We assume the flow of world history follows random logic, conditioned as we are by Darwinism. But nothing could be simpler than to show a non-random pattern in world history since the invention of writing. The rapid growth of archaeological knowledge since the nineteenth century has greatly expanded our views of world history and, significantly, crossed a threshold of five thousand years, the bare minimum interval, we are about to see, for grasping the logic of historical evolution. This expansion in our knowledge has led to a series of remarkable discoveries.

1. The first is of the so-called Axial Age, the enigmatic synchronous emergence of cultural innovations and advances across Eurasia in the period of the Classical Greeks and early Romans, the Prophets of Israel, the era of the Upanishads and Buddhism in India, and Confucius in China.

2. The second, related to the first, is of the mysterious drumbeat pattern of turning points or transitions proceeding down a mainline of the diversity of civilizations. Looking at this Axial phenomenon we are forced to consider that it is really a step in a sequence, and moving backwards and forwards we suddenly discover the full pattern. Note that these turning points are equally spaced, with an interval of about 2400 years, clear evidence of a cyclical phenomenon.

TP1: the rise of advanced civilization in Egypt, Sumer, ca. -3000
TP2: the sudden synchronous effect of the Axial Age, ca.-600
TP3: the rise of modernity, ca. 1800

In one stroke we discover what was said not to exist, a complete Universal History, rich in interior significance and meaning. We call this pattern the 'eonic effect', a superset of the core Axial Age phenomenon. This pattern is vast, and yet we can in this unique case get a better sense of it from a high-level view beyond the details, a stroke of good fortune. Since short narrative accounts can distort the evidence, we must lay the groundwork for a systematic way, at least in principle, to simply observe the phenomenon. However, using simple periodization, we can momentarily bypass the need for complex interpretations of each period or civilization, and detect a dynamic at work independently of content. As we zoom in, the data pattern starts to take off almost exponentially leaving us with narrative fragments and the subhistories with ethnocentric bias. But the pattern generates its own unifying factors. Think in terms of our zoom targets, and the idea of a fractal: one can zoom in to any depth, and yet the basic pattern remains invariant at the highest level.  These are the two default zoom targets, the first a subset of the second. 

There is a lot to describe here, so we proceed in several expanding repetitions to simply point to the pattern, which invokes the whole data set of world history, and which is logistically hard to keep at our fingertips (the reason it is difficult to make a public metanarrative out of its depiction since it starts multitasking in different directions). One book a piece for each key area is still quite inadequate, and each such book will descend into a local bias.  Significantly, a high-level view is perhaps the best approach, or the best we can manage, to start, as long as we are careful to refine our observations of what we are seeing. In fact, this high-level approach, despite a number of traps, succeeds because there is an overall coherence to the pattern. Although this pattern involves the totality of world history, its action is applied to a subset of the whole. Darwinist speak of selection! Here we will see an interconnected set of selected regions! It is as if development occurs in well-placed target areas, and then proceeds by diffusion into its surrounding.

The idea of a turning point means that there is a staging area and period for a major advance, which ratchets the overall development of civilization to a new level. Unfortunately, the first 'turning point' is just on the boundary of our observational standard, requiring data at the centuries to decade level, but fits the pattern so perfectly, that we are left with an hypothesis of frequency action, whatever that means, a point not required to explore the basic ‘core eonic effect’. In fact, starting with our second turning point, taken in isolation, we could ask, is this period unique? Once posed, the question answers itself: we can see three such periods, if we can see the unity behind them. This first turning point is by no means an absolute beginning. Clearly we have only a fragment of a greater pattern. A three beat sequence is difficult to analyze, the bare minimum needed to show sequentiality at all. Note the equal length of the interval between these points, about 2400 years. It seems like a frequency phenomenon, but our data thins out very quickly. We must have rich data for the Neolithic, and that we don't have. 

Applying a frequency hypothesis to the emergence of civilization is so strange that we can barely give sense to the idea. But as we consider the Axial phenomenon this interpretation is almost unavoidable. A finite interval suddenly becomes active. We would be hard-pressed to call it unique. We swiftly infer other intervals analogous to the Axial Age, once we strip off their disguise. Inclusion of the modern period is also problematical, at first, but we can simply propose this as an extension, by our frequency hypothesis, to our Axial riddle. We see the rise of the modern (what does that mean?) at such close range that the whole phenomenon suddenly becomes transparent, like successive steps in a computer program. Including the modern period in an analysis based on dynamical thinking swiftly generates a series of paradoxes. What of our freedom to act in the present? We will soon this that this is a perfectly valid point but is no objection to our analysis, which will not be deterministic. We must be wary of this point. Universal histories have always tended to derail on questions of fatalism and historical inevitability. We will be forced to think in an entirely new way. The pattern itself will show us how.

