My newest book, Great Decisions, Perfect Timing: Cultivating Intuitive Intelligence (coming out Feb. 19, 2015) is many things: an autobiography, a guide on how to improve decision-making and timing and some philosophy — rolled into one. Above all, its composition, which took four years, has been a labor of love.
The book incorporates the subject matter of my two previous books — The Visionary I Ching and Divination: Sacred Tools — and tells the story of how I found right livelihood in developing an intersection between two major fascinations — the I Ching and interactive multimedia.
Great Decisions, Perfect Timing: Cultivating Intuitive Intelligence focuses on Visionary Decision Making, which involves making use of the Synchronicity Principle and archetypes, two revolutionary discoveries of the great psychologist, Carl Jung. This gives you a hint of what the book is about, but to understand why I wrote it, let me tell you a bit about the journey behind it.
If you browsed through spiritual or “New Age” bookstores in the 1980s or 1990s, you may have stumbled across a couple of CD-ROMs named the Oracle of Changes and Tarot Magic. I was their producer. After the Internet gained primacy, I created a web business that produced authentic, do-it-yourself I Ching, Tarot, numerology and astrology reports. I sold the company in 2007 and started the Divination Foundation, the non-profit that publishes my books and podcasts my interview show on iTunes and Divination.com. I consider my books, radio show and the non-profit itself as “legacy work” — my giving back to the cultural commons.
Legacy is a powerful concept. I recently interviewed Rick Weijo, author of Our Dreams for our Children: Creating Legacies that Inspire Each New Generation (you can listen to the interview at Divination.com). Rick noted that legacies can be consciously and proactively created. In fact, he argues that they should be created, that legacies need not be defined as what is left behind for descendants to sort out. Rick talks about “renewal” rather than retirement, and I totally resonate with his thinking. By interviewing Rick I became acutely aware of the fact that all of my current writing and interview work — none of which profit me personally — is a legacy project.
Great Decisions, Perfect Timing discusses three stages of life, which roughly correspond roughly to every 30 years. The first 30 years are naturally about discovering your fascinations (the student stage), the second stage is providing for yourself and others through achieving mastery in a livelihood (the builder stage), and the third stage is about recycling and passing on your wisdom and support (the patron stage). It is during Stage 3 that the idea of creating a legacy gains traction. And, not coincidentally, this new book’s beginnings were just after I had sold the business and my patron stage had begun.
Of course, many people in the world are not in a position to leave much of a financial or material inheritance (with seven children, my parents certainly weren’t). But leaving a legacy isn’t necessarily financial at all. In fact, it can be as simple as writing a “legacy letter” where you discuss family history for your children or grandchildren. It could be a poem or a memoir, or even be a series of videos telling stories and sharing bits of hard-won wisdom. Your wisdom and experiences can feed the next generation; more than anything material, your internal gifts are worth passing on.
Over the next several months, I plan to introduce topics of Great Decisions, Perfect Timing into this blog. The blog posts will follow the themes of the book. Here’s a teaser from the book’s table of contents:
- Our current decision-making crisis
- Learning about your own fascinations
- The psychology of perfect timing
- The resources of infinite intelligence
- Your strategic vision
- Intuitive intelligence
- Invoking archetypes
- Divination and the book of changes
- Execution and perfect timing
- Perseverance and mastery
- Belief engineering
- The synchronistic lifestyle
I hope you’ll join me on this voyage of lifelong self-discovery.
Great Decisions, Perfect Timing will be published on Chinese New Year, February 19. It is available for pre-order right now. Thanks for reading.
