We can bring all our ideas together in a short summary of our eonic model, now in the form of an outline of history. But before doing that we can bring in one last idea, the idea of a sort of floating ‘fourth turning point’, and can speak of ‘general TP4 exceptions’.  Later we will connect this to questions of ideology, especially the ideology involved in saying that TP3 is a major turning point.

TP4 exceptions Our eonic history is about what we see in the past. At all points the human agents were free to act in any way, and yet we see the system sets an overall direction. As the eonic sequence shuts down those agents are again free to act in any way, including the possibility of producing actions scripts that will undo TP3. In fact we are seeing that already. Since we have made no predictions, not even that anyone should agree with the direction (s) set by our system. We can see however that TP3, which is now something more than the splitting outcomes of rival ideologies, would be hard to undo! The real problem is the phenomenon we see in antiquity after the Axial interval, a slow but steady collapse of general advance. A great many ‘general TP4 exceptions’ attempted to wrest control of history and the future in that mideonic period.
Action Script Falsification Nothing in our formulation preempts the possibility of a special kind of TP4 exception: setting up a plan of action that will contradict/undo TP3 by creating a new ‘turning point’ out of synch with the eonic sequence, thus proving it false! In fact, this possibility goes a long way toward explaining much reactive anti-modernism, postmodern critique of the Enlightenment, and much else. And it shows that our affirmation of the eonic sequence contains an ideological element. This however is no objection to our basis thesis which is not, to repeat, a set of statements about historical laws, but a set of observations about the relationship, in the past, between an ‘eonic system action’ and ‘free action’. These issues should come home to roost at the end of our model making, but for the moment we can say that undoing TP3 would likely prove very difficult, the result being instant chaotic decline. Consider the rapid fall off after the Axial interval. We should do better to preserve the gains of eonic evolution! Just at that point we realize our difficulty in even defining the ‘modernity’ we associate with TP3. We must graduate to the immense task of realizing our model as what it also is: a simple periodization map turning into a world history chronicle.
From evolution to history The way we have set up our model, in some fashion, automatically answers all these objections. Our task is not reactive anti-modernism, but a genuine self-consciousness that can both realize and transcend the eonic sequence, as we ‘exit evolution into history’. That, however, is not so simple.

Thus there is a strange solidity to our thinking: we have built in a principle of falsification! But let us proceed to recapitulate our basic ideas. The data of the eonic effect, with its shades and hues brought out by the accompanying eonic model (it's like a high-contrast effect given to a photograph), gives us a complete but high-level snapshot of a strange new entity, the 'eonic evolution of civilization'. To summarize our terms again: We have connected the ideas of evolution and history, bypassed the problem with laws of history. We then created a simple model, and connected this with a key theme of the philosophy of history. This model is simply a matrix of periodization, in which we keep a careful distinction of 'system' and 'free activity'. The slow alternation of the two creates the eonic effect. Note that ‘theories’ and models are part of the output of our system.

Observers, embedded agents What is our status as observers of this system? We have already answered this. We have a model that carefully defines ‘theory’, ours at least, in the present, and which preempts the Oedipus effect by switching off after the close of our pattern, so that ‘theory’ applies only to the past, looking backwards. Theory is a codependent evolute in the eonic sequence. The outcome of the transitions are a series of action scripts, i.e. potential domains of 'action realizations' on eonic themes, sequentially dependent on the 'eonic emergents'. 
The question of the observer is crucial since such observers chameleon the ideological emergents of their own transitions, e.g. the redactors of the Old Testament, expressed the output of the system as 'action scripts'. We would like to replace all these observers with a scientific eonic observer, but that is not so simple, since science has no categories for this kind of analysis, as yet. However, to be an eonic observer requires only basic operations, e.g. periodization, and can be done independently of the ideological content of the eonic sequence (maybe). 

This approach allows us to deal in a useful way with directionality without the confusions of teleology. This model is really about two levels, and we see the stream level and the level of the eonic sequence. These two levels are braided together and this matches the dynamic driving 'eonic evolution'.

Discrete-continuous models The type of model we use is a so-called discrete-continuous model because we see a discrete series of turning points overlaid on a continuous pattern of world history.

