Outremer III

by D. N. Carter

  Paul’s mind raced as he thought over the many discussions he had had with his father over the years. It was clear now that he had been educating and preparing him all those years. He felt sick and dizzy and had to shake his head to clear his mind. He remembered his father had told him to always remember the yew tree in a place called Fortingall. As he recalled this, he looked up at his mother, who nodded her acknowledgement and that she knew what he was thinking of.

  “That yew tree, my son, is thousands of years old…and it shall remain growing until the dawn of the new Age of Aquarius,” she smiled and took his hand again.

  “If this is no dream, then how do you forgive those that beheaded you?” Paul asked Elek.

  Elek smiled and looked to Paul’s mother.

  “She can best explain that,” he answered.

  “Forgiveness you must learn and practice…it is one of the primary lessons preached by all those true followers who walk a spiritual path. But understand that forgiveness is not the first thing one must do when one has suffered a great wrongdoing or injustice or traumatic experience. Healing is so misunderstood by placing impossible pressures upon people to forgive without having first accepted and dealt with the trauma or wrong doing or pain for it sidesteps their own unresolved shadow and the principles of accountability. If a knight is severely wounded in battle, he does not have time to start a forgiveness prayer or mantra for the assailant. He would need to remove himself from further harm’s way, seek medical attention and recover or he would die. When it comes down to it, healing and forgiving ourselves is the important step. We are not responsible for those who wound us. They can take that up with God. Grief and time are the dynamic healing team that receive little praise, yet they make our hearts soften and allow for new love to grow. A hard heart is not able to understand or heal,” she explained and sat him down upon the lush green grass. She sat beside him and held both his hands. “As we all grow, we likewise grow out of old ways and our souls yearn to learn more and grow further and you will want to grow more. Then you start the same process over again just with more understanding than before. It does not stop as growth and consciousness is infinite and ever expanding. You will change many times my son, my beautiful son,” she said and cupped his face in her hands and gently kissed him upon the forehead.[96]

  “I do not understand how we are able to do this?” Paul remarked and looked up at Elek.

  “’Tis but a natural process we all posses. You would call it ‘telepathy’ from the words ‘tele’ meaning ‘distance’ and ‘path’ meaning ‘feeling’. It actually means getting feelings through a distance…the communication between two minds, separated over a distance, without the use of the five known senses,” his mother explained and looked deeply into his eyes. “We must go now…but remember the Glen of Lyon for it is there that my mortal remains lie buried. Please let your father know.”

  She stood up slowly and moved back to stand beside Elek. He clasped her hand and both smiled at Paul.

  “Tell your father I am with your mother and we shall see him again,” Elek said.

  “And Paul…Death is never the end. In the end, only three things matter… How much you loved…How gently you lived…How gracefully you let go of things not meant for you! And remember this…your son will hold your hand but a short time, but he will hold your heart for a lifetime.”

  As she said the last sentence, Paul’s heart jumped in fear with a sudden sense of dread about Arri. What was she telling him? He went to stand but a sudden loud and almost painful high pitch ringing echoed out within his ears making him feel dizzy. He lowered his head immediately and clasped his hands over his ears and screwed up his face, looking down. In the distance he thought he could hear Arri calling him. He felt a shaking sensation upon his shoulder. Suddenly his head was full of noise and a rushing sound, his heart beating fast.

  “Father, father!” Arri called out in a whisper as he shook Paul’s shoulder.

  Paul had his head resting in his hands as he leant forwards with his elbows on the table. He opened his eyes wide instantly as he woke up. Sunlight was already beginning to enter through the corners of the window covers. He turned to see Arri stood beside him in his night clothes smiling.

  “Arri!” Paul said and quickly pulled him close and hugged him tightly. He kissed the side of his head and felt emotional as he held him close. Arri put his arms around him and Clip clop caught him in the side of his face as he did so. “And please, call me Papa…remember.”

  “Why is everyone having a lazy day today…Papa?” Arri asked, puzzled.

  Paul laughed and hugged him even tighter just as Alisha walked in rubbing her eyes.

  “Have you been here all night?” she asked and kissed the top of Paul’s head as she walked past him.

  Paul just held Arri and ran through everything he could remember of his strange dream. He shook his head puzzled and confused. It was only then that he noticed a small white feather beside his sword and a small rolled up piece of paper. It had Attar’s typically green string partially tied around it. He leaned over and with his left hand picked it up and rolled it open as Arri looked down at it. He raised his eyebrows as if to ask what it meant.

  “’Tis written in Arabic…and it says…‘Write the bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble’.”

  Arri smiled and quickly pulled away and rushed over to Alisha. As she asked him what he would like to eat, Paul’s heart felt heavy almost like a real weight was inside as he thought back over the words his mother had apparently told him in the dream. He heard her words echo in his mind and it made him shudder. Perhaps he was misunderstanding her words. Perhaps he should look upon them as he should always be grateful and make the most of the time he has with Arri for he will grow so quickly. Maybe she meant it from her to him as he was her son?

