PALMISTRY

Introduction
It looks simple. You glance at your palm and you see three major lines. At some point in your life you've probably heard of palmistry and wondered what those three lines meant, but then you thought, "Oh, it's just a bunch of baloney," and that was that.In fact, those three lines are just the beginning. Virtually everything about your hand reveals aspects of your personality and lif e: its shape, the type of its skin, the fingers, the way the hand combines with the fingers, the three major lines, and all the other little lines as well. To think all this time you've had a wealth of insight literally in the palm of your hand and at your fingertips, and you didn't know how to use it. Well, now you will!And by the way, it's not considered baloney anymore, either—nor should it ever have been. The art of palmistry began in the Stone Age— ancient cave paintings of hands are abundant, and the second-oldest manuscript known to man is a treatise on hand-reading. Through the years it has gained more and more scientific acceptance, particularly through the credibility of the famous psychologist Dr. Carl Jung, and recently received an enormous boost of legitimacy with a new scientific theory.According to this medical study, as reported in Time and Newsweek, the nerve endings in the hands are directly connected to the brain, as if the hand were itself a printout of the brain's circuitry. This was supported by the fact that people who have lost the nerve functions in their hands also lost their lines.By the same token, since people go through a lifetime's worth of subtle personality changes, so the hands too experience corresponding changes in their lines (always in response to the brain, never before it).Some skeptics still maintain that lines are merely reflective of hard work, scars, or physical tears—that sort of thing. Jung disproved this by examining the hands of newborns—even they have distinctive line patterns!What does all this mean? If the patterns on our hands merely reflect what's already happened, how can they possibly help us?Yes, the hands are like mirrors of our personalities. In some cases, they can help predict the future (as with the major lines, which we were born with), but they can also help us see ourselves better. We get into ruts, we forget what we're good at and what we're not good at, and by studying our hands, we can remind ourselves of our strengths, our best chances for happiness, and even our destiny.