Repost and Update:…//What is the eonic effect?…

This post started in relation to a discussion at gurdjieff-con.net (links at the end). But the key idea should be restated because it was confused by the extended discussion of the ‘causality of freedom’ which is not needed in a description of the eonic effect. I don’t really agree with my own discussion of the causality of freedom and there is a better approach, transcendental idealism, and especially Schopenhauer. The causality of freedom notion is like a man and a computer mouse: the computer is mechanical as is the mouse. Now expand the range to include the user and we have a holistic situation of machine and user: the mouse gives input to the machine via human choice. Choice is real, whether free will or not. Choice may have a causal explanation we know nothing about, but choice is real nonetheless, etc…

But let’s extract the strange almost eerie beauty of the eonic effect taken as a description empirically, not a theory.
The issue of the eonic effect should be very simple and descriptive: a nonrandom pattern in world history.

The idea of world history was always confused in antiquity but with the rise of archaeology in the nineteenth century our knowledge has expanded and suddenly we see a non-random pattern that resolves or starts to resolve its mystery: the intervals from 3000 BCE to the present show clear evidence of an interval sequence while at the same time (e.g. the Axial Age) we see evidence of parallel action. This pattern then is nicknamed the ‘eonic effect’ and is probably the gateway to the eonly solution to a ‘science of history’, though not in the sense of Newtonian science, i.e causal laws.
A ‘non-random pattern’ is like Friday’s footprint: Crusoe sees it and its non-randomness suggests a human on the island. The case for world history is more complex: a non-random pattern is evidence of an historical dynamic and design, but not of course of a human.
Note the discussion of yesterday on theistic historicism: a non-random pattern suggests design, and the result in religions is some kind of active theistic process. Doesn’t follow. Crusoe can recognize a human from his footprint because he is human, has seen footprints before and sees an example of another human.
This is the issue of specification raised by William Dembski, the ID-ist at Evo-News ( I may have altered his idea). Crusoe can specify the footprint because he has seen humans before and evidence of design can be specified as human. But that doesn’t work with history. We see a nonrandom pattern, but we can’t specify what a designer would be like because we have never seen anything that can serve as a specification. Thus, the issue of design in history becomes problematical
With history the problem is tricky because historical processes if they exist are not created by humans who however create history so to speak. The scale here is tremendous. But the confusion was made by Israelites who sensed a non-random pattern in history and not surprisingly for primitive tribalists who thought it must be a ‘huge something’ that was really a somewho but very vast and like a human and so they invented ‘god names’ for that… Anthropomorphi, n’est pas? The false analogy to Crusoe and Friday is clear although it remains true that an historical non-random process just might suggest a designer. But unlike Crusoe and Friday we have no prior specification of ‘god’ and a name is entirely misleading. Even the term ‘designer’ is speculative. We have forgotten the originally apt insight of the primitive Israelites: the something/somewho is humungous but we should be wary of what we call it, viz. use a glyph like IHVH instead of terms like ‘god’. Unfortunately the ‘god’ confusion took over and we got pop theism and its theo-gibberish ad infinitum. The problem is a close cousin to the Taoist insight, the Tao that can be named is not the real Tao…
In fact, we can solve the problem by seeing the Israelite history shows an eonic effect and in the eonic model the term ‘god’ is simpy out the window (which is neither atheism nor theism, but a systems model, sort of ).
The Israelites began to notice the eonic effect in their own history in the period ca. 900 to 600 BCE. The earlier history, Abraham, Moses, probably Solomon etc, is tribal myth with some historical component, like Achilles or Agamemnon is the Iliad. It is not part of this discussion which is about an interval not a long history. We fail to see just how remarkable that three-century period was, small wonder a ‘theistic specification’ muddled the vision. The actual data is not very clear and the Old Testament texts are hard to sort out and are often much later than claimed, but the point is that within that time frame a Bible emerged and so a ‘religion’. Note the strange and eerie timing of the Exile and the way Zoroastrianism came to influence the Isrealite corpus, this becoming very marked in the later centuries up to the time of the Roman Empire as ‘Judaism’ consolidated. The original vision one suspects has been lost and we can’t quite make out what’s what in the seed notions in the midst of semi-pagan ‘god’ elements. Whatever the case the Israelites created a revolution against paganism and succeeded in that, but the resulting monotheism turns out to be a pagan pantheon with one (male) divinity.

This issue haunts the current evolution debate: if you find natural selection to be a myth then you are confronted with the design issue and that suggests to some a kind of theistic/creationist answer. Science has learned the hard way to be wary of design arguments in that sense, but then the issue arises: what is driving evolution, assuming the natural selection answer fails: it looks all very intelligent and we are once again in the trap. There is no answer here as yet: there is, in my mind, an unseen cosmological boot strap process that is related to the emergence of life on planets. We simply don’t what the answer is, but we can see that creationist thinking is simply rehashed Old Testament myth.Let’s be clear: nature with evolution shows processes that we can barely map out let alone explain. But some factor remains to be understood. The situation resembles the discovery of fields in physics, very puzzling those fields, til Faraday and Maxwell came along (Newton of course the first). Evolution needs its Faraday/Maxwell…That is only my opinion/speculation: evolution on the surface of a planet seems to show some kind of field effect (bio-field), and like earlier fