's hard even for adults. You know, there are a lot of adults who have to continue to rectify the fact that they they're either living their lives to please their parents as adults or they went another direction. But there's some trauma there from feeling that they're not accepted by their parents who mean so much to them.

It could be their deceased parents. They're still living the imagery out, and that might be fine for their older, younger sibling for whom their hand looks like their mommy or daddy's hand looked. And that type of lifestyle, assuming that mommy and daddy were actually living according to their handshape, et cetera, that might fit them, but it doesn't fit young Johnny or Mary over here. Yeah, and that should be to me, that should be AC, anticultural. And the problem isn't them, the problem is the culture trying to provide square pegs for their roundness.

Yeah, I completely sympathize with that because I went to university and I remember being in university where it was exploding. This was the they didn't have enough people for all the It jobs. And so it was like, oh, you want to have a bunch of offers when you graduate? Go It. And I was like, oh, that sounds easy, let's do that. That's like a path of least resistance. I really want to graduate and just be set and not have to worry about I mean, I was much more drawn to the humanities, but for me that was fun, so it wasn't how I was going to make a living. And I also didn't want to go to school forever. So going into something like psychology or whatever, I knew I'd be like, in academia for a lot longer and I wanted to become a grown up and be on my own and whatever. Yes. Right.

Not only a paycheck, a nice paycheck.

Yes. So I was like, oh, okay. Somebody pointed me in the direction of Easy and I was like, yes, I'll do that. But I had no interest in it, no passion for it. But I enjoyed math, and there was a math element to it. There was a rational, logical part.

And you're smart, a certain type of smart that allowed you to enter that world.

Thank you.

I could see by looking you have good ideas and you can work within the realm of ideas quite well and you can put things together nicely. And it was where the money was.

Yeah. And I had seven offers when I graduated from college, and so it was like, yeah, okay, I'll just take my pick of what I want to do. And then I ended up in a career for like, 1415 years. That was like, it was just like, what you're talking about when I said, you're singing my song? Because it provided for me and ultimately for my family, and it had some great opportunities, but it was not ringing my bell by any stretch of the imagination. It wasn't making me feel fulfilled by any stretch of the imagination, but I didn't value that, where I was within the culture and so forth, it was like, no, purpose is not the same as career and so forth.

Yeah, I hear you. Can I take a different tack for a moment?

Yeah, please.

Because you're talking it talks. Something that's been happening the last few weeks. Really? You're familiar with the new AI program that a lot of people are talking about? I was going to say everybody, but not everybody. A lot of people are talking about I assume that Chat GPT is not like I'm not saying something brand new to you, I'm guessing.

No, I'm with you.

So I've had some meetings. This absolutely fascinates me. So in my book, Life Prints, I have a 20 page appendix that I wrote late ninety s. And it's about the history of fingerprint research in the medical community and in the palmistic community, and how they are the same indifferent, and how they wind up over here. And it's a detailed article with like, 20 footnotes blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, charts and everything. And my conclusion, by the way, there's thousands of articles in medical textbooks. There's more material about what fingerprints mean about the person in medical textbooks than palmistry books.

Wow.

Thousands of articles.

Really?

Books written about schizophrenia and fingerprints.

No kidding.

Not articles, books. Wow. Yeah. And I made my discoveries about fingerprints in the medical libraries, not in palmistry books. I was reading medical libraries and overlaying the medical literature, but the palmistic literature, that I realized that there was a map in there from prior to birth that can be interpreted a certain way. None of the medical researchers realized that because they dismissed palmistry as silly superstition done by those people. And none of the palmists have read any of the medical literature because those are the enemy who look down on us.

Yeah.

