What's up, fellow 'shroomers?! I increasingly find warnings, distrust, and even outright threats in these forums.
I thought we were supposed to be the enlightened few. Is the problem money, ego, business rivalry? Imagine coming here for the first time searching for the mushroom Truth and finding instead petty squabbles between peeps who should be joined at the aura through space and time...
Get right. You see the big signs just like I do; we need abundant love and peace to deal with the quickening.
{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{good vibes}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}
Erlkoenig
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Main Entry: quick?en
Pronunciation: 'kwi-k&n
Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): quick?ened; quick?en?ing /'kwi-k&-ni[ng], 'kwik-ni[ng]/
Date: 14th century
transitive senses
1 a : to make alive : REVIVE b : to cause to be enlivened : STIMULATE
2 archaic a : KINDLE b : to cause to burn more intensely
3 : to make more rapid : HASTEN, ACCELERATE
The Quickening of Life
This chemical diversity became the foundation stone for living systems, and as soon as life became established, the rate of development increased. Changes took place not over billions of years, but over millions -- and, later, even faster.
Such lengthy timescales are so far from our everyday experience that it is hard to appreciate just how rapidly evolution has been gaining speed. To get a better feel for these changes, let us chart the evolution of life against a more familiar visual image: New York's tallest building, the quarter-mile-high World Trade Center.
If street level represents the formation of our planet, 4.6 billion years ago, the first living cells appeared about 3.5 billion years ago, on the twenty-fifth of the building's 108 floors. Photosynthesis evolved around the fiftieth floor, and bacteria that breathed oxygen came another ten floors later - more than halfway up.
More complex cells, capable of sexual reproduction and possessing a central nucleus, appeared at about the seventieth floor. Multicellular organisms came another ten floors above that, and crustaceans ruled the waves on the ninety-fourth floor.
Fish appeared on the ninety-seventh floor, and crawled out of the sea on the ninety-ninth.
Dinosaurs reigned on floors 104 to 107.
Mammals arrived on the top floor.
But Homo erectus did not first walk on two legs until a few inches from the top of the top floor. It had taken 99.99 percent of life's journey to reach this step, and humanity was only beginning.
The Neanderthals, with their enlarged brains, simple tools, and tribal culture, appeared in the last quarter-inch. Then came Cro-Magnon people, with clothes, painting, and language.
The Pharaohs ruled Egypt a fiftieth of an inch from the top. And the Greek and Roman empires thrived a hundredth of an inch above that.
The Renaissance occurred in the top one-thousandth of an inch -- less than the thickness of a layer of paint.
And the whole of modern history occupies but the thickness of a microscopic bacterium.
The age of the microchip, rock'n'roll, nuclear power, moon walks, global warming, and the Internet is a layer almost too thin to measure.
One thing is clear: wherever we are going, we are going there faster and faster.
And yes, it will hurt!
Erlkoenig
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