Bill Douglas, Visionary Author

Inner Child (IC): Bill, besides founding World Tai Chi Day, and the World Healing Day events, you are also an award winning author of both fiction and non-fiction. I know your first novel hit the top ten lists for “visionary-fiction” on amazon.com in the US, UK, Canada, and Germany. What other recognition has your writing gotten?

Bill Douglas (BD): Yes, my first non-fiction book was my tai chi and qigong book, which was called visionary by top tai chi masters.

But, it was my first novel that was chosen Best Fiction of 2010 by Spiritual Enlightenment Magazine, although years before I been the United States Award winner of the AOL/Chicken Soup for the Soul Global Essay Contest.

IC: That was “2012 The Awakening,” which Deepak Chopra had referred to as “A gift,” is that correct?

BD: Yes, he did. And TIME Magazine Woman of the Year, Coleen Rowley, had called it “visionary.”

IC: And your newest novel, “A Conspiracy of Spirits – Wall Street vs. The 99%” has had some heady acclaim as well. Pulitzer nominee, David W. Menefee, wrote in his review of it, “Bill Douglas is one of the most remarkable writers of our generation … on a par with Charles Dickens.”

BD: Yeah, me and Angela were dancing around the living room when we read that one.

IC: Some have said that your novel’s have a prophetic quality, foreseeing some of the current happenings in the planet years before they occurred. Can you explain what that means?

BD: Yes, my “2012 The Awakening” novel described a global awakening spreading across the planet where by individuals would have their own personal shift that would translate into mass societal and global change.

Realize I wrote this book 5 years before the Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street movements went global. I had just published that novel and gotten the Best Fiction of the Year award for it, when I had to go to Canada for medical therapy. I was holed up in a high-rise condo in Vancouver in the winter, and had nothing to do but watch TV, as the Arab Spring erupted in Tunisia and then across Egypt and North Africa. One of my readers contacted me, and said, “Bill, your novel’s coming true!”

Then when the We Are The 99% movement spread across America, I too was stunned with how closely my novel pre-viewed what was coming.

IC: Is it true that in your coming autobiography, “A Call to Duty – Miracles DO Happen,” you talk about your Scottish heritage, and ability for prescient thought, or glimpsing the future?

BD: Yes, writing my autobiography helped me understand what I’d been doing over the last years with my fiction writing, as it had given me a chance to evoke visions of the future that had been coming to me.

I’d traveled to Scotland, our family’s homeland, years before and seen an article from a British newspaper posted on the wall at the National Library in Edinburgh, that had been printed

hundreds of year before. It reported that a British expedition was forming to travel to Scotland and to study the Scot’s purported ability for prescient thought, or their ability to see the future.

Scots believe in what’s called “the second sight,” defined as the involuntary ability to glimpse the future, and they believe this skill is most prevalent among Highland Scots.

A sister had been urging me for years to get a DNA test, to find our families roots in Scotland. It was just as I was writing this chapter in my autobiography about seeing that article while in Scotland that my sister paid for one of those tests to be done, and asked me to do the DNA mouth swab, because only the males of the family can reveal those DNA roots. When I got the results it clarified to me what had been happening to me over the past years as I’d begun writing what has been called me “visionary-fiction.” For our family’s DNA roots are almost entirely from a clan in the highest of the Scottish highlands.

IC: I understand your novels are a combination of spiritual insights and political and social commentary. Can you comment on that?

BD: I don’t use formulas, as I have no traditional training in fiction writing. As you learned in our interview on my world organizing efforts, my writing came out of two angelic experiences I had in my life. My fiction writing began with the same inner-call, kind of presenting a story to me for me to transcribe.

But, also as I wrote them, who I am became part of them. Teachers always say, write what you know. So, my novels are a weaving of my life experience, my spirituality, my environmental and human rights activism, my world organizing, etc.

IC: What is the gist of your first novel, “2012 The Awakening”?

BD: It is about several people with no connection being drawn to express a new way of being in the world, a new way being demanded by a planet sagging from the weight of a burgeoning population and strained resources.

It is about a spiritual need we all have to be part of a healing solution, and the cumbersome social and political dogmas and systems that are retarding humanity’s ability to evolve into a new way of being that can nurture us and our planet.

My goal with my novels is to A) entertain with a wild ride of twists and turns, B) to educate about social issues our world needs to be facing, and C) to explore the spiritual dimensions of our lives to imagine new ways we can personally evolve our view of ourselves and our world to contribute to the coming global evolution of humankind.

IC: You say you had no education in writing, yet your novel was chosen best fiction of the year. How do you explain that?

BD: My novels are the culmination of a lifetime of preparation and research, beginning with the miraculous angelic experiences of my childhood and young adulthood. But, I look back and see that my being an art major, and then a sociology major at university, were part of it as well. Then my 30 years of Tai Chi and Qigong meditation and the exploration of my own consciousness

these tools fostered, all played a role in it, as well as my 30 years of environmental and human rights activism.