So am I the only person who's read the complete palmistic literature and everything written in the medical books about fingerprint? Yes, I am the only person who's read all that. Why aren't there, like, tons of people who've read all that? Anyway, I did. Anyway, so I concluded that appendix was saying, the big shame and the reason it's not done well, by the way, in Indiana, you can study fingerprints at, I think it's Indiana State University no kidding. Is a graduate course for fingerprint analysis by Dr. So and So, whatever his name is. I can't recall at the moment. And again, fingerprint analysis is not alien to the medical universe. It's just not particularly well known. There's a problem, I concluded, and the problem is the information is not correlated. So, for instance, my wife has diabetes, one, and I've been living with the consequences of diabetes. I've learned more about that disease than I ever wanted to know over the last 40 years. And at the time, there were like 33 articles and medical books and medical journals, the AMA journal, blah, blah, blah, about diabetes, one. Here's a study of 400 people and looking at the atd angles of the lines of the palm. And here's another study comparing the number of loops and whirls on these fingers with diabetes, one. And then the sample size, the control group, blah, blah, blah, blah. So there's over 30 articles with charts, graphs, numbers, et cetera, like this. If I'm a doctor and I want to make use of that data, I have to read all those 30 articles myself. I have to sort by the way, this is not easy reading. I have to sort through it. I have to take the mean between the outlier numbers from this study and that study and look at what the studies overlap each other and then decide whether I want to use some of the same criteria to take a look at what's going on with this patient, to get extra information about they're prone to this condition or that. So maybe I should do a test. If I see these symptoms, Bob, I have to do all that myself. Too much work. I'm not going to. So it's a tool that's investigated by the scientific medical community but has been largely under deployed. And when fingerprint researchers they call it Domatoglyphics, not Palmasphere or anything. When Domatoglyphic researchers get together they complain why isn't our field thriving more? Well, it's because the information had not been correlated. The information is now correlated AI correlates it. So I was talking to a student of mine who studied with me a dozen years ago in Zurich, by the way, and who I'm still in touch with and he's done other research, blah blah blah but he's into all this tech stuff more than I am. And so he was telling me some of the things he found out by using that program and I said, Let me do some trials with you. He said sure. And we're doing a zoom call. He said, Tell me the question. I'll type it in. Correlate the data for fingerprints. How many worlds, loops and arches with diabetes? One finger per finger. Great. It came streaming out.

You're kidding me. Oh my God.

I said, oh, what about atd angles? It came streaming out.

Wow. And it was accurate?

Yeah.

Wow, that's fantastic.

And more readable than reading the medical because the language was more like non technical readable and I didn't have to wait for and then it came out. No, it came streaming out. So apparently that program can look at the 35 article, whatever. Maybe there's 40 articles, 50 articles by now. I didn't look since 2007. Who knows how many other articles come out about diabetes? Apparently could read all those instantly and synthesize the data and then print out what it all says. And I'm not saying I should do a medical diagnostic based upon that, but I could read that and maybe I could use that. Remember that's what was wrong. That was what was holding back the demotoglyphic profession from taking off. And by the way, that's not just my own conclusion. That's what the Dematoglyphysis was saying. You know, if we could just get this correlated then look at all the uses that we can have. All we need is a few million dollars to hire 20 people to sit down and correlate all this stuff and we can pay them. They have to be smart enough to read it, to correlate it and it'll take them five years and then we would have a database that we can all use. This was the 1990s, right? We don't need 20 people five years right. I have another meeting tomorrow. Tomorrow a couple of days. I have another meeting. We're talking more about some of the potential uses that we could think of for this program. I was trying to get a research grant 25 years ago with this doctor here and that mathematician there for research into breast cancer. You probably don't know about the research into in the 1990s on breast cancer and fingerprints. No, I do. Some of the researchers concluded that the fingerprint exam was more accurate than a mammogram in terms of future possibilities of breast cancer.

Wow.

So is that a full diagnostic? No, but if it's more accurate than a mammogram with no radiation and, you know, I don't get mammograms, but my wife has got she doesn't like getting a mammogram.

Right.

She very much doesn't like it. And if there was a non invasive, almost free version, if you have this, you should definitely get a mammogram. And if you don't, maybe 18 months apart, 24 months apart instead of twelve, whatever. That's just one immediate use off the top of my head.

Wow. That's mind blowing.

It's mind blowing.

I mean, I didn't even know that you could have physical disease or potentialities that can be that are shown in your hands.

Autism is perhaps the most studied condition. Schizophrenia may be more, but schizophrenia is a whole realm over here. But autism is my daughter is a high school teacher working with kids on the spectrum to oversimplify things. And I know I can look at hands and know things that are useful for teachers based upon the information in their hands. And it's not like a full pediatricians were told as far back as the look for this and that in hands, and that would signify potential trouble with your kids, learning issues, blah, blah, blah. So that's been around in the medical world for 75 years already, but the information has not been correlated, and therefore it's of lesser use.

Wow.

But now now it is easily correlatable. And I have work, but my work has been anecdotal. I can't publish anything. I don't have hundreds of studies, and I don't have control groups, et cetera. But I can look at kids I know what I'm looking at in their hamprint, and people are bringing the hamprints to me and telling me that the child is autistic or on the spectrum or something like this. And I'm seeing what the hands are saying, and I'm also seeing a profile of their particular version of this and also an entry point. Here's a person who is perfectly fine this way and not so fine that way. And if I was just babysitting, if I were just with this kid for a day and I know what's on this handprint and he's hard to be with, for most people, I would try to get through the front door this way. Based upon this, this and this in his hand, how useful could that be.

Yeah, completely.