  ‘Your son will hold your hand but a short time, but he will hold your heart for a lifetime’ he heard his mother say again, her face perfectly pictured in his mind. He would draw her image whilst he remembered, he told himself, as emotions welled inside him to the point he could not speak for fear of bursting into tears. Attar had mentioned about being cautious of the dream he had about two armies fighting with two horns on either side and his dream of the same event came vividly back to mind. Though tired, he forced a smile and stood up trying to concentrate on the comment his mother had said that she promised to always watch over him. In Attar’s comments he had strongly hinted at a prophecy that would come to pass, but the seeds of a promise had also been sown by his mother.

  Chapter 58

  Beyond the Veil, Revelation Cometh

  Port of La Rochelle, France, Melissae Inn, spring 1191

  The old man sat back in his chair and raised his hands to his face, resting his chin upon them. He closed his eyes and took several long and slow breaths.

  “I sense what comes next will be difficult for you…will it be?” Gabirol asked.

  “No, ’tis fine. I shall continue,” the old man answered and sat himself up ready to carry on.

  “Does it mean that Arri will die, or be given to Kratos and why was Elek handed over?” Simon asked in quick succession.

  “What if I told you Elek was not of normal creation. As for the dream about him and Paul’s mother…well Paul felt it was real enough to draw an image of her and the stones in Glen Lyon…look for yourselves,” the old man said and nodded towards Paul’s folder. Gabirol opened the folder and carefully looked through the images inside. “I think you will find he has marked them.”

  Gabirol pulled out an image of a woman with the simple title penned at the bottom ‘Mother’ with a question mark beside it.

  Fig. 55: Paul’s mother.

  He then pulled out another image simply marked ‘Elek’.

  Fig. 56: Elek.

  “You mentioned female knights before and again just now…but do you really mean it?” the Genoese sailor asked.

  “Yes…as our good
friends here will confirm, they were and are real enough,” the old man answered and looked at the Templar and Hospitaller, who nodded in agreement.

  “And time…you said it was a circle or something?” Peter asked.

  “Time indeed…’tis a vast subject we simply do not have time to discuss in detail but I can say that there are those who claim and teach that the time we live in is a circle. That what was, will be, that we live and die and that we can not only be born again in the future, but also the past,” the old man started to explain, Simon rubbing his head confused. “God, or whatever you wish to call him, in his infinite wisdom is teaching us all to become more than we are, and if you believe the spirit being eternal, then why make life experiences just one way in time?”

  “And I guess race, colour or creed make no distinction and therefore no real meaning if in one life you can be born black as a man and the next as woman and white…Muslim one time, Hindu or Christian the next,” Gabirol said, shaking his head as his mind raced pondering the possibilities.

  “’Tis far too deep for me, but I am interested in the pyramids in Bosnia. How are they hidden and how many more are there in the world?” Peter asked.

  “My friend…our entire world is covered in pyramids, even on the seabeds…such is their age. But there are even older ones that remain buried, especially in areas like China and closer to home in places like Crimea, even Georgia…huh, and those when they are eventually opened will not be able to be denied or hidden,” the old man laughed.

  “What do you mean?” Ayleth asked.

  “Their great antiquity and the very real physical remains of some of our ancient forefathers,” he answered.

  “But why were so many pyramids made then?” Peter asked.

  “Because our ancient forefathers knew and understood the delicate forces that wrap around this world we live upon. They used the pyramids to control that force not only to remain healthy and maintain the fertility of the lands, but also to stabilise our atmosphere and protect us. But that knowledge was lost as you all now know. The Norse myths still recount them in their legends of Thor and the ice gods as mentioned earlier.”

  “Though not really lost if what you have told us is true,” Gabirol remarked.

  “If what was handed down to us is true, then other planets that housed life lost their atmospheres after losing their natural forces of energy…this cannot be allowed to happen again,” the old man sighed. “As our planet’s harmonic signature, its tune, its rhythm increases so too it will affect each and every one of us and as a consequence our consciousness will also be raised. Our ancient forefathers knew how interconnected we are with our mother planet and so stabilised that energy and that is why they buried and hid for protection the very things necessary to safeguard us as mankind transits from one level of consciousness to the next higher level.”

  “How?” Simon asked bluntly.

  “As our earth passes into the new period of light, enlightenment, and the harmonics increase, it is the pyramids that will again regulate that energy and keep us balanced,” the old man explained.

  “And you have told us that all of this happens to a set time scheme…a plan almost, but you now tell us time is but like a circle. Does that mean we simply keep going around over and again doing the same thing?” Gabirol asked.