The switched off present The elegance of a discrete-continuous model where the 'system' takes the discrete series aspect, and 'free action' the continuous history aspect, is the way the character of the system changes as we enter our present. Note that we are outside the 'eonic series' and have been executives of the output of the system.

Verification in the data This property of our model shows spectacular confirmation, as we will see, in the phenomenon of the Great Divide ca. 1800 in the modern transition. 

Nothing could be simpler than this approach to modeling: We change our mental software in a very simple way and the data makes sense! We simply take our three turning points and turn them into discrete transitions three centuries in length in an eonic sequence overlaid on our second universal history, TP1, 2, 3 become:

Transition 1: birth of civilization -3300 to -3000
Transition 2: Axial interval -900 to -600
Transition 3: rise of the modern 1500 to 1800

Isn't this a bit artificial?  Yes, it is, or seems so at first, but it doesn't really matter since a rough match is quite sufficient. These transitions create a fishnet, and only approximate an unknown functionality, but undoubtedly map out statistical regions.

Eonic emergents, relative transforms Our observations are based on the way stream phenomena show 'relative transforms' as they become 'eonic emergents'. The Axial transformation of 'monotheism' is a 'relative transform' (it existed before) and by definition thus an 'eonic emergent'. 
Note that we cannot define the 'essence of a transition', e.g. modernity, since each one is a spectrum of eonic emergents forming no simple philosophical unity. Approximations, e.g. 'Scientific modernism'  or 'Enlightenment rationality' are only approximate up to a point. 
'System action'/'free action' The question of causality and freedom yields to 'system action' and 'free action', which in the eonic sequence are also called 'eonic determination' and 'free action'. Evolution yields to history, as the degree of freedom increase, Freedom growing out of 'free action'. 
Self-consciousness The medium of action, and emerging freedom, is self-consciousness. This is also the medium of eonic determination. True freedom lies beyond and outside of eonic determination, which happens in the mideonic periods or at the end of the eonic sequence. 
These terms allow us to efficiently describe the eonic system in general terms beyond the actual content. 

There is nothing dogmatic or even fully derived in this matrix. It simply works if we take it that way. It is like the schedule in a school. The timing of classes is given, system action, but the content is 'free action'. Later we will consider foundationalist questions and ask what foundation we can give to this model. One approach that avoids metaphysical foundationalism to adopt a 'circular epistemology' as explored by such figures as Hegel. IF we set up a model, however arbitrarily, then as we enter into its implications we see in practice its basis in reality: there is an extraordinary match to the data. More generally we explore a theory of the evidence, short of a closed depiction of mechanism, which is always beyond observation, by definition, for reasons we will see.  But as an approximation it encompasses the statistical regions of innovation that form the cluster effect of our pattern. Too many pieces of a puzzle fall into place for the model to be too far off the mark. 

Relative beginnings The nice thing about this model is that we can start anywhere. We have, as yet, no absolute beginning to our series, although we proposed a frequency hypothesis extending it backwards. But that hypothesis is not necessary for the use of what we have. In fact, we suspect that our transitions create a net increase in complexity, information, and self-organization in a way that is not causally sequential with its antecedent periods. 

End of Sequence? Note that we are outside the last transition and that this switches off in our past: our current action may or may not express the aggregate directionality shown, which is highly complex in any case, comprising multiple parallel streams. Thus the teleology, if any, inferable from the continuation of TP3, may be quite different from that of the overall sequence. We are left with a question, have we reached the end of the sequence? 

We don't know but we can only assume that we have exited the eonic sequence in the final stage of the 'evolution of freedom'. We have no secure grounds for claiming to be outside of the eonic sequence. After the Axial Age, most of what is necessary for the conduct of civilization was present, yet the system collapsed and went into mideonic decline. Science, and democracy virtually died out.  Despite many myths of a future cyclical coming age the eonic system was able to restage an unexpected system return. But as we observe the eonic effect we suspect its future return would collide with anticipation. We must suspect the eonic series terminates as we become aware of it. Expectation of future return created hopeless confusion in previous eras, the myths of the last times being examples. Hegel's version, a myth of another kind, might help to stabilize such extravagance.  This end of eonic sequence is a true beginning, the birth of true history, but under dangerous conditions, since we have to ability to conduct cultural change on the scale of the eonic effect. So, we must learn. 

