qua – as;  as being;  in the character or capacity of.  ‘The work of art qua art can be judged by aesthetic criteria only’.  Author asks:  what happen to the status of a shaman qua anthropological informant when he/she is ‘discovered’ by the New Agers?

Qayylum – “I think Qayyum means that what one has gained by life is recycled into the programming. I think that is everlastingness. So what has been gained by life is perpetrated by being distilled and eventually recycled in the divine programming.” . . .”Qayyum is that which was transient is being eternalized. Jalaluddin Rumi says, “Tonight the umpteen stars give birth to the life eternal.” That means that which is ephemeral, says Jami, will be eternalized. Rather the quintessence of it will be eternalized just like perfume. That is what is happening to you. You are rehearsing for the passage of death by resurrecting before you die. That can only happen by transmuting your body – enhancing the esoteric chemistry of the body hormones, the neurotransmitters, the enzymes, maybe transmuting electrons into photons, so that you continue to live as a being of light after the demise of the – let’s say the demise of the body is not the correct word – after the spreading out, the dispersal of the electrons of the body. Because the photons don’t have any mass. The process of transmutation takes place in your body, which is enhanced by your awareness of that process in your body. While the very subtle body, your celestial counterpart, acted as the template of your subtle body and your physical body now is the result of the transmutation of your body and celestial body.” . . .”Qayyum means everlastingness. . . .everlastingness is something that had a beginning in time, but does not end. And eternity has neither beginning nor end. So the word for eternity is Samad, and the word for everlastingness is Qayyum.” — Pir Vilayat

Quatralia – Australia out of focus

Quietism – A little more than a year ago, at the first World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, the Latin American writer Eduardo Galeano commented that our societies suffer from ‘fear of solitude … fear of dying, fear of living.’ The dominant trends encourage passivity. ‘Quietism is based on fear.’ And: ‘The system presents itself as eternal. The power system tells us that tomorrow is another word for today.’ – Norman Soloman

quintessence –   Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French quinte essence, from Medieval Latin quinta essentia, literally, fifth essence  Date: 15th century.  1: the fifth and highest element in ancient and medieval philosophy that permeates all nature and is the substance composing the celestial bodies [syn: ether] 2: the purest and most concentrated essence of something 3: the most typical example or representative of a .   – Dictionary/Webster

Quorum sensing ~ is a system of stimulus and response correlated to population density. Many species of bacteria use quorum sensing to coordinate gene expression according to the density of their local population. In similar fashion, some social insects use quorum sensing to determine where to nest. This coordinated behavior of bacterial cells can be useful in a variety of situations. For instance, the bioluminescent luciferase produced by V. fischeri would not be visible if it were produced by a single cell. By using quorum sensing to limit the production of luciferase to situations when cell populations are large, V. fischeri cells are able to avoid wasting energy on the production of useless product. Quorum sensing can function as a decision-making process in any decentralized system, as long as individual components have: (a) a means of assessing the number of other components they interact with and (b) a standard response once a threshold number of components is detected. ~ Wikipedia