One aspect of this contradiction is that while we begin with observations about a system following a dynamic that assumes some sort of mechanization, our pattern is about creative renewals. In and of itself, this is not impossible, but our approach using mixed modes requires care. In any case, we will retreat to bare periodization, which is merely a sequence of dates, and makes no statement about the causal nature of creativity. Despite the logistics of correct study and observation, the general sense of this pattern, to a bird's eye view, is quite simple: it induces recognition, like the pieces of a puzzle falling together. We recognize a system operating in a kind of drumbeat alternation.  Its action is transparent: we see three surges of several centuries, along a complex mainline of selected cultures, with 'medieval' periods in between. The only explanation is that there is a strange driver behind the drama of civilizations. It switches on, advances a handful of regions, then switches off. There is no other way of explaining the enigma of the Axial Age, the clearest case. The process behind this pattern seeds new cultural advance areas, which flow into oikoumenes, as it sets an overall direction. It always restarts in a new area at each step.  It can operate both in parallel and in sequence. The most telling clue is the successive recursive action in the sequence of steps. And this periodization brings the question of historical dynamics into our recent past, rich in detail, and we must be careful about what we mean by modernity. We will soon find 'eonic data' at the level of decades, to remind us that even our first two turning points have a thin record. 

This system, as it draws us into contradictions as we explore its 'causal' explanation, is an ingenious 'widget' operating on two levels, a clever way to balance diversity and unilinear advance. It is still not clear how the two aspects, sequential and parallel fit together. But we are in the presence of a clear historical dynamic, a point especially obvious from the data of the Axial Age. This system, by default, gives us a free gift: the key to a 'science of history' (but only after we call into question the idea of such a causal science). We have found our missing 'force', but it isn't a force, although the resemblance to a 'field' effect is remarkable. The reason we claim the pot for a ‘science of history’ is simple:  no other phenomenon could compete with the comprehensive character of this pattern, whose action derandomizes the expected random occurrence of the historical chronicle. This pattern includes all the key advances of human civilization. The first alternate candidate to be challenged is the economic interpretation of history. Economic 'evolution', while braided with this pattern, is something, we will show, that is distinct from it. Causal statements about this pattern suffer immediate difficulties. We are in the presence of a phenomenon that apparently does nothing on its own, but only induces action in man, who performs an executive function in a sudden state of creativity. There is no other explanation for the diversity of realizations in the pattern, a good example being the synchronous emergence in the Axial interval of an atheist religion next to a theistic one.

Crisis of objectivity We are confronted with an unsuspected dynamic behind the highest and most complex elements of universal human culture. The very methods we use to study this pattern show their dependent lineage by diffusion inside this system, and will be a series of ideologies. Science, philosophy and religion, to say nothing of art, or the Indic dharmas, show their sourcing points, or at least amplification, in sync with the eonic sequence. This creates a danger of ‘interpretative decline’ in the fall-off from the initial peaks of realization. We should be wary of facile interpretations, isolated perspectives, and our inability to produce a ‘meta-description’ of the eonic effect. We should first clock the phenomenon, point to the output, and keep the discussion at a high level of abstraction, mindful that while we have discovered a truly awesome master-narrative of universal history its scope transcends the ‘ideologies of the moment’ that dominate our contemporary present.

One of the strangest aspects of the eonic effect lies in our own immersion in its action. This makes the task of objectivity paradoxical. How as participants in the third turning point do we at once make statements about dynamics and do this without the dynamic getting in the way? We need to adopt a new kind of historical theory to take into account this situation in which an historical dynamic, which we will soon see falls into the evolutionary category, proceeds from the distant past into our present. Part of the paradox disappears once we realize that TP3 is a finite interval already concluded and we not inside the eonic pattern. Our analysis applies only to the pattern, not our present. This is the first peculiarity of this new type of model: a system in alternation ingeniously allows this property: that the observer is outside the field of action. This is strange, but this is actually an invaluable situation, because it forces us to distinguish clearly the action of individuals in relation to a large-scale system. There are very few ways to reconcile the contradictions that arise from this circumstance, but the eonic effect exhibits an example of the simplest way to do this: an alternating sequence with a kind oscillation of degrees of freedom.  But we need to create a special kind of model to keep track of the different levels at work. Life, please note, is full of such situations. We can speak of the dynamics of traffic, but this doesn’t contradict the free activity of the vehicles.

The clearest case then in our ‘eonic sequence’ is the Axial interval followed by the long wane of advance resulting finally, especially in the Occident, in the collapse of the Roman system, the Dark Ages, and the relatively static era prior to the sudden rise of the modern world, almost on schedule after around 1500. Why do we instinctively speak of the 'Middle Ages'? Middle of what? We sense the pattern, without quite seeing it. Why did world civilization show a period of such fast advance, followed by so much sluggish idling? But this is the characteristic behavior of a particular type of system. Progression and relative stasis. This familiar aspect of our perception of world history is unaccountable until we see its context, and the earlier instance of rapid advance in early Sumer and Egypt, followed by the same kind of relatively slower advance. Further, this pattern shows a scale beyond that of individual civilizations, and later we will see the way each step follows a 'frontier logic'. This system is truly global in scope, with a leapfrog effect moving between civilizations. We see that the birth of our great traditions is simply an aspect of this pattern, its second phase. 

The periods stand out because of the rapid-fire innovations clustered in short intervals. Here is the barest summary:

TP1 The birth of the state, appearance of writing, onset of Dynastic Egypt, and Sumer, first higher civilizations
TP2 Onset of two world religions, multiple sources of philosophy, birth of science, Greek democracy…
TP3 Onset of Reformation, secularism, English, French, American Revolutions, Enlightenment, another scientific revolution, another birth of democracy, Industrial Revolution,…

These are just a few of the effects. We can call these effects 'eonic emergents', i.e. intermittent bursts of suddenly emerging cultural constructs. Here’s the hard part: these changes are relative and don't necessarily show absolute innovations (e.g. modern science is not an absolute innovation, and shows a complex earlier history, both medieval and eonic). So, these eonic emergents show sudden spurts of development, but the absolute origin of their history is another question. We take it this way instinctively. We speak of Christianity as one continuous history, tracing its absolute origin, but we also speak of the relative transformation we call the Reformation as interval inside that larger history, and we see, surprisingly that this is part of our larger pattern. Debates over continuity and discontinuity suffer endless confusion over abstraction. But here, armed with such a large-scale example, we see resolution of the paradox, and might do well to avoid such terminology, save to note that the pattern perfectly reconciles the two confusions. World history shows a continuous aspect, and a discontinuous one also. Both perspectives are correct, there is a discontinuous phenomenon overlaid on continuous history, what we will later call a stream and sequence effect. As noted already this correctly applies as well to any concept of acceleration, a term we shall abandon from here on, since we are not dealing with a system of physical laws.

Relative transforms We must be quite wary of TP1, since the data begins to thin very rapidly. The ‘appearance of writing’ must show, not necessarily an absolute beginning, but a relative transform inside what might be a longer continuous history stretching back into the Paleolithic of man’s ‘activity with ‘signs and symbols’.  Not only that, but this transform, as is so clear from the Axial Age examples, must be inside the turning point (whose length we have not even specified as yet, about three centuries we will claim). However, as we zoom out we see the larger pattern of  (relative) beginning followed by the characteristic ‘mideonic’ falloff, so evident in the later post-Axial period. This, quite obviously, is a very steep set of requirements for our analysis, to distinguish ‘discontinuous’ overlay on ‘continuous’ history, but the key to its success. Look at TP3 and the Protestant Reformation, an obvious case of a relative transform inside the turning point interval (about 1500 to 1800).

The clustering of eonic emergents in our series is massive, and at first inexplicable. Pick any cultural category, and the chances are that it will show amplification in this pattern. Philosophy? The Pre-Socratics, TP2. The birth of democracy? Axial Greece and the modern transition, TP2, TP3. Virtually all the basic higher cultural (i.e. more than just technological/economic) advances of civilization take place in this framework. It is easy to find the lineage by diffusion of most civilizations relative to this pattern, with significant exceptions due to the incompleteness of our pattern. 

New World Civilizations This pattern is comprehensive, yet does not so far explicate the issue of New World Civilizations. A pattern such as this has one complication: we must study the tracks of diffusion throughout, not a simple task. Since we have spoken only of relative changes, nothing in what we are saying claims to show either the absolute origin of civilization inside the pattern we have, nor do we reject the possibility of independent creation of civilization(s). However, that suddenly seems unlikely, and the overwhelming influence of the eonic pattern in all other cases leaves us to wonder if some element of Old World diffusion is not present in the New World Civilizations. 