All this seems strange, but these points are crucial. This limitation to our model, i.e. it is not predictive, is in fact the payoff of this approach.  In practice, this model, taken as a timeline using periodization can simply help us to visualize the eonic effect, and map out its structure, as a ‘tracker-approximator’, the same thing physicists use with an intractable system, and economists with economic cycles (where they can see effects, but not necessarily causes). 

Economic cycles Our method, even as we bypass the economic interpretation of history, resembles the stance of economists studying economic cycles. Economists produce theories about cycles in the past, looking backwards, and their model switches off in the present, and they have ‘free action’ in this present (i.e. the ability to modify the cycles, maybe). Predictions may still be possible, but free action can change any such prediction, at least theoretically.  
Note: Economic evolution? An essential issue is to see that while the question of economic systems is braided with this pattern, the two are not the same. Look at TP2. Multiple eonic emergents cluster there that are not economic by category. We can’t use economic explanations for the sudden appearance of world religions, philosophies in a spectrum, and everything else, including flowerings of art.  

That’s it. Our model is simply a grid on the surface of a planet, showing a sequence of transitions between different regions, sometimes with parallel connections.

 It might seem that this model is ad hoc, or artificial (and we can cheerfully accept such critiques), but we can see that to find such an elegant, if incomplete, simplicity in something so stupendously complex as a five thousand years of history is the real surprise. The model accurately reflects the actual data of evolution on a planet. The only real  problem is that we are unfamiliar with a system that acts on fuzzy regions, fields of free action.

 In fact this approach puts world history to a test. We are, it seems, unable to find anything there that corresponds to an overall direction, to the idea of progress, or to the prior existence of what we call in Darwinian terms, 'evolution'. We can see that appearances are deceptive and a careful 'sequence test' (even if trial and error) using periodization based on the clusters of most fundamental innovation uncovers immediately a directional mainline. It has remained unseen because we are unfamiliar with a theoretical gesture as abstract as a 'discrete-continuous' model, which detects the modus operandi immediately, however fuzzy the result. We fail to see progression because we are thrown off the scent by the sudden declines in the wake of the transitions. The solution was to extend the scale and look comprehensively at the whole. The intuitive picture of such a model is that of intermittent surges of advance. 

Punctuated equilibrium would have been the perfect term here, but its usage is already prejudiced by other claimants, so we will steer clear of it. It is, however, something familiar from our experience (the analogue is not exact) in a thermostatic device, whose action switches on an off. Something switches on intermittently over the course of world history, apparently in a timed sequence, ca. 2400 years. That's clearly different from feedback, since we seem have a system in a frequency mode, as strange as that might seem. We can offer no final explanation for this phenomenon, but if you thought that history was random, that was wrong. And that's that. 

The reason we can get away with such a fuzzy model is that the data could avalanche in two directions: random or non-random. It doesn't take much to force avalanche to a non-random pattern, and the data, fretted in the eonic model, crosses the threshold well beyond what we could expect from chance. More than this the pattern shows meaning, which allows us to detect its overall coherence and long-range unity, connecting successive stages of the sequence. One reason is the phenomenon of 'double emergence', or recursive restarting. Consider science and the case of the missing centuries, or the double emergentism of democracy. To our astonishment we find this to highly significant. This alternating successive clinches the eonic model, and shows that our system has memory. 

One of the most useful aspects of our model is the way that it doubles as a simple periodization outline of world history. So we will morph the previous section on the eonic model into a succinct outline of world history. This model is at first a strange way to look at history, but it gets results without indulging in supernatural fictions and in this chapter we will attempt to show the way it uncovers something mysteriously elegant in the sense of making definite the 'evolution of freedom'.