  “A good point, Gabirol. Let me explain briefly that all ancient cultures speak of vast cycles of time with alternating Dark and Golden Ages. Plato called it the Great Year. Many ancient cultures believed consciousness and history were not linear but cyclical, rising and falling over long periods of time. Myth and folklore all speak of a cycle of time with long periods of enlightenment broken by dark ages of ignorance, indirectly driven by a known astronomical phenomenon, the precession of the equinox. We all know the two celestial motions that have a profound effect on life and consciousness. Diurnal motion, earth’s rotation on its axis, causes humans to move from a waking state to a sleep state and back again every twenty-four hours. Our bodies have adapted to earth’s rotation so well that it produces these regular changes in consciousness without our even thinking the process remarkable. Earth’s revolution around the sun, the second celestial motion, which Copernicus identified, has an equally significant effect, prompting trillions of life forms to spring out of the ground, to bloom, fruit and then decay, while billions of other species hibernate, spawn or migrate en masse. Our visible world literally springs to life, completely changes its colour and stride, and then reverses with every waxing and waning of the second celestial motion. The third celestial motion, the precession of the equinox, is less understood than the first two, but if we are to believe ancient cultures from around the world, its effect is equally transformative. What disguises the impact of this motion is its timescale. Like the butterfly that lives but one day a year and knows nothing of the seasons, the human being has an average life span that lasts only one-360th of the roughly 24,000-year precessional cycle. And just as the butterfly born on an overcast, windless day has no idea that there is anything as splendid as sunshine or a breeze, so do we, born in an era of materialistic rationality, have little awareness of a golden age or higher states of consciousness, yet that is exactly the ancestral message that has been handed down to us. The idea of a great cycle linked to the slow precession of the equinox was common to numerous cultures before the Christian era, but today we are taught nothing about it. The observation of earth’s three motions is quite simple. In the first, rotation, we see the sun rise in the east and set in the west every twenty-four hours. And if we were to look at the stars just once a day, we would see a similar pattern over a year: the stars rise in the east and set in the west. The twelve constellations of the zodiac, the ancient markers of time that lie along the ecliptic, the sun’s path, pass overhead at the rate of about one per month and return to the starting point of our celestial observation at the end of the year. And if we looked just once a year, say on the autumnal equinox, we would notice the stars move retrograde, that is opposite to the first two motions at the rate of about one degree every seventy years. At this pace, the equinox falls on a different constellation approximately once every two thousand years, taking about 24,000 years to complete its cycle through the twelve constellations. This is called the precession, the backward motion of the equinox relative to the fixed stars. The standard theory of precession says it is principally the moon’s pulling force (gravity) acting upon the earth that must be the cause of earth’s changing orientation to inertial space, as in ‘precession’. Ancient oriental astronomy teaches that an equinox slowly moving or ‘precessing’ through the zodiac’s twelve constellations is simply due to the motion of the sun curving through space around another star, which changes our viewpoint of the stars from earth. However, and as man will relearn, our very solar system also travels around and by doing so produces the precession observable accurately, resolving a number of solar system anomalies even though astronomers have not yet discovered a companion star to our earth’s sun, but as you all know we do indeed have a companion dark star as I have already explained. A moving solar system provides a logical reason why we have a Great Year, to use Plato’s term, with alternating Dark and Golden ages. That is, if the solar system carrying the earth actually moves in a huge orbit, subjecting earth to the forces and influences of another star along the way, and shaping the subtle energies through which we move. Just as earth’s smaller diurnal and annual motions produce the cycles of day and night and the seasons of the year so the larger celestial motion produces a cycle that affects life and consciousness on a grand scale. And to finish on this very large subject, I would urge you to simply remember that consciousness prefers light, which is consistent with myth and folklore, the concept behind the Great Year or cyclical model of history is based on the sun’s motion through space, subjecting earth to waxing and waning stellar energies that thus result in the legendary rise and fall of the ages over great epochs of time.”[97]

  “I was once told that Easter, in fact the
Sabbath and our days of celebrating events from the Bible, are all wrong because we are now following a Roman instigated time model…and that the Sabbath is correctly connected to the moon and the great cycles of time and the constellations. Is that true?” Gabirol asked.

  “You have heard correctly. Suffice it to say that neither Saturday nor Sunday have ever been the ancient seventh-day Sabbath of the Creator, Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Daniel, the Apostles, or our Messiah and Saviour. But that is all I need say on that matter,” the old man answered.

  “But what about time being a circle?” the wealthy tailor asked.

  “If I told you that time was a circle, in the realm of existence we all live and experience life in, would you really believe me?” the old man replied.

  “I would,” Simon interjected loudly.

  “If you can believe the soul is eternal, and that life reincarnation was real, then judging people by the colour of their skin, their material wealth, or lack of it, or where they were born is quite literally and physically a redundant factor as Gabirol alluded to earlier. And suppose, as I explained before, we are all here to learn and grow…to evolve to a higher state, and so we inherit all that our parents knew and experienced so as time moves on, the newly born will be for ever increasing in their knowledge and experiences…but what if I then told you that you can just as easily be reborn in the past as well as the future. This is why some people who have already lived in those times are able under certain conditions to remember and recall events from those lives. Hence how prophecy and visions can and do occur,” the old man explained and paused as he gauged their reactions. “And what if I told you the sins of the father being visited upon the children is actually quite true, but also, what if, now consider this, what if everyone of us was a small part of a greater being of consciousness and that we are in fact all one and the same being and experiencing many different emotions and trials, all compressed into one world…so when great mystics and religious teachers tell us to do unto others what we would want done unto us, it literally means if you hurt someone, you are hurting yourself.”