This point is tricky, but absolutely as it should be. In a school, homework might be assigned by schedule, but you could do it in your own time. But would you know how? We see that the Axial Age, so-called, is simply the second step in a short series of intermittent transition-like intervals. It is visible in the extraordinary appearance of a multitude of sages, prophets, and cultural innovators, spread across Eurasia in the time frame -900 to -400. This intermittency is the key: something is operating in a macro effect generating a set of relative transformations of extant cultural streams. Something switches on, and does this it would seem on schedule, and then as quickly the effect wanes. We can even see why the particular areas in eonic focus get selected: they are strategically placed, and follow a frontier effect. No area is used over again.

The 'rise of civilization' at TP1 is a temporary misnomer, being really a kind of relative stage of what must be earlier history that we don't see clearly, as yet. This is another typical case where ‘slow and fast’ development explanations have confused analysts, without a rationale for ‘relative transformations’. As research proceeds complex antecedents leading up to this point will obviously become visible. It is almost the same as the confusion between the Middle Ages and the sudden rise of modernity. Discontinuous and continuous are both at work simultaneously. This puzzling point seems impossible to grasp, but the Axial Age shows the stark reality of this kind of paradoxical behavior. Chinese history shows a strong continuity from the Shang period onwards. But right on schedule in the Axial interval we see a cultural transformation of whatever was already there developing by another process. Note the TP2 interval, the Axial Age: it is a relative transformation and not some kind of absolute beginning. That is a very strange way, at first, to take the question. But then we see that TP1 has the same structure and character, but less advanced. Clearly there were complex antecedents of what we see in early Sumer, and, to a lesser degree, Egypt. Dynastic Egypt dramatically emerges with exact eonic timing. Thus, the so-called Axial Age (which can also be fruitfully studied in isolation) makes no sense until we see it as part of a larger sequence of 'Axial Ages', or relative transformations. As we move backwards and forwards we discover the only real candidates for this, and we can indeed see that these periods almost echo each other. The inclusion of the 'rise of the modern', a very vague term, is at first puzzling, but as we explore the details of the modern transformation we discover the remarkable logic of the whole pattern. Much confusion arises in the attempt to either define modernity as an outgrowth of the Middle Ages, or else a spontaneous new era starting in the sixteenth/seventeenth century. But here we see that modernity as a relative transformation of our type easily reconciles the contradiction, if we can get a sense of its place in a larger world system generating intermittent phases.

The term ‘eonic’ In the midst of a complexity of civilizations and their cultural dimensions, one that defies easy understanding, we detect a very simple kind of system at work, one following some very characteristic properties of operation, which we can isolate. We can call this combined pattern the 'eonic effect'. The term 'eonic' can be taken to mean 'intermittent' with an obvious pun on 'eon', or age-periods. Another pun is 'eonic' in the sense of digital samplers in electronics (type 'eonic into Google for a dozen examples). At each stage a sampling selection of cultural elements occurs, and these undergo relative transforms that amplify into new forms.

We confronted with the fact that a cyclical interpretation of the data is the right one, as long as we are careful about what we mean by this, and steer clear of the traditional confusions of such thinking. The pattern shows an odd resemblance to a continuous frequency sampled at regular intervals, this being a metaphor only. The wavelength would be about 2400 years. The Axial interval seems to 'sample' the cultural totality it finds in place and amplify selected strains into a new form. Thus monotheism, in various inchoate forms, is already present in the prior cultural zones, but in the Axial period, with remarkable precision, these strains are blended into a focused religious formation that will later blossom into a series of world religions, these religions being outside the Axial interval. The Old Testament in fact makes this point with its contrast of an Abrahamic era (whether or not Abraham existed) and the era of the Prophets, faithfully reflecting our eonic analysis. The same is true in India, where depictions of yogis go back millennia before the Axial period, but this cultural strain suddenly crystallizes as an expanding religious formation, Buddhism, in the wake of the Axial interval. These are 'relative transformations'. The point must be considered since the idea of the Axial period has shown a kind of runaway interpretation as a secular version of an 'age of revelation', which is misleading. Another confusion is the idea of some kind of 'Axial thematic' or core philosophy. Hardly the case: almost everything transformed had a prior history, as we have suggested. And the many eonic emergents, or emerging innovations, show a dialectical variety, encompassing many opposites, e.g. the 'atheism' of Buddhism, versus the 'theism' of the monotheistic stream. 