I'll get off my soapbox in a second. There's so many other things in the hands, and the kids don't have to be on the spectrum for me to see that they have a particular learning style that is anticultural for our school system. That doesn't mean the school system is wrong. So much this for millions of kids. They don't have room to set up 27 different sub programs this way and that way. But if a kid has this, they shouldn't be in regular classes doing that. They're super bright, but they're not going to show bright unless they're in a circumstance that looks like this. Mostly I'm looking at people in their sixty s, fifty s, et cetera, who are trained in schools the exact wrong way for the way they learn. They're brilliant, potentially. They have exceptional learning skills, but only in a particular format. And without that format, their brain basically shuts down. There's no room for me, and they sludge out. This is criminal.

Yeah. Wow. It's so fascinating. Do you see if you were to look in a crystal ball, do you think that there were some tea leaves, perhaps? He leaves. Yes. I can see the potential for life prints to just go, gangbusters. Are there a lot of practitioners? Is it growing? Because I know that you're teaching. You've been teaching for years.

Okay, so I love that question, and I sit on that pencil point there's so many times. I thought that was the breakthrough moment. You're just barely old enough to know who Johnny Carson is.

Yeah, I know him. Yeah, right.

So some famous actress read his hands for like, five minutes on a Johnny Carson show, and I said to myself, that's the breakthrough moment, because it was on Johnny Carson. An article appeared in Time magazine about fingerprints and homosexuality. An article appeared in Nature magazine that's the scientific journal about the different lengths of the fingers, the index and the ring fingers. And there's stuff all over YouTube about different lengths of fingers and the scientific research into the different neurotransmitters and different amounts in the developing fetal organism. Blah, blah, blah, like this. I thought each of these different things were going to be breakthrough elements. The dam would break, the 100th monkey would sing, and hands would reach the fringe. At least the fringe. Maybe I could see hands getting to the fringe of our culture. And each of these times, my hopes have been dashed. So do I get to see hands not even inside the mainstream of the Western world do I see it. Like, at least get to the fringe. I remember when my mom, Restraul, got acupuncture. I mean, she was as like, straight down the road American as you can be. And her son is a hand reader. How weird is that? Oh, my God, et cetera, et cetera. But she had arthritis. It hurt. Some of her friends had acupuncture done, and it worked better than any of the drugs she was taking to ease her pain. She got acupuncture. My point is that acupuncture made it to the fringe enough for my mom to avail herself of it despite her. This is all voodoo nonsense. But if it makes me hurt less, that'll be fine. Thank you.

Yeah.

Can Palmistry ever get there? It will get there. Of course it will get there. Because why? Because it works and therefore it will get there.

Yeah.

It's not pie in the sky. It's real. Well, I see it. I do not know.

Well, for the people that you train, I know that you do in person training, but I can't remember now. Are you also doing online? How easy is it for people to get trained?

Well, it's not easy to get trained by me anymore, but it's easy to get trained by people I trained. Okay, so people can just Google my name and hand analysis. Richard hunger hand analysis. They'll wind up at my website, which is Hand analysis. Net. There's a list of things that they can do. What I've been doing the last few years is especially during the pandemic where I kind of hunkered into my home space like so many other people did. My field has been hampered by the absence of a textbook. There is no textbook in my field until I wrote one. And this is learnable. You could learn the alphabet of this, but it's not just one weekend. It's not like you study for a weekend. You take a workshop and now you're good at it like anybody else, in your opinion, counts as much as the next guy. Like an enigram workshop or something. There are people who are experts, but in a day you're playing in enneagram land. No, you have to learn something. And that's a turn off to a lot of people in this instant gratification time that we live in. On the other hand, for other people who are more like you, for instance, learning, you mean I'd have to study, I'd have to read, I'd have to learn something, I'd have to practice, I'd have to make mistakes, get corrected and get better over time? That's a turn on for a small group of people, people who actually have books in their house and take time to read a book. So hand analysis is like that. Even the good Palmistry books, there's only 400 plus Palmistry books in the English language, of which I've read them all. Even the good ones, of which there's maybe a dozen. They're no more than a dictionary. It would be like trying to learn Croatian from a dictionary. Imagine that you had a Croatian dictionary and you wind up in Croatia. Do you think you're going to be able to have a conversation with somebody?

No.

If you memorized every single vocabulary word, do you think you can have? And what does it mean? That somebody is really bad when they dance? Does that mean they're good?

Yeah, right.