Theistic histories The fact must be faced that we have produced, roughly speaking, a secularized universal history, whatever that means. The term 'secular' requires careful definition. We don't have to indulge in positivistic acid bath treatment of historical data to get this result. The philosophy of history is a perfectly good companion to science, whatever its limits. Such things were always considered to be 'spiritual or sacred' histories, with their transcendent sources, but, with an idea from Kant, we have replaced all that with a two-level analysis, which might impinge on what Kant meant by 'transcendental' (as opposed to transcendent), and this gives the appearance of being well within the domain of greater nature. However, this two-level analysis will generate a distinction not unlike the noumenal/phenomenal one in his philosophy. This distinction replaces 'material/spiritual' distinctions, and is adapted to an extended science.  This simply means that while we get a clear picture of the eonic effect, we never see its mechanism, a point we can proceed to demonstrate by looking at the question of freedom in history. Our representations of history can only detect relative transforms, as period of rapid advance. Our perceptions are framed within temporal, spatial, and causal rubrics, with the 'freedom' rubric ambiguously on the boundary, at the limits of our perceptions. Later we will consider the question of 'historical freedom' and (Kantian) 'transcendental freedom' as an idea nexus adapted to our data. 
Methodological naturalism If we reject supernaturalism, that is not a new dogma. But any claims here immediately prejudice the case with metaphysical presumption. Naturalism, if defined by strict causality, itself begins to breakdown, but is the 'grab bag category' of last resort, the solution being to annex new phenomena to its definition. There can be no final solution to this problem, even though we give the first innings to naturalism, almost by definition. 
Staying practical... In fact, we will be finished describing the eonic effect and constructing the eonic model long before we come to any conclusions about naturalism or methodology, which contain metaphysical ambiguities.  
Philosophic timing Now see that methodological relativity can be addressed by considering the key point of the 'divide' and making any methodological 'eonic emergents' prime resources, since as we have seen the quality post-divide may decline. Kant appears with a mysterious eonic timing to his, and his generation's labors (of the generalized Enlightenment, French, English, German...). 
The Old Testament: a version upgrade A strange thing happens to our interpretation of the remarkable Old Testament: we see its significance is not that of God-in-History, but that of the eonic evolution of civilization, and a most remarkable instance at that. We have no evidence of divinity acting in history (although we see what the Israelites meant!) that couldn't be applied to our other transitions, where it obviously doesn't belong. So, stripped of this perspective, what do we have left? A lot, in fact, a much better understanding of the Bible than it can provide for itself.  Our respect and reverence for that great gift of eonic data can easily transfer itself into a secularized account far more useful than the primitive fictions that now belabor that great text and throw its religious adherents into mythological regressions and teleological fanaticisms. 

We have noted the resistance, for good reason, of narrative historians to questions of theory, but we have shown how, taken in the large, the study of world history cannot do without a theoretical framework. We cannot now restrict ourselves to specialization in one area of world history. No more one-track mind accounts of Western Civilization. If we yield to the demands of narrative history, we still insist on an account of the whole using the eonic guideline, from the Neolithic to the present. The Indic stream, which crosses the eonic sequence boundary in the Axial, is almost a parallel universe to the Occident, and its history has never been properly told anywhere, anytime. And yet its invisible operatives are often in the thicket of historical incidents, in disuguse. 

So we are back to where we started, trying to find some means to organize such a huge tale. That's a colossal job! But ironically the eonic effect does the first step for us, and the immensity of world history suddenly becomes a meaningful (but incomplete) chronicle of mere millennia, three drumbeats in a progression of man's greater evolution, ten thousand years of sudden fast advance, the first, we suspect, since the period of the Great Explosion. There is a unity to the whole of man becoming Man, an unfinished evolution. 

We can at least indicate in principle how to do this history. We have the basic map, and note the way it enforces a discipline of the whole, with the Neolithic soon to be included. It is better to be brief with an outline than to concoct mini-narratives five pages long, one for each age period. We need to garland the work of multiple histories wholesale. We mediate the whole via a set of 'streams' related to a master sequence. The whole is evolving through a subset of seminal regions. Our model is designed like Chinese boxes, one inside the other, and we can start anywhere, because our eonic sequence is a set of relative beginnings. We might aspire to, but do not need, an account of absolute origins. We need not derive anything (although we should do that anyway) from the prior past, and enforce that on a later 'present'. 

