I work two jobs and don't have much time to read but my room-mate has a copy of Art's book, "The Quickening". As I understand it the quickening is that everything accelerates over time moving toward a cresendo or climax, beyond which a new world order of some kind is born. The quickening is not caused in the normal sense of causation but rather is a part of the pattern of how the world works.(posted 9464 days ago)This corresponds to the way the y2k bug becomes disasterously dangerous, it wasn't really caused, at least in the normal sense of the word. People just did what was appropriate in the normal course of their lives, and the problem has accellerrated beyond any rational explanatiion because everyone who understood the issue lacked the time an energy to solve the problem before it got out of control.