The Age of Gaia

The stock market was crashing.  Bastante Solipsis Marquez was running out of time.

Linear time was an illusion, of course.  Bastante was actually quite relieved to be running out of it.  Better to dwell in the Clock of the Long Now, the astronomical calendar of Galactic evolution.

The Sat Yuga.  Bastante breathed deeply.  Almost home.

Modern Babylon was running out of time, and money.  Which meant we were about to enter an age which didn't require either.  But this transition would be awkward at best - the Lords of Materialism had everything to lose and were willing to destroy the entire solar system in order to escape the limits placed on them by Yama, lord of Death.  The Babylonian Serpent was wounded and dangerous, most dangerous.

Behind the protection of religion, Temple Banks had committed usury, and defied the laws of dharma through fractional reserve lending.  This amoral practice had allowed the servants of Mammon to acquire ownership of the world's physical assets, and in so doing enslave all species, including humanity.

All this, in a spiritual universe governed by an impersonal moral law.  Something had to give.

In the end, it was oil.  Ironically, the very physical asset that had allowed the Lords of Materialism to gain so much power was the same asset that led to their downfall.  The corrupt and decadent Kings of the Middle East had grown accustomed to ostentatious extravagance due to their unique positions as owners of the world's great oil reserves.  They knew no limits, desiring limitless-ness itself.  Yet they were dinosaurs in a mammalian age, intolerant monarchs in a republican era, and they saw the shadows of their demise in the too-soon future.  They attempted to solidify their Empire by audaciously lowering oil prices and overproducing in an attempt to corner the global market, eliminate competition, and make their Empire unassailable for another generation.

This strategy failed.

The competition tightened their belts, lowered their prices, devalued their currencies, cultivated partnerships, and kept producing.  It was a buyers market, and the vile snake the Kings of the Middle East had released upon the world bit them on their own ass.

Of course, it was oil, after all.  Plant matter and dinosaurs, cooked in the bowels of Mother Earth for millions of years, then pumped up to fuel Babylon.  Dinosaur energy.  Reptilian energy.  The whole world ran on the burning of decomposed reptiles.  Reptilian energy fueled the global economy, and influenced it in subtle ways.  The Age of Oil was the Reptilian Age.

Bastante's generation was leaving it behind.  His van was a diesel.  It ran on veggie oil and blue-green algae.  The Age of Gaia was being born...

Shambhalla

Bastante felt pressed for time.  There was still plenty of it around, of course, but it was getting used up noticeably faster than before, it seemed.  He held a council of peace chiefs on the Eastern Slope of the Middle Mountain Kingdom, in the forested refuge of Nalanda.

You see, a long time ago -

Nalanda had once been the great University of Minas Tirith.  Far to the east, as the Kali Yuga raged, from Atlantis had come the dark servants of Mammon.  In the great War with the Gods Atlantis had been sunk with cataclysmic destruction, but Mammon's dark creatures had rent the land and enslaved a great number of elves and humans, twisting their souls, stealing their spirits and their divinity.  Mind began to record its dreams, and learned to remember, and thus dreaming became thinking. The power of Nomos, Time and Number, became Nemesis, and life itself became something bought and sold, a commodity to purchased and thrown away.

And Minas Tirith, gateway to the Mountain Kingdom, had fallen, corrupted from within.  Yet the great Aghori King, the left-handed Peace Chief and ward of the eastern slopes of the Mountain Kingdom had foreseen all this, and in wisdom had laid down his weapons and surrendered without a fight, meekly retreating into the forest fastness.

And in so doing, Nalanda University was not razed to the ground.  Minas Tirith was infected and corrupted with the toxic materialism of the Machine Age, but the University was allowed to educate the people, and because nonviolence had been the seed nonviolence became the fruit, and though a thousand generations had since passed, and the city of Minas Tirith had become mere legend, upon its foundation was built a city wherein the humans were rather elven, and the elves were wise, and compassion and wisdom and the beauty of nature were in abundance.  It was a blessed land, and a tremendous vortex of astral energy, charged with purpose.

Bastante would go no further east.  Beyond the Mountain Kingdom of Shambhalla lay the vast plains of Mammon.  East of the plains lay the mighty River, and beyond lay Mordor.  Nestled in the very heart of Mordor lay an enormous city which stretched 800 miles in length and harbored a hundred million slaves.  New Babylon.  It seethed with greed and lamentation.

This was the world Bastante had been born into.  It was a nonsensical reality, bereft of meaning and purpose.   Now was the time.  The mill of heaven ground fine the Ages, and at long last the avatars had returned to correct the course and align with the path of dharma.

He sang his heartsong.  The earth pulsed.  She was waking up.