We can say, for example, that man is a meateater, and that this reflects his Paleolithic evolution, but we can also say that the Axial Age produced an evolutionary innovation, vegetarian religions. No prior claim on the 'evolution of human nature' stands supreme over that definition therefore (we should consider such claims anyway since 'eonic innovations' have no absolute status either, could be experiments, and might encounter millennia of resistance, etc,...). This a good, deliberately provocative, example of the way the temporary splitting of eonic mainline into a set of parallel lines in the Axial Age allows our system to explore alternate futures. 

Our eonic sequence is therefore a thimble-sized world history from scratch, suddenly becoming visible in the relative onset of higher civilization. 

The rise of civilization: Sumer, Egypt
The ‘Axial’ phase: Greece/Rome, Middle East (? Canaan), India, China
The rise of the modern: sector of Europe

This list is a little odd, because its clear sequential character is complexified by its overlaid synchronicities at each sate, Egypt and Sumer, the Axial Age, along with the absence of such in the last phase. In fact, our sequential intepretation is a special case of a more complex process, which can be understood by considering a grid-like piece of graph paper applied to the surface of the planet. Our system not only in intermittent sequence, but in intermittent, or interspacial (?) hopscotch (where a child does two feet down, one foot up): Our system leapfrogs between adjacent areas, and produces what we called the 'frontier effect'. Its next stage, in the evidence we have, shows how it leapfrogs to a new area in each transition, and it does this at the boundary of its prior field of diffusion. All at once we see why Sumer and Egypt don't enter the Axial Age, and, further, we notice, all of sudden, why it is that our eonic sequence hugs the furthest frontier of Eurasia, in so-called Western Europe (and there especially its Northern untouched areas). Once we take into account this leapfrogging frontier effect, the intermittent sequence suddenly becomes completely clear. What a strange result, at first! But a little reflection shows us that this is a natural way to obviate sluggish sandbanking of civilizations. Keep on the move, and stage innovation at the frontiers. 

Modern unidirectionality? The puzzle of the Axial Age synchrony is matched by the mirror image puzzle of the absence of geographical synchrony in the modern transition, leading to endless confusion about a Eurocentric Western civilization. But as we enter intensive globalization, the realization that the modern transition, with its frontier focus, is a transient interval in a greater eonic sequence resolves many paradoxes at one stroke. An Axial phenomenon in a shrinking world would have proved disastrous, and the transcultural latency of modernist universalism gives a rubric for an eonic first: a globalized oikoumene. 

We now see the significance of what we call the birth of civilization, which is classifiable as one of our ‘relative transformations’ in what we suspect is a series going backward into the Neolithic. Look at the medieval period leading to the sudden rise of the modern. Now look at the antecedents to the sudden crossing of a threshold in Egypt and Sumer. The resemblance is exact.

Let us extrapolate backwards to create a ‘retro-diction’, and leave the issue open to future data. (We don't need any of this to proceed, having made each stage of our data a 'stream and sequence' unit.) We do that by applying our model of ‘transitions, equally spaced, to the whole period starting before the Neolithic, with an interval of about 2400 years. This generalization is not yet confirmed, but illustrates the meaning of the data we do have very well indeed. This extension will in fact keep our statements honest, because we might forget that our data is incomplete. We are dealing with a fragment. 

Transition 1  ?Mesolithic transitions
Transition 2  ?Proximate start of Neolithic  ca. -8000
Transition 3  ?The Middle Neolithic interval  ca. -5400
Transition 4:  The birth of civilization, interval before -3000
Transition 5:  The revised ‘Axial’ period, interval before -600
Transition 6:  The early modern, interval before 1800

We are already suspicious of the period in the sixth millennium, and there is an already filling gap in our knowledge in the area to the north of Sumer in the Fertile Crescent. A highlands culture zone to the north of Sumer seems to flow outward into the Mesopotamian area, in a frontier effect, prior to the historical period. But, whatever the case, we can't start making cocksure statements about slow evolution in the Paleolithic anymore. 

