| 2 Part Interview with Bill Douglas, author of 2012 The Awakening
- Violet Li, St. Louis Examiner.com
Like [his novel's heroine] Ravi, Mr. Douglas has an urge to tell the truth. Words just flew from his fingertips unto his computer. In many ways, he is the moral conscience of the world.
The critically acclaimed thriller 2012: The Awakening is the first fiction written by Bill Douglas, who is the founder of World Tai Chi & Qigong Day and World Healing Day. The synopsis of the novel is a young Nobel Prize winner, economist Ravi, who has an urge to speak the truth, putting her and her family lives at risk. While Ravi is kidnapped and tortured, democracy and humanity in the world are threatened. To understand why and how Mr. Douglas wrote the novel, below is my recent interview with him in very candid conversation . . .
VIOLET: I am totally amazed by the amount of information that you have in the book and how brilliantly you threaded it throughout the story. How long did it take you to do the research?
BILL: Yes, in many ways this novel is the product of nearly 50 years of life research – and some of it was thrown in my lap from an early age. You probably noticed, for example, that “breathing” is a cord that runs through this novel, the breath being a connection with people’s faith or spiritual journey.
This idea was planted in me as a young child. Of course in my 30 years of Tai Chi and Qigong study “breath” is at the core. Qigong directly translates as “breath work,” or “life energy work.” I’ve since learned that this is a universal understanding of human’s worldwide, for in the West the ancient Latin root of “spir,” as in “spirit,” and “respirate” is the same. They understood that the breath is our doorway to our spirit.
But, back to my personal journey that began 50 years ago. When I was a young boy, one night a being came to me. I thought of it as an angel, having no other reference for such an experience. It lifted me out of bed. At that young age I still slept with my Mom. We had a small modest home with 5 kids, and bed space was at a premium. My dog, Lady, slept on my other side. So, when this angel began to draw me up out of bed, I reached out for my Mom and my dog, and my hand went right through them.
This being flew me through the night sky, I remember looking down and seeing the rooftops of all the buildings in town. It was a cold winter night, but I wasn’t cold. The angel flew silently.
It finally sat me down across town in a small brick alleyway between my Church’s Sunday school and the Lutheran Church I was raised in. This being began to show me how to “breathe.” As I learned, I began to lift up from the ground. You can imagine how exciting this feeling was for a young child. Wow! I can fly! I can’t wait to show my friends!
I got better and began to fly higher and higher, up into the moonlit sky, doing great looping circles down between the Sunday school and Church and then back up into the limitless sky. It was incredible!
Then I became afraid, and held my breath, and tightened up and began to fall down to the brick alleyway between the buildings.
The being caught me, and “communicated” something to me. It took me decades of life experience to unravel the lesson it imparted to me, but I now know it held 2 messages that were like quintessential seeds, or what the computer would call “exploding-files” that contain compressed data that unfolds and becomes much larger as it expands onto the hard drive, in my case the hard-drive was my unfolding life experience.
The first lesson, which you see in the novel’s narrative was “fear closes all doors. Our flight ends with the contraction of fear. Faith is the opposite of fear. The angel was giving me a lesson in faith. But, also in “breathing.” Over the years of adulthood and my Qigong experience, this early lesson kept coming back to me, and I realized what the angel was telling me that night so long ago. It was imparting a truth, that the breath is what connects our physical body or reality to our spiritual world or nature. The Sunday School represented the intellectual/physical world, and the Church represented the spiritual realms. It was the breath, or the breathing, that was the portal that could join the two.
So, you see, I was destined to write a best selling book on Qigong, “breathing exercise,” from a very early age – long before I would ever know what Qigong was. And perhaps I was also destined long ago to organize a global event celebrated now in over 70 nations with a motto of “One World … One Breath.”
Read the entire interview at:
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-16087-St-Louis-Tai-Chi-Examiner~y2010m7d4-An-Interview-with-Bill-Douglas-author-of-2012-The-Awakening-part-1-of-2
http://www.examiner.com/x-16087-St-Louis-Tai-Chi-Examiner~y2010m7d4-An-Interview-with-Bill-Douglas-author-of-2012-The-Awakening-part-2-of-2
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