Nalanda

Bastante Solipsis Marquez met with the chieftans of the tribes of the West, but could not linger.  He sped eastward, over the mountain pass and across the Great Desert which stretched endlessly across the horizon.  In ancient days it would take weeks, even months to cross the apocalyptic ocean of sand and salt.  Bastante rode a steel horse - a white beast named Nanda.  He had a mattress in the back and a 35 gallon biodiesel tank.  Without needing to stop, he could climb to the divide of the Great Western Mountains and descend hurtling into the endless desert, crossing all the way to the hidden and haunted Vale of Darkness, home to the City of the Temple.

     The City of the Temple had banned many Rainbow Warriors, and enslaved many more, and this forbidding and beautiful place had also banned Bastante Solipsis Marquez.  He had no business there.  Here lived the Ice Queen, who had banished him.  He rested in secret, hiding in a cemetery with wolves who howled him to sleep.  His psychedelic tentacles reached out into the night, probing the City, looking for a sign of relent, a glimmer of compassion from the Queen.  And he found it, and clung to it, hoping against hope for a truce, yet as before, the Queen resented his approach and tormented his dreams.  He awoke desperate to leave.  Making a quick offering and singing his heartsong, again he boarded Nanda and hurtled eastwards and south, bewildered by fate and subdued by karma.

Bastante drove out of the Vale of Darkness and entered the Great Mountain Kingdom.  The sands and the browns and the yellows and the reds gave way to higher and higher vistas, snowy mountain passes and evergreen forests which dropped away to rivers far below.  His spirits rose.  He felt at home here in the Mountain Kingdom.

The Great Continental Divide still lay far ahead of him when he detoured south.  Briefly, mountain and desert merged and morphed, one changing into the other.  Skirting the border between them, Bastante followed a river southwards, as it wrapped its way around and through great peaks.  Here, at the southwestern edge of the Mountain Kingdom, another council was held with the peace chiefs of the Western Slope.  Again Bastante was asked to stay, and again he declined.  He would return, he promised.  Time was short, and the demonic forces who sought to destroy the balance in the universe grew more daring by the day.  These asuras - the Lords of Materialism, they were called. The servants of Mammon, others called them.  They were the sorcerers of the Black Nobility, driven by desire to expand without ever contracting, to forever feed Yang while forever depleting Yin.  With tremendous will they had grasped the reins of power, and would never let them go of their own accord. They behaved precisely like an ego does in moments of meditation, refusing to let go.   It was a precarious situation.

Bastante leapt aboard his great steed yet again, and endlessly pressed his way eastward.  He passed over the Continental Divide, and gravity herself pulled him towards his destination as he guided his rocketship ever so slightly to the north, narrowly avoiding the fuming and belching City of the West, gateway to the Plains of Mordor.  He followed a secret passage northwards, out of sight of the City and the Plains, and at last entered the great Elven sanctuary of the Front Range - Nalanda.

Nanda rested in a grove by a creek.  Bastante rested under a tree.  For the moment, he was home.

Field Marshal Marquez

Bastante rolled down the mountains like a raging river, laughing and crying his way into Babylon.
      He drove through ancient forests guarded by elves and owls, following rivers and streams upstream as they coursed out towards the Great Western Ocean.  He passed out of the Great Northwestern Forest, across the razed and zombified Central Valley, into the foothills of the High Western Mountains.  There he briefly held council with the local peace chiefs, Elven-gene reincarnates with dormant dna who appeared fully human, with latent characteristics of, you know, elves.

The elves were reincarnating.  Bastante Solipsis Marquez was a king, although young.  Mother Earth - Gaia - was singing a new tune, a higher vibration, and her tone demanded a harmony that manifested as a choir of spiritual beings taking physical form, a spiritual army of devas and brahmas, angels and arcangels, returning to Earth to bring harmony and balance back to the physical dimension.

Slowly, slowly, the dawning of the Sat Yuga began to begin.

Bastante lived time backwards.  He saw the Sat Yuga in its full glory - it was his true home.  He didn't belong here in Apocolyptic Babylon, and neither did his army.  But it was required of them, and in order to find their way home the Elves had to pull off a trick of reverse-engineering.  Starting off in the Sat Yuga, Bastante and his army were required to reverse-engineer the journey back to Babylon, so they could figure out how to get there from here.

It was coming together.  Not fast enough, nor clearly enough, nor cogently enough, but revelation had done its work, and Bastante had glimpsed the path through the darkness.

Slowly, painstakingly, Bastante Solipsis Marquez and his spirital army were ushering in the Golden Age.  He was a commander of Rainbow Warriors, getting good at it out of necessity.  Nobody saw the full picture of how to get there from here as he did.  He had done the reverse engineering in its entirely within his mind, and all the nuances had been worked out.  He needed the army to implement the plan, and the army needed the plan to implement.  Everyone was here for a reason.

His real name wasn't Bastante Solipsis Marquez, of course.  His real name was Quetzlcoatl.