Why is relationship a topic of so much importance nowadays? Is it because, at the change of the millennium, we are living in such tumultuous times, with cultural conflicts, constant upheavals and extremes in almost every field drawn to the maximum? Is it because of the collapse of strict boundaries of long-held certainties so that everything is now relative, probable and temporary? If this is the case, then some measure of understanding, balance and togetherness through human contact and relationships among people at both personal levels and global dimensions seems imperative. Given this situation, relationships thereby become the central key in our present world.

Nowadays, we seem to be more aware than ever before that we live in a world of interrelationships, interconnections and interdependency. Even in the pure sciences, at the quantum level, it is known that the outcome and results of an experiment are conditioned or affected by the experimenter. Scientists are grappling with the questions regarding the 'mind' of the molecules forming our genes(1), and they are probing into the mysterious regions of the genome, which in turn influence our evolution as human beings. This subject was addressed long ago by Sri Aurobindo and also by his disciple Satprem, who wrote a book entitled "The Mind of the Cells". Sri Aurobindo believed that by conscious intention we can participate in the evolution of the human species. However, we are witnessing the results of injecting human genes into plants, and the cloning of sheep has proved to be successful. We are approaching the dangerous threshold of cloning human beings.

Notwithstanding the relevance and importance of these questions, I doubt if I shall be able to point to or deal with any one of them in a comprehensive and serious manner. However I have mentioned them because of their urgency and because they linger as unanswered questions in my mind, permeating the subject of this book.

Somehow I believe that each of us makes a difference in this world of ours. Therefore, attempting to address some of these questions remains a self-chosen, individual task, humble as it may be.

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Taking all this into consideration, the main question I find myself grappling with is what it really means to be human. Choice was, and still is, the unique prerogative of the human species. Are we using this prerogative wisely? Have we, at all, been free to choose? Or have we been too free in our choices?

Looking at our planet, this beautiful, green-blue globe seen from outer space and coming right into our homes via television, brings into focus the poignant discrepancy between this great, mysterious and beautiful orb and the artificially rigid boundaries of countries, the squalor of overpopulated cities, the violence in the streets, people beset by wars, hatred, anger, aggression and the like. It emphasizes to me how much we still appear to live only a fragment of our "humanness". Also how very few of us have started to become conscious of who we really are, what we are made of and how or why we function as we do. Yet, these questions have always occupied the minds of poets, philosophers, artists and scientists.

So what are we as human beings? Are we our impulses? Are we our actions, or our thoughts? Or are we our feelings, our intuitions or yearnings? Does everything exist solely in the mind or in the neurons? Are we of a spiritual nature, which some dismiss as nonsense yet others, today, crave for? Do we have an inherently spiritual nature or are we the unconscious children of a hidden realm that may be playing havoc with us - or perhaps both?

Since the quantum revolution, we have been talking about "being" as a mass of energies of a certain low magnitude that become so dense they materialize as a body that can be seen and touched. However, most of us cannot touch or see our feelings, sensations or thoughts with our material body, although we all know they exist and work within each of us. We have the physical body, which includes the five senses. We have our feeling-values, based on our early feeling judgments about ourselves, at times formed already in the embryonic state. We have our thought patterns, which control, direct and criticize our emotions, sensations and actions - sometimes to such a degree that we are completely at their mercy. We also have our so-called sixth sense, our intuitions which signal to us modes of knowing that at times are not compatible either with our thought forms or with our bodies, resulting in psychosomatic body reactions. Our feeling values, i.e., our judgmental reactions, can freeze our ability to be open to receive, understand or to take a stand concerning these messages. We may be harassed by unexplained fears that haunt us. Our thought patterns may criticize and negate any of these intuitions, thus depriving us of their function as helpers in our life.

From a very early stage in our life, we tend mostly to defend and even hide our vulnerabilities and, at times, our inner knowings and our intuitions. Paying no heed to them, however, may often turn them into anxieties, phobias, pathological tendencies or psychic and physical illnesses. More and more, we tend to correlate body organs with psychic states. Diagnosing the ailing organ and the associated remembered experience, may point to the part in the psyche that ails, hurts or has undergone a particular traumatic situation.

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I shall try to examine the subject of relationships and ways of relating from both psychological and psychochirological angles. Since the hand is a distinctly human prerogative, it shall be utilized as an inner map that directs us to understand better the complexity of our relationships - whether they are to ourselves, within ourselves, to others or to world around us.

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