William Bezanson: I BELIEVE
An Interview with William Bezanson: I BELIEVE
A Rosicrucian Looks at Christianity and Spirituality
Interview by Christopher Buck
As a retired engineer, William Bezanson fulfilled his passion for writing, and have now published six books on world stewardship, user performance-centered systems design, and mathematical beauty. He is a long-standing member of a Rosicrucian Order and two related initiatic, mystical orders. His mission in life it to help to bring about a Spiritual State in this Mundane World. William’s writings focus around large-picture topics such as cosmology, esoteric Christianity, the Jungian world view, mystical spirituality, and related topics.
OMTIMES: Bill, you are well known to our audiences, but many may not know much about you. Tell us a little about yourself, your background and your personal projects.
William Bezanson: OK. Thanks, Christopher. Well, I grew up in Nova Scotia, Canada, and graduated as an electrical engineer. I moved to Ottawa for my first real job, and have lived there for most of my adult life. I still live in Ottawa with my wife, Susan. Our children are grown up and we are empty-nesters. I worked in the high-tech industry, and retired about twelve years ago from Nortel Networks.
My personal projects include researching and writing about systems design and world stewardship topics. I have interests at the intersection of spirituality, mysticism, psychology, physics, cosmology, and big-picture thinking. And finally I am heavily occupied with self-development through membership in a Rosicrucian Order and two related orders, the Order Militia Crucifera Evangelica, and the British Martinist Order. I’ll give you the website addresses for these orders at the end of this interview, for anyone who wants to look them up, if that’s OK with you.
OMTIMES: Yes, that will be fine. Now, you are a published author and have been a Spotlight Writer for OMTimes for quite a while. What made you, a former engineer with a technically-trained mind, start writing about spiritual and mystical concepts?
William Bezanson: Engineers spend most of their time writing and communicating technical topics, to design teams, customers, and other industry members. So writing became natural and enjoyable to me. I enjoyed crafting the documents I wrote. Even birthday cards… I have fun writing greetings, for example, for someone at age 32, I would write “Wow! You’re now a billion seconds old!” Check it out: 60 x 60 x 24 … You’ll find that 32 years is just over a billion seconds. So when I retired from Nortel, where I worked, I hit the ground running with the manuscript for a book that I was writing about a new type of online and embedded training and documentation for products, which helped one in performance of one’s job at the moment and place of need. That resulted in my first book: Performance Support Solutions. I loved the process of researching, writing, and publishing books. After a couple of systems design books, I turned to my real love, namely spirituality, mysticism, and world stewardship books. It took a bit of courage to get into spiritual writing, even though I loved the area. I found that I had to shed my life-long habit of suppressing my own ideas in that area, and to summon the courage to write about what I really felt. The turning point came when I was about 65 years old, and I realized that if I don’t write now about what I really liked, I would never get a chance to do so, at least in this current life. So, I just bit the bullet and started, and the result was three books: Why Are Gas Prices So High?, Abandoned Shopping Carts, and I Believe.
OMTIMES: In one of your books, “Abandoned Shopping Carts” you tackle the problem of the modern lack of interest and lack of mindfulness that we see in our society. Why do you think that many are so disconnected with our environment and life?