Let us recall our already defined terms. Note that our frequency series shows the eonic sequence, and that in between we have the mideonic periods which show a series of oikoumenes created by diffusion. 

Stream and sequence We have created two levels to our model, and we can consider the history of a particular culture the stream aspect, and the intersection of that with the larger evolutionary process the sequence aspect. 

Consider the example of Greece. The stream of Greek history is one thing, and proceeds as the tale of a culture or cultural complex over many millennia. But its intersection with the 'eonic sequence' produces a transition in a larger process. This is the characteristic Axial Greek period, issuing from the Dark Ages into the so-called Archaic, then Classical periods. This is actually a very efficient way to 'evolve' a whole through an isolated series of parts. 

Diffusion and oikoumenes Each transition produces a diffusion field leading to a new oikoumene. The Hellenistic is one classic example and appears almost immediately in the wake of our Greek Axial transition. 
Sequential dependency This process creates a broader rubric than causality. Each successive culture in the diffusion field shows a kind of loose determination created by the transition. 

The reason for this is the inability of the successors to match the creative intensity of the transitional period. People begin to look backwards and form a tradition based on the transition. Many of the seminal innovations are in fact lost as time goes on. Greek democracy fails to endure, or example. The world of empire takes over. The great flowering of Greek tragedy simply stops immediately at the end of the fifth century. To understand sequential dependency consider this case of tragic drama. To overcome this dependency effect we would have to be able to produce tragic dramas 'on demand' as it were! Clearly in this one case we are still the downfield sequence unable to freely 'transcend history'.

The ingenious discipline of the eonic model is that it demands balance applied equally to all times and areas, and this can be achieved efficiently by dividing the surface of the planet into zones, according to time-periods. But the eonic outline does this already. We can 'reach' each period of history by using the major transitions as jumping off points. Note how the eonic outline corresponds to some minimum principle implicit in nature itself: a period of eonic evolution is conveniently placed at all the crucial points to generate a globalization of the whole. But we have said very little so far about the New World civilizations, and this raises an important issue. 

Nothing in our model excludes the independent emergence of civilization in multiple areas. Our eonic series shows a predominance of effect, but has no monopoly on invention. Quite the contrary, we see that our eonic sequence tends to 'sift' the prior achievements of the cultures in its direct path and amplify them for 'general distribution'. The greater totality of human cultures has many latent resources inherited from the Paleolithic, and our eonic sequence performs but a selection of cultural factors from this totality. There is hardly another explanation for the way it seems to contradict itself, as it spawns two world religions in parallel, the atheist Buddhism, and the monotheistic proto-Judaism. In each case the prior stream was there, but as they intersect with the eonic sequence the latent cultural potential self-organizes into vehicles useful to the dominant theme of globalization. 

Thus, there is nothing in our account to preempt the possibility of the independent emergence of civilization in the New World. And in fact, without a trace of prejudice against this magnificent zone of human cultural achievement, the fact must be admitted that these civilizations are a bit anemic and sluggish compared with the high-octane fast-paced advance occurring in the Eurasian field. We suspect that we see an example of what the independent evolution of culture without a macro driver would be like. The Eurasian landmass, with a center of gravity, or rather, diffusion, in the Middle East is clearly a more efficiently compact field of operation, giving a small investment in a series of hotspots or transitions a big payoff in the rapid spread of civilization to its far corners. Notwithstanding this view of the New World civilizations we nonetheless suspect a strong element of diffusion is at work in the emergence of the Olmec, Mayan, and other New World cultures, a question with a considerable controversy. More on this issue later. But let us note that we have produced an 'idea for a universal history' and this produces in reality two universal histories. 

Two Universal Histories Attempts to produce universal histories suffer from the selectivity of their focus. Our approach has a built in failsafe: even as follow an eonic mainline we encounter the set of cultural streams that crosses the boundary of the sequence. And the totality beyond that is as much our real subject as the selective mainline of advance. We thus have two, or multiple universal histories, encompassing the totality of human culture. 