The core eonic effect The best explanation of our data is with a frequency hypothesis, but this creates a speculative question mark about our incomplete pattern, as we track backward in 2400 year intervals in search of prior phases. We can use this hypothesis as an extra beyond the basic 'core eonic effect' consisting of TP2, and TP3, basically the Axial Age and the rise of the modernity, leaving the greater pattern to further research. TP1 is certainly the antecedent here, but as we study TP3 we discover significant structure at the decades level of timing, and this degree of data we don’t have yet for the first period. The core eonic effect makes sense on its own terms if we simply consider it as showing a 'system in some kind in drumbeat alternation', whatever its antecedent steps (which may go back to the Neolithic or beyond). In addition to the core eonic effect we have a useful falsifiable hypothesis of frequency for this mysterious pattern.

We see three rapid threshold crossings or stepping progressions with 'medieval' periods in between of slower advance. Note how the Axial period rapidly falls off and in the Occidental zone we see the period of innovation yield to the long centuries of the Roman Empire, followed by an almost complete collapse of the advance in the Middle Ages. The term 'mideonic' would be better than 'medieval', which has a specialized meaning. But notice how we instinctively sense the 'middleness' of the Middle Ages: we can't help but notice this eonic periodization. The larger pattern shows why. These transitions we can estimate at about three centuries, the first or generative part of a five century interval at each step. Clearly the extra two centuries is really part of the mideonic interval and simply shows the slingshot takeoff after the transition, followed by a rapid damping out of the driving transition.

Transition 1: the relative stage of advance in Egypt, Sumer, ca. -3300 to -3000
Mideonic period 1
Transition 2: the Axial interval, ca.-900 to 600
Mideonic period 2
Transition 3: the rise of modernity, ca. 1500 to1800
Mideonic period 3: our present?! 

The three century interval seems quite artificial, and could be measured in various other ways, but once we study the modern case we will realize that it is probably close to exact, if only as a statistical region. Note that we are outside of the modern transition, but at the end of the full five-century interval of modernity in contemporary times, and the sense of sudden ‘postmodernity’ arises spontaneously (and quite incoherently: the object of the exercise is to maintain, not deviate, from ‘modernity’).

Punctuated equilibrium Although we will avoid the term 'punctuated equilibrium', due to its prior usages, this pattern is an almost perfect case of this idea, the words simply taken in their dictionary sense. The normal flow of continuous history is 'punctuated' three times in a stepping stone sequence. This should be the defining example for the whole idea of a punctuated equilibrium, the one truly documented case of this phenomenon, clearly having nothing to do with genetics. However the ‘equilibrium’ periods are not truly stable, or static. The punctuations are inducing independent growth in the cultures touched. The entire globe goes through a series of convulsions and generates a master sequence of oscillations on continuous history.

This is not a universal global phenomenon, but one occurring in a complex mainline that leapfrogs between cultural zones.  Later, by defining the relationship of history and evolution, we will be able to call this stepping stone progression an 'evolution of some kind', the 'eonic evolution of civilization', with a question about the relationship of this to earlier stages of the descent of man. Such a clear case of a 'macro' process operating on the micro stream of history makes us suspicious of Darwinian thinking about man, at least. 

This pattern, once seen, is highly coherent, and defies all odds of being random, not only because of its clustering, but also because of its interior significance.  The pieces of the puzzle have sudden new meanings once conjoined, and make sense on their own terms. This system is evolving higher civilization, but only partially since the effect merely seeds new starts and leaves the result unfinished. Later we will elaborate on this with our distinction of 'system action' and 'free action'. We are almost helpless: the pattern forces itself on us, even though its complexity would seem to surpass our powers of comprehension. The pieces of this puzzle fall into place in the corner of a still larger puzzle and we can recognize what is going on without having the full data set or any understanding of what is driving this amazing process with independent branches that don't communicate and remorph so fast mutual diffusion could not explain them. And it is clear that our triple sequence is merely a fragment of a greater whole, probably encompassing the Neolithic and before. Later we will propose a frequency hypothesis for our sense that this intermittent series is a set of equally paced transitions with their intervals between them. 