If I were speaking to a classroom of young aspiring writers, my advice would be: Live in the most authentic way possible, and then write from the heart.

IC: What is your second novel, “A Conspiracy of Spirits – Wall Street vs. The 99%” about?

BD: As you might guess, it has an economic component about the alarming disparity of wealth, not only in America, but throughout the world. It is about giving up the delusion that we are here to accumulate and consume, and awakening to the fact that we are spiritual beings who are on this planet at this time to usher in a whole new way of being that will leave our planet and its people far more abundant and creative than at any time in history.

IC: So, you see a bright future for humanity?

BD: I do. However, to get to the light will entail us awakening to the darkness, to become disillusioned. In America we often see dis-illusionment as a negative, and probably most of the world see’s it this way. But, what it means is to lose your illusions. That is what is required to usher in a new world and a new way of being.

But, the rewards will be massive, for the discomforts of a dysfunctioning society will not disappear by pretending they aren’t there. They will press and squeeze and cajole us, until we look directly in their face, and start to solve those problems collectively.

So, the discomfort of our evolution will be as easy, or as hard, as humanity makes it. While it is discomforting to look at what is wrong with our nation and our world, that is the first step to awakening, and evolving beyond that into what becomes limitlessly possible.

My novel deals with the environmental and economic challenges the planet faces, and envisions ways for us to tackle the environmental challenges in a way that not only heals or ecosystem, but also creates a robust green-energy economy. As with my first novel it is peppered with researched facts to make the case for realizing this vision.

IC: Is this why you enjoy writing, to paint a vision?

BD: Really, my world organizing, my activism, everything is all for one common purpose: to contribute in any way that I can to our evolution in consciousness on this planet.

My adult life has been dedicated to seeking out information and techniques that have helped me heal from my past, and evolve into a future with greater possibility. So, it comes through everything that I do.

Sometimes, when my wife and I make new friends, they get upset because they think we don’t like them because we don’t get together very often. But, it’s because we are so immersed in activism on so many levels, that our activism consumes almost all of our time when we aren’t eating, sleeping, or resting. Those we encounter in our work are what comprises most of our social lives.

We have a finite time on this planet, and we’ve got a lot to get done so that our children and their children can have a viable planet that they can love living in, rather than just survive in.

Human beings were not meant to struggle and suffer just to get by, the way most of the planet is right now. As Gandhi said, “There is always enough for people’s need, but never enough for people’s greed.” The income disparity, our environmental crisis, all these issues are tied up in one tangled knot, and it is a spiritual knot.

All our problems are fear based. “Greed” is the manifestation of “fear of scarcity, or more often fear of being unloved.” When someone who has 30 billion dollars, pushes and shoves, purchasing politicians, and harnessing power, to gain another 30 billion, it is not out of any kind of real need. It is an obsessive disorder rooted in their fear that the world will not love them if they are not powerful. Of course the opposite is true, look at how much love Warren Buffett has incurred by being willing to loosen his grip on his fortune so that the least among us can live slightly better lives.

War and violence are caused by “fear.” Those who obsessively need higher walls, bigger guns, even as the society they seek to protect is starved so that those guns can be purchased are “fearful people.”

30 years of Tai Chi and Qigong’s meditative loosening, and other forms of meditation and seeking have taught me that when we let go of our fear, the thing we fear often dissipates. When the powerful unlock their grip on control and wealth, they will find that the rejection they feared will no longer be there.

My writing, like my life’s work, is seeking to bring truth to light, and a more spiritual world into being.

My novels are nail-biting thrillers that will cause your heart to beat faster than is probably healthy, but they will ultimately leave you with great hope for our future. The most important prophecy is the “self-fulfilling prophecy,” because our thoughts are what are creating our future. I try to contribute a vision of what could be possible, in the hope that by floating that seed, the current of human thought my carry it toward becoming a reality.

What we all say and do matters. We were put here to joyously explore what is possible. Not to cringe in fear of the boogey men we create in our minds. So much is possible. We are on the verge of a new world we can all love living in. It is only waiting for us to shed the confining shackles of the “old ways” we’ve been doing things, so that we can create space for the new us, the new world, to unfold within and all around us.

It is time for the planet to stop seeing ourselves in the old masculine approaches of “exploration, conquest, and exploitation,” because the world’s resources are being exhausted. We must begin to see ourselves in a feminine approach, as no longer conquerors of the planet, but homemakers. When homemaker goes to the cupboard (our planet’s resources), they don’t do so to claim it as their own, but rather to survey its contents, and to determine how to best utilize those contents to nourish the entire household (the 7 billion inhabitants of planet earth).

We are in the midst of a feminine awakening, not with women taking over everything, but all of us, men and women, awakening to this homemaker approach to the future of planet earth.