Quickening and the Evolutionary Process
It was once known that there is an actual quickening as evolution speeds full on ahead. This quickening is the acceleration of time many of us have felt - rising and falling in waves with stops and starts - over the course of our lives.
Quickening is the promise of possibility in our DNA, and the exultant joy of life force exploding in every cell.
Quickening is the spiritual engine pushing rivers of time and regeneration into one single fruitful flow.
Quickening also refers, as it sounds like it should, to anything going faster.
There’s probably a physics equation that accounts for the planetary acceleration that pushes evolution along - but i’m just guessing here. Mathematical equations are now lifetimes behind me and light years ago.
What else can still be known about quickening?
Quickening, as per Wikipedia, refers to bursts of fetal movement during pregnancy.
But the quickening of which i speak, with its drive toward actualization, is not acknowledged in Nature any more, except regarding pregnancy; i can find no reference to quickening in terms of evolution any more.
Instead, technology has redefined quickening to give itself front and center stage; as in, only technological leaps matter to history, but life itself does not.
As language is increasingly coopted by dominant forces and redefined, the word quickening has come to refer to cycles of technological advances and discoveries that leave time, space, and matter irreversibly altered and transformed.
Tech advances, and the race to remain relevant in a world gone mad…
It is this mechanically driven quickening that denies human physiology, pushing the nervous system (OUR nervous systems!) into chronic hurry and worry and the anxiety of not being relevant enough and never being able to keep up.
It’s an unending hamster wheel of stress that sooner or later makes the strongest among us nervous, sleepless, and unwell; and rarely feeling relevant enough; then, seeking fixes like an addict - in fleeting moments of approval from the world - validating that we exist and may even matter.
And in those moments where all likes shower upon us and we feel our identity redeemed by the crowd, adrenergic and dopaminergic hormones flood us and slam the needle to extreme highs - leading to addictive highs that exhaust our nerves, burn out our adrenals, and lower our resistance to illness and our resilience to stress.
Adrenergic hormones like cortisol, adrenaline, and noradrenaline spike the sympathetic nervous system into high alert and fight-or-flight. Continued production of adrenergic hormones leads to depletion and adrenal fatigue.
Dopaminergic hormones provide both a sense of satisfaction, and a craving for more. For example, continual dopamine release while navigating social media or obsessing in our work can create an addictive emotional need for “the next hit”.
It’s the ultimate existential irony. The life we are for the most part compelled to live is a booby trap that ever accelerates to completely highjack and deconstruct our brains!
And ironically, the only way to catch up and reverse degenerative hormonal cascades is to S-T-O-P.
But, we argue with ourselves, we can’t stop or even slow down; and onward into greater dysfunction we invisibly and breathlessly slide.
Stress hormones block healing. We know this.
Quiet time and natural light soothe and repairs the brain.
Here’s are some subtle and persistent examples of brain damage people commonly sustain in life and yet ignore:
1) WORSENING VISION - in many cases we insist on staring at flashing pixels on devices and tiny screens for far more hours than we sleep - we never rest or replenish our eyes.
2, 3, & 4) INSOMNIA, HEADACHES, & CHRONIC DISEASE - Brain waves are interrupted and accelerated on technology; radiation flows through us from the grid of everything and the worldwide web, penetrating our flesh and bones. Staring at phone and computer screens also gives us digital dementia and pixel-whiplash day and night and day and night - it rattles and disorganizes the brain.
WHEN DID EVOLUTION BECOME SO HAZARDOUS TO HEALTH?
The road to quickening split long ago, and too many were steered seamlessly into what one might call the great Google quickening and its techno-hive-mind, where we are slaves to devices and online avatars, relationships, and accounts. This detour away from soul is the ultimate and most subtle coup, and it fits perfectly with future agendas for societies of fully roboticized hybrid humans.
The rest of us still choose to share good, ol’ fashioned spiritual quickening, keeping nature and the senses alive.
The divine created too much glory, color, and vitality to be reduced to mundane zeros and ones.
SPIRITUAL QUICKENING
At this point, we must reconsider the urgency of spiritual quickening as our greatest evolutionary edge.
Spiritual quickening shows up in all traditions that love and honor the sacred in life.
i have seen a few bibles, and myself am drawn to India’s spiritual scripture, hymns, and poetry, for its vibrational force. In Christian bibles, quickening - which appears in several psalms - is when God fills us with Divine Light; or resurrects the dead. Contemplation reveals to me that all religions based on a Loving, omnipotent god say much the same thing.
We are quickened through reverent connection with the god of our heart. By caring for others, we grow to embody the shimmering light of our beloved divine.
It seems to me Divine Light is exactly the energy we need to quicken and cultivate right now…so here is my idea:
Call in Divine Light, Source, Infinite Love, Great Spirit, Goddess, or God, as you wish; for it matters not how we invoke this evolutionary quickening together here and now today.
It only matters that we DO.
“I can’t promote this Quickening enough. You were born during this time to evolve at the fastest rate that you could. You got to know what you have at this time. This is what you came to this planet for…
That’s why there’s such a calling in you to become conscious, to be at peace, where you’re at. We all have to not just change, but we have to transform the way we think and how we feel, how we feel is through our heart. That is where your spiritual quickening is optimized…
All masters know this…”
(excerpted from web article)
May we find ourselves illumined, illuminated, and transformed by the quickening power of evolution birthed within us as sacred Light.
and so it is…
Thanks Yolanda. Another excellent article. It's our Spiritual Quickening that IMHO will keep us
buoyant in times of troubled waters.
thank you for this yolanda. the path of heart requires nothing more than our attention to it and our reaching out from it. i will share this. much love, blee