Note that this form of evolution has its own drawbacks, and generates its own tensions, witness the confusions of the various Buddhists, or the Jews and Christians. But with the Axial Age we see for the first time the emergence, still from a localized source, of transcultural vehicles, 'portable cultural software', capable or rapid adaptation to the cultures that encounter these diffusing influences.

Thus the eonic model has a lot to say about each stage of historical evolution. But at the same time we can displace our model into the background and almost make its sequence of transitions a set of chapter headings. Our narrative accounts will be buttressed by a strong sense of historical meaning and coherence, with a viable claim on historical directionality. We can proceed to study the teleological questions raised by that without committing ourselves to any final conclusions. Questions of teleology are themselves productions of the system, and can galvanize action in the wrong direction. Our stance is to mediate themselves relative to the eonic sequence. If a religious formation generated in the Axial interval, for example, makes claims on the future, to the extent of proposing to overwhelm modernity with some postmodern counter-modernity, we can point to the place of the modern transition in a greater sequence, and as a justification of modern freedoms and their realization. 

Our model is set up so that we are always taking the measure of our present degree of freedom in the context of a dynamic that is confined to the past. This requires a clear demarcation of the modern transition from the 'new age' that it initiates, and this requires the tandem understanding of the transition and its divide. We can proceed to ask if we have evidence of such a phenomenon, and we find most remarkably that a rough measure of three century transitions gives us a modern transition from 1500 to 1800, hence its divide at the proximate point of the Enlightenment, around 1800. This 'prediction' of our model is so amply confirmed in practice that we know that, however artificial or approximate, our model uncovers an unsuspected property of modernity. This period, and we see that it is not accident, is packed with innovations, and then we enter the modern period proper as a kind of realization. 

It is like a rocket. You have countdown and liftoff. A phenomenon has a complex start (transition), and the end of the start is the beginning of the real event. Thus our divide. Around 1800 a new order of global civilization, at first with its imbalance near its transition sources, comes into being, as much as we might like to avoid epochal 'New Age' thinking. Once we discover this phenomenon of the modern divide, the all-important point of the climaxing innovations for the new era, we look to see if we can discover a similar effect in antiquity. It is not hard to find. The Old Testament, and Archaic Greece (less clearly) show this to be about -600. Note the way that the era of the Prophets, and the general phenomenon of 'Israel/Judah'  gives way to period of consolidation, and crystallization: the Bible comes into existence, a canon is set, and its redactors are beginning to look backwards towards a phenomenon that seems to have completed itself. In Greece, it seems at first that a 'divide' around -600 seems to precede the climax of the Greek classical period. But in fact this is itself significant, for reasons we will explore. 

System action/free action again Our model and terminology seem a bit odd, but they contain a very powerful set of concepts that uncovers a mystery, and a buried eonic engima, which is this: the starkest contradiction, at first, to the evolution of freedom, would be the induction of freedom. But in fact this is perfectly consistent with our perspective. The eonic correlation of Greek democracy with our eonic sequence suggests just this induction of freedom. But to initialize something as 'system/action' requires, in the name of freedom, a cutoff after which the realization of freedom is purely 'free action', i.e. the system must stop its action to let the 'freedom to realize freedom' take its course, whatever happens. The results might fly out of control, but that's the nature of experiments in freedom. 
But this is reflected perfectly by the facts. The Greek Archaic produces a foundation for democracy, but it isn't until the period after the divide around -600, the time of Solon, that the actual 'free emergence of democracy' takes place. The reason is that this must be freedom as 'free action' in the wake of freedom as 'system action'. All this might seem coincidence, but it happens twice this way, again in the modern transition. Did you not ever wonder why democracy appears so suddenly near the point of the modern divide. A free gift of our model is to suggest this is not chance, and that it has to be this way.

The evolution of freedom has some subtleties that we did not expect! This language of freedom will give us a useful formal rubric for describing the evolution of civilization. 

We still need to consider further the issue of ideology. We can see that no matter how hard we try our perspective will contain elements of ideology in the sense of being 'eonic emergents' and 'action scripts' springing from one of the transitions. However, we do have a rubric that shows coherent directionality, independently of the multiple sources of philosophy, religion, etc,..The eonic effect enforces a balance between all of its output. 

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