Was Fleming at all divinely inspired to create the character of James Bond, and if so, why? If not, where did his inspiration principally come from?

His was a good example of a human/divine partnership. We talk about this quite a lot because it is an ideal for each human to have a partnership with the divine, and this is for many reasons but largely to help the human get the most from their life experience, to learn and grow under difficult circumstances, but also to have not only inner resources but divine assistance at the ready and callable whenever needed. This gives the believer a tremendous advantage, but that is only as it should be given they have greater knowledge and a higher perspective. That is no different than having a larger frame and more developed muscles in an athletic competition, those better equipped will win out—it is that simple. So in this case, we have an author writing about a very human level character and perspective, often involved in questionable activities and even though on a preferred side of the competition, in terms of national origin, many times there were quite violent, although dramatic, turns of events that were a major focus of the works of fiction and drew great followings because of the exciting themes, even though they were to us unsavory. But that does not mean we have no voice and nothing to say in such an enterprise; when invited, we can always add something and it might end up being a quite important aspect that otherwise would be lacking and the work would suffer. In this case, the creativity of the author was such that there was an intuitive outreach and a desire to have a higher goal in mind for the work, and that was just enough of an invitation for us to weigh in, and help to keep things in a better balance at least, so that there were clear demarcations of why the side that Bond was on needed to be the winner, and on display were not the crudest of brute force tactics and the excess often utilized through military solutions. His contributions were done through intelligence, resourcefulness, a proactive exploration taking great personal risks to gather intelligence, and help to formulate and often execute a solution that ended up avoiding a more drastic outcome, often preventing the need for war. Even though the plot involved subterfuge, deception, and sometimes violence and lethal force, there was a greater good in the end, and this balanced things out in terms of the bigger picture. One always is working within a context. You are not light beings at the moment but physical humans in a material world that is enveloped in evil and orchestrated through evil means to corrupt you and misdirect everything that happens to worsen it and cause suffering. To even take part is putting the self at risk personally of incurring severe karmic penalties. So for us to weigh in and help to moderate the plotline of even a fictional work, the fact it touches on the human dilemma and scenarios that are actually plausible can be used as a teachable moment to enlighten people about how to obtain a lesser evil, and to us was worth doing in supporting these writings. We are not responsible for the ideas and the form and the subject matter, but played a key role in moderating the details in a way that raises it up at least, to be a service in some way not always present in fictional writings from this same genre.