The Axial Age, terminology we will move to replace with something better, is the term created by Karl Jaspers who attempted to synthesize a series of observations accumulating since the nineteenth century. The sudden synchronous appearance of cultural innovation in Rome, Greece, the Middle East, India and China in a period centered on -600 is inexplicable under conventional assumptions. Standard causal reasoning about the 'evolution of cultures' fails because of the simultaneity of relative advances in these separated areas. There is some kind of global factor operating independently of particular civilizations. This is not the evolution of cultures, but a series of time-slices of multiple cultures in parallel. Since this period produces a series of world religions a confusion has arisen over the idea of some kind of 'spiritual age', but a closer look shows that the full effect is multidimensional. For example, in the case of Greece we see the emergence of philosophy, science, democracy, and much else that doesn't fit into a religious framework. Behind Buddhism we see Upanishadic yogis, and these shade into a set of philosophers. Heraclitus is a philosopher, but he is a little bit like a sage-yogi. Pythagoras is an actual 'yoga philosopher', almost explicitly. Confucius is a philosopher, but his work produced a kind of semi-sacred, semi-secular 'culture philosophy' rather than a religion. Clearly our categories blend between themselves at this stage prior to differentiation into philosophy and science.

Our pattern shows a recursive action. In a real sense the Greek Enlightenment is a first draft of the modern Enlightenment, and gives birth to all the essential characteristics of modern secularism. The resolution of the paradox of common denominator will turn out to be fairly simple, and will emerge as we go along. But the basic idea resembles the contrast of libertarian and collectivist perspectives: all the way through we see the dialectic of state and individual. We see the evolution of the state balanced by the evolution of the individual. Then the religions do the same thing. Note how the first eonic step creates the rise of the State, while the second starts to generate the freedom factor of the individual inside the state, Greek democracy. With this clue, we see that 'religions' are simply dialectical variants of the state/individual nexus, with the idea of the state found wanting before the possibility of a still larger transcultural aggregates. This play of collectivist aggregates and individuals is present throughout. The connecting point is the 'self-consciousness' of man as individual versus the mechanized consciousness of man as state person. The libertarian/collectivist paradox is especially clear in the religions generated in the wake of the Axial Age, and we see the way they talk to the self-consciousness of the individual, yet leave us (moderns) puzzled by their clear collectivist tendencies. But we see this is no paradox at all. The state/religion 'paradox' should be obvious from the all time classic Axial transition phenomenon: the 'Israel/Judah' transformation in the Old Testament, simultaneously a state history and the generation period of the materials for a series of later religions. It is worth remembering this point: the Axial interval shown by the Old Testament is the chronicle of a State history, not the creation of a world religion, which comes much later. We must constantly refine our top-level observations, and be wary of teleological assumptions. 

The question of the Axial Age is puzzling until we see its greater context, and the rise of the modern world in many ways contains the key to its understanding. More specifically we have already touched on an integrating clue in the thinking of Kant, whose analysis of the antinomy of causality and freedom provides the tool for the creation of a model for the eonic effect. More than that the 'triplet' 'divinity, soul, free will', so cogently conjoined by Kant, will be discovered to show the transition points not only between philosophies of freedom, viz. a Kantian liberalism, Big Histories as myths of 'cosmic agents" and (Upanishadic) religions of 'soul' (or no-soul as in the case of Buddhism), but also between civilizations themselves. We see Archaic Greece giving birth to ideas of freedom, Israel to 'cosmic agent' histories, and India to 'soul' or 'consciousness religions'. The discovered inherent unity of these permutations at one stroke exhibits the deep coherence behind the eonic pattern.  

 The idea of the 'modern transition', as the next step in a progression, another 'Axial Age', seems strange at first, but makes so much sense of the data that we are driven to see its logic in terms of the eonic effect as a whole. The status of these statements is not dogmatic and we will adopt a heuristic 'try it and see' approach. We will suddenly see that the rise of the modern has a buried structure, visible, for example, in the phenomenon we will see later in the Great Divide. This can also help to integrate our study of world history beyond the confusions of Eurocentrism, postmodernism, religion/secularism, collectivism/libertarianism. The keynote is a process of globalization, and the cultural integration processes revealed in the eonic series highlight the evolutionary process underway. This globalization, however, is much broader and more comprehensive than the current 'economic globalization' we see in the wake of the modern transition. Globalization means just what it says: something of almost Gaian proportions able to generate this eonic series across many millennia, staging a kind of global implosion from a set of isolated hotspots. 

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