We have over 75 people offering you advice in this one magazine this issue – 75 editorial points of view for you. How could that be?

Well, it's like this. I had a burning desire to bring advice to everyone around the 2012 phenomenon. Yes, as most people know, 2012 is not just a year but rather a milestone of sorts. The Mayans predicted the end of something or other on supposedly 21st December. There's been much speculation. Some have even suggested disastrous consequences. However, while none of us knows completely, it seems pretty obvious that, where there is a death, there is always a birth. This is totally in line with Mother Earth's cycle – no escaping it – and it seems a bit like gravity to me in its inevitability. So, even if there were an ending of something, then it's not an ending.

For me, I'm convinced that we are not all going to suddenly 'wake up and find ourselves dead' because we don't all have lines on our palms indicating a sudden departure. Yes, I have seen many things come true from reading a palm in my past. Indeed it's what really got me into this spiritual stuff. I used to consider myself an atheist and I was taught palmistry by an old guy in the accounts department at work. Ben Jonson was fascinating, a direct descendent of THE Ben Jonson (look him up on Google – no time to expand here). He was Jewish, born in China, raised in India and had learnt palmistry from the servants there. I became quite adept at it (can't remember the finer details now – so don't ask) and, after seeing so many correspondences between what was written on the palm and what had occurred in a person's life, I realised that there must be some sort of grand plan.

One of the old dead dudes in the Old Testament also asked for God to show him his destiny in his hands – so I decided that maybe there was an intelligence behind our physical appearance. This was back in the 70s – I had many a free bottle of wine or dessert when a waiter saw me reading someone's palm over a dinner table. I'd find another palm stuck under the candle flame and an offering in the other hand.

Anyway that was then. Back to now – we'd all have a big break in our lines if something sudden were to happen to end our physical bodies, and this is not so. Hmmm... what could it be then?

Back to the over 75 people with advice and opinions – I was so wanting to bring you a gift from others this issue that I was pushing and pulling at my advertisers (as most of them are lovely people who have lined up to do 'light' work at this time) and yet they were not getting what I was wanting to bring you. I started writing an email to 9,000+ people to give them one final plea to do something and, as I was writing, I found that I was offering them to send in a dual contribution – editorial with their contact details and a little promotion as well – and I was removing the price barrier totally. I offered everyone to pay what they felt to pay. The result was overwhelming. In the end, four people took offence somehow with my approach or what I said, but there was a landslide of people who were so grateful and saw this as the sort of thing that has to happen if we are to move forward as a community in and beyond 2012.

You know, my little fear-based physical self wonders how that could possibly be, how could I find the $55,000 base line figure each month if it were just built on what people wanted to pay? How can any business survive that way? Is it just a sign that many of us in this niche are naïve about money, or even scared of it?

But then I look at all the 'Occupy' movements around the world, and hear the things they are exposing – about the greed at the top and the plight of the workers – and I wonder. Maybe there is a basis for paying what we think we should. Certainly communism has proven not to work, and certainly private enterprise works well when the person in the chair, the boss taking the risks, gets well rewarded. However, when the boss is exploitative, then it's no longer a humane system.

Gees ... many smarter brains than mine have tackled this issue with no resolution. I'd better stop while I can, but it does make me wonder if there is more than a haphazard coincidence in my deciding to throw this feature about the changes ahead open to people on a new payment basis. I certainly didn't set out to do that, although I had met Shakti Durga again at the Sydney Mind Body Spirit expo recently and was admiring her way of running her whole business, the Harmony Centre (see p.33), on donation. She told me that at first the donations didn't cover her needs, but gradually, as she changed her way of looking at it within herself, she found that they covered them very amply. At the time I found myself saying to her, "I wish I could run my business that way".

Suffice it to say that I am trialling the idea again in the next issue, which is our double month one, Jan/Feb. Next time the topic builds on this one, and focuses it a tad more – please see page 28 for details.

There are so many other people in this issue that are talking about 2012 and the changes to come – you'll find people directly speaking about this on pages 10, 11, 17-19, 28-31 and 37-38. I'll leave you to explore.

With love