One Great Year (38 page)

Borte was honored as the Empress of the Mongolian Empire and was the most respected and valued of Genghis Khan's many wives. Helghul wreaked havoc in the world of man, as was his role, and he basked in his ever-growing power and glory, sowing his seed literally and figuratively across the continent.

As Jochi aged, his striking resemblance to Chilger was obvious, and resentment grew. Genghis and his other sons never accepted the boy, though he remained his mother's favorite. His likeness to Chilger offended the khan, though the Adversary knew that Marcus's soul was elsewhere.

Jochi was poisoned and died in his forty-first year.
²⁹
According to tradition, he was buried in an unmarked grave on the plains under the stars. Borte never suspected that Temujin had murdered him just as he had murdered the boy's look-alike father decades earlier.

Present Day

Quinn returned from a museum exhibition feeling nostalgic and suffering his loneliness. There was no one to talk to. There was no one who felt how he felt. There was no one who had memory and knew what he knew … except perhaps Helghul. Happily Quinn hadn't encountered him in this lifetime.

Quinn had spent too much time alone lately. Nate was busy with his life and Quinn had moved farther from the city, so the few friends he had made there slowly faded away. He wanted more than companionship. He wanted Theron, but waiting for her took its toll. He reminisced alone, remembering the other lifetimes, the many lifetimes, when the museum artifacts he had just viewed had been new and whole.

The Emissary had blogged the day before.

The Emissary
: Art and music are nourishment for the higher self. They have the ability to soothe the soul. This explains why artists and musicians are celebrated in Golden Ages and are vilified and censored in darker times. Recently in Caral, Peru, an ancient city and pyramids were found with scores of musical instruments but “no trace of warfare.”
³⁰
What a paradise it must have been.

Quinn dropped into his chair; he had so many ideas bombarding him. He was anarchic with his blog topics, because he was constantly studying and dissecting the vast array of websites, trying to address rumors, conspiracy theories, and incorrect ideas. Most of all, he wanted to choose topics that would make people think. Not just the ramblings of some pot-smoking recluse, but something valuable. He wanted to help pilgrims on the path to enlightenment, he didn't want to just preach or draw too much attention to himself. It was a fine balance. His list of followers was growing weekly, but he had his favorites.

The Emissary
: I am back on the topic of lost knowledge and civilizations. We have so much to learn from the Ancients, but first we must admit that they existed.

Adam's Calendar in South Africa is a seventy-five-thousand-year-old stone astrological calendar, made up of one hundred thousand ancient stone ruins, spreading out over the mountaintops.

A lost city, Gobekli Tepe, has been rediscovered in Turkey. There have been discoveries in the south of Spain, at Lake Titicaca in Peru, and so many more.

The ancient pyramids in China are not documented in any of their records, indicating they were already there, before the time from which records have survived.

So many of the ruins we have already found—the Pyramids at Giza, Teotihuacan in Mexico, and the Anuradhapura stupas in Sri Lanka, to name a few—are aligned with specific constellations at certain times in history. Clearly the builders knew something about the stars and their importance that we do not. Did they have information that we still do not understand?

Dvaraka, the lost city of over a million citizens in the Bay of Cambay, and Rama's Bridge in India were both consigned to myth in ancient Vedic texts. Evidence has now been discovered that they may have indeed existed.
³¹
Imagine, a man-made stone bridge linking India to Sri Lanka, twenty miles long! This accomplishment is not possible if we cling to antiquated assumptions.

Through the Dark Ages a linear approach to sociology was embraced, denying the idea that our ancient ancestors had more knowledge than we do. Further, with the advent of Darwinism, the popular belief became absolute: mankind must progress in one direction, from primitive to modern.

There is another more accurate truth: civilization is circular. One Great Year of approximately twenty-six thousand years marks the rise and fall of civilizations as they move through one entire precession of the equinox.

The Golden Age is the longest of the Ages and is a time when civilization and humanity are at their height of purity, Oneness, and innovation. This is a peaceful time during which human consciousness is at its peak, manifested through levitation, telepathy, and the complete understanding of God.

Leading in and out of a Golden Age are a Silver Age, a Bronze Age, and then the shortest, the Iron or Dark Age. Based on this notion, I think it is a Dark Age from which we are now emerging. Has the Bronze Age already begun?

In the book
Hamlet's Mill
,
³²
the authors identify at least thirty separate civilizations with early references to the Great Year cycle. One example is the ancient Vedic text that described the “yugas”: a four-seasoned, twenty-four-thousand-year cycle.

All indications seem to point to a cyclical rise and fall of mankind … but why?

If a divine cycle known as the Great Year exists … why does it exist?

Is it random? Chaos? Lessons? Choice? Experience? Enlightenment? Through these highs and lows do we become something … more?

One must wonder; can the cycle be altered? Can the wheel get stuck in a particular Age?

When we admit ancient civilizations existed, we can learn from them and new questions arise. Without questions there can be no answers.

Wisdom, knowledge, and enlightenment cannot enter a closed mind.

Ping! The blog comments started coming in.

Twenty minutes passed, then an hour. Quinn could have gone out, over to the pub, to a movie, to the gym, he could have hooked up online like others were doing, but he preferred to stay home. He slipped out of his jeans into sweats, rolled a joint, and cracked a beer while he interacted in cyberspace.

He sat at his computer late into the night, blogging and scouring the Internet for evidence of the next great Age. The clues were readily available to anyone. Had the enlightenment begun? Would the lands be tossed and crumpled like too many blankets? Quinn didn't know, but regardless, the Iron Age must be ending. Mankind must have begun the ascension toward a new Bronze Age, on its way to a better time. Was there any other option?