Not so good. You have to know culture. There's a million things you have to know besides the translation of the word bad. There's context, which is blah, blah, blah. There's a lot of things to learn, but I have taken my training courses, a three year training course. I've taken the first two years and created training manuals for those two years of study. It took me seven years of basically full time work to write that first training manual, because it's one thing to teach in a classroom, which I've been doing forever, and you can ask questions. I could look over your shoulder. We can work in small groups. I have a grad assistant helping you. No, we wouldn't use the headlines curve this way on this hand, because look at the fingers. The fingers have this and that. You don't use it in this context. You use it this way. But what about this? What about my sister? Who that? That's a good question. In a classroom, you can have all that, but in a textbook, the textbook has to anticipate that, address that, and yet not be a million pages. Yes, I love that challenge. And again, my field, there's hardly any hand readers, because you either find a teacher like me, my wife, and a few other people who could do it, and then you study with them, or you read one of the palm of few books. It's interesting, but you find you can't really use it.

Yeah. There's not enough content. Yes.

Which is okay, but it's not this field. Well, now there is a textbook. I hope this year to finish the third year training in written form so that I have those three years of training, and you could read at home and learn on your own. Anybody's interested can just get in touch with me, and I'll be glad to tell them about this.

So I feel like if people are listening and they're drawn to what we're talking about first of all, I can't recommend a session with you highly enough. I mean, it was fascinating. I loved every minute of it. So if any of this is resonating with you, dear listener, please do get in touch with Richard. I'll have his links in the show notes. But is it lifeprint? No. Handprints is my first book, but it's Hand Analysis. Net.

That's my website. And people can just also they can just write me at Richard@lifeprints.com.

Okay.

And I'll write them back, and if they tell me what their interest is, I'll send them to Renell, who's teaching this course, or Jenna, who's teaching that course, or one of my books, or whatever, depending upon what their interest is.

Yeah, absolutely. And we did our session on Zoom, so it's not location dependent.

I'm doing all my sessions on Zoom now.

Yeah, it's so cool. For my experience. I contacted you. I paid for it. You sent me this. Kit. So I got in the mail, like, some ink print things, and then I just did. I followed the instructions, I emailed you my prints, and then we had the zoom session, which was fantastic.

1 second. You read the instructions?

I did.

People don't read the instructions. Here's how to take your print properly. People don't read them?

Yeah, I read them and I tried my darndest to keep my cat from walking on the ink, which was a challenge too. So I had a lot of fun. But the other point that I'm getting from this is that if there's a part of you who's listening where it's like, wow, this sounds like a super interesting field. There's not a lot of competition. So if you feel drawn to learning how to decipher handprints and help people connect with their life purpose, this could be a fantastic avenue for people who are wanting to do something who maybe got into it and it's not filling the gap. Maybe something like this where you're actually helping people to decipher their life purpose, is going to answer the call for you, or you need to answer the call.

Let's say that you're already a life coach.

Okay?

The fingerprint part, it takes longer to be able to have pattern recognition on the hand shapes and lines. That takes a lot of practice. But the fingerprints I can teach you the fingerprints in one day. The fingerprint system is easy enough by itself to learn in a single day. Imagine being able to add life purpose and life lessons to your work with people who are life coaching with you. I mean, you already know how to talk to people. You already know how to listen. One hopes you already know how to inspire and to assist people with whatever their difficulties may be. You already know how to be an ongoing support mechanism. Imagine if you also had a map to their life of deepest meaning. On the one hand, life coaches say, I don't want to do that. They tell me what their goal is, and I help them with their goal. They want to win Wimbledon. I'll look at their serve and see if I can help improve their service as a performance coach. Other coaches are more transformational, and they don't direct the person in any way. They just listen and connect and offer perspective. That's nice too. The hands have a map as to where the person's deepest meaning can be found. And I believe that especially the life coaching community needs to pay attention to the information enhanced because they're not serving their clients as well as those clients could be served because they don't know. Those life coaches do not know what the person's life purpose is. So somebody like you says, I want to be better at it, and the coach will help you be a better It person and make more money at it. How much would that have improved your life.

Well, yeah. It wouldn't have gotten to the bottom line. No.

It wouldn't have helped you be on the lookout for that, which would have brought you meaning. You don't tell the person that you must do this. That's not what a coach does. But you couldn't announce what is possible and put the person on alert to be on the lookout for clues that there is something perhaps over here. Pay attention when stuff like that is knocking on your door. And coaches that aren't doing that, I don't think, are serving their clients as well as they could be served.

That's a great point. Yeah. Wonderful. Well, this has been fascinating, Richard. Thank you so much. I really appreciate all your insight. And, again, I got so much out of our time together, and then again today. I've got so much out of this too. So thank you. Thank you for the service you're providing.

Let's start by changing Indiana, and then we'll graduate out to the rest of the world.

All right. I'm signed up for that. That sounds good. Great. Thanks.

Talking to you.

Yes, you too. Thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I'd love for you to do me one quick favor, which is to think of one person who would benefit from hearing this content. Let them know you're thinking of them by sharing this episode with them right now. Thank you. And I look forward to the next meditation conversation.