It contains a questionnaire that gives 19 scenarios such as being wheelchair-bound, having severe pain and not being able to shake the blues. After each scenario the person would check "acceptable," "not worth living" or "can't answer now."

Critics claim that it encourages suicide and sends the message that a disabled veteran's life isn't worth the expense of medical treatment and therapy. Maybe it is sending the wrong message, but, in any case, it's a good idea to draw up a living will while you still can think clearly and to find an organization like the Twilight Brigade to assist in hospice care..

If I were to write a living will, I would want to put down in unambigous terms, that I don't want to become a vegetable, kept alive by machines and drugs and costing my family a fortune to maintain. However, if my mind and body are useless, but my soul is still aware and I don't require much care, then I would choose to be kept alive.

Some people would think that to keep a soul imprisoned in a crippled body and a semi-comatose mind is cruel. But I see it as an opportunity to balance karma through suffering. I have worked with developmentally disabled adults. With some of them, if you gaze into their eyes, you can feel their spirit and see the tremendous light that their souls have garnered from years of karma balancing. I believe that they have balanced all their karma and are now working on balancing planetary karma.

It could be that in some cases, before a person re-embodies, he or she chooses to ensoul a body that has birth defects or becomes crippled later in life in order to balance karma. For this reason, babies who have birth defects should not be aborted. When I was a liberal college student, I was a friend of Dottie, the Dean of Students secretary, who always seemed to be in pain and walked with a stoop. One day, before Roe vs. Wade, I asked if I could use her phone to call my congressman and voice my support for state legislation allowing abortion in the case of birth defects. When I got off the phone Dottie glared at me and told me that she had been born with spina bifida, and asked me if I thought it were better if she had never been born. I don't think I've ever been more ashamed of myself than in that moment.

Those who are in favor of abortion and euthanasia don't take into consideration karma. They feel that if a person will suffer if they are born or kept alive, then it's cruel. But whose life is it? Whose choice is it to live and suffer, or to die and have to come back and face the same suffering later? In the case of a baby, you can't ask the soul, unless you contact the soul through psychic means, if it wants to be born in a defective body. In the case of a disabled veteran, you can ask if he or she wants to live. But I think the questionnaire in Your Life and Your Choices should add one more question - "Do you want to balance karma through suffering and make your ascension in this lifetime?"