Quinn marveled that he hadn't thought to ask the Elders more about the precession of the Great Year when he had had the chance. He knew that no one could have answered his questions anyway—free will made them impossible to answer. He struggled to remember how the Elders had behaved in the end in Atitala when the Golden Age had crumbled and the descent had begun.
Was a biblical Armageddon imminent? Was the shift out of the Darkness guaranteed? Would devastation be the catalyst, or the awakening that had to occur before humanity ascended to the next Golden Age? Was the upswing certain, or could the Darkness prevent it? Could one side defeat the other in the cosmic tug of war between Dark and Light, or was there always balance?
These were Quinn's unspoken questions.

Quinn didn't have the answers, but he watched diligently. His inner voice told him he needed to be sober and straight to hear more. He ignored the voice, tired and sore from the mountain of memories that he carried. He found relief from loneliness under his foggy mental blanket.

The Emissary kept one eye on his blog responses, but they seemed to argue more about the length of the Great Year than to answer why it happened. The opinion was split exactly fifty-fifty as to whether or not an Age could be forestalled. Finally Anderson88 made a brief appearance and it got more interesting.

Savetibet911
: A cycle has to be able to stall. Free will must allow for anything, and where is the lesson in a cycle if there is no changing it?

Anderson88
: Perhaps the cycle continues but our souls proceed differently through them or through higher level dimensions cycles as we ascend. Maybe it's not the same experience for everybody at the same time. Maybe it's like a ladder, or more like a group of inter-locking circles … we pass from one to the other as we climb up.

Hansonrocks
: A combination of string theory, the Great Year, and Buddhism! I love it! What if the cycle can also be reversed … turned in the opposite direction?

Across town, things were as they were meant to be. Nate was at the home of a fellow movie buff for the screening of a quirky art film. Nate's passion was filmmaking, and as a director of photography (DOP), jobs were scarce in the current economy.

Nate had met Eden when he first arrived at the screening. She was a vivacious documentary filmmaker who was searching for a DOP for her current project. They had immediate chemistry and made a date to meet the following evening to discuss a possible partnership just before she had to rush away. The fated meeting marked the beginning of an adventure and the end of an Age.

Quinn had fallen asleep about three a.m. with a comfortable beer–and–BC Bud buzz. When he opened his bleary eyes for the first time at ten o'clock the next morning, a mountain of neglected computer repairs was beckoning. There were customers waiting, and he was anxious to meet his promised delivery dates and get their units back to them.

Quinn rolled out of bed, mindful of last night's blogging and news. He had enjoyed some interesting chats, some great feedback, and some especially sharp reader input, and he was happy. The numbers were growing daily; he was reaching people one keystroke at a time.

Freshly showered, his second cup of coffee in hand, Quinn was ready to do some work that paid. He was dressed in a plain white T-shirt and loose-fitting jeans and was just beginning when there was a knock at the door. He looked through the peephole at Nate, who bounced excitedly from foot to foot. He looked nothing like the guard at Stone-at-Center or like Amnut, but the colorful aura and familiarity around him were undeniable.

“You won't believe what happened to me last night. It was over the top!” Nate began, before Quinn could close the door against the drizzle. Nate stripped off his soaked coat and threw it carelessly over the back of the sofa.

Quinn smiled, moving the garment to an overflowing hook by the door.

“Is that new?” Nate asked, noticing the large, multicolored silk tapestry of a square with a circle inside hanging on Quinn's wall.

“Nope, it's always been there. It's called a mandala.”

“Mandela? I love that guy.”

“No, not Nelson Mandela, mandala. It's the Sanskrit word for ‘circle.' It's my life story,” Quinn said.

“Hmm, never noticed it … anyway … I met the most amazing woman, her name is Eden, like paradise, ya know? And not only is she totally hot but she's a filmmaker! She's a writer and director and she needs me for camera! She wants to collaborate, and … get this … she's totally into me. We just, like, clicked … totally clicked … and I know that sounds like a line, but it's … well you can see what it's done to me!” Nate couldn't stand still. He strode back and forth in front of the door, oblivious to the wet splatters his black boots sprayed across the floor.

“I'm happy for you man, brilliant,” Quinn said sincerely as he took a seat at his desk and had a slurp of hot coffee. He always saw young Amnut so clearly in Nate.

“I'm seeing her tonight. We're going to meet to talk about her project. I need to have a sample of my clips for her, you know, I think it's pretty much a formality, we just …”

“Clicked,” Quinn finished.

“Yeah, I said that. I know I sound like a teenager … I feel like a teenager,” he said from the kitchen, grinning, where he was helping himself to coffee with plenty of milk and sugar.

“You practically
are
a teenager. I hope you can still get this excited when you're old like me,” Quinn teased.

“Naw, man, when I'm your age
I
won't be single,” Nate said, not realizing the slight until the words were out. “Um, well no, I mean … I hope I won't, umm, that's not …” the younger man stammered, wishing to ease the offense. Quinn chuckled, and Nate was relieved.

“No worries, I know what you meant. Whaddya know about her?” Quinn asked.

“She's beautiful, thirty-five …”

“An older woman,” Quinn interjected.

“Only six years,” Nate said defensively. “The documentary is about special Crystal kids. Have you heard of them?” Nate continued.

“Yeah, some … but go on,” Quinn said, his interest piqued.