What is our starting point? The Big Bang? Hominids parting ways from chimpanzees? The Great Explosion ? The Neolithic? Our perspective is designed to allow us to start anywhere, without an absolute beginning. We suspect our eonic series starts with the Neolithic, but we begin to see the eonic effect only with the era of Egypt and Sumer , and our first transition, itself just on the threshold of analysis given our severe standard: centuries level data.

Track of the eonic observer As we begin an eonic outline, we need to produce the biography of the eonic observer, his global coordinates relative to the eonic effect, here ‘modernity’, probably in a secular perspective, his ideology, and place relative to the great eonic emergents inside of which he observes the past.  

Theory and Ideology As we can see the eonic sequence produces ideological transformations that we, as eonic observers, begin to carry out. The dilemma of System Action and Free Action reminds us of the potential loss of quality in that relationship.

Looking backward It is important to remember that we are outside the last transition of our sequence, looking backward. The action of our system shuts down and is replaced by our spontaneous free action, looking forward. This system shutdown point is clearly present in the early nineteenth century. Our model is fussy on this ‘quibble’ but protects us from teleological confusions, and the problems of the Oedipus Paradox, or Social Darwinist-style distortions. We suspect that directionality, seen looking backwards, is evidence of a teleological system. But this is a discrete-continuous system, We only get glimpses of the system changing direction, often several in tandem, not of teleology. The two-levels of our model distinguish therefore individual action, and directional action which is on a different scale.

It is important to see the elegant manner of our model: we only see dynamism looking backward, as the ‘eonic effect’ switches off in our recent past as System Action  becomes Free Action.

We are ready to begin our stepping stone passage through our eonic sequence in a minimal outline, beginning with a look at the framework of Big History, a short history from the Big Bang, leading up to the the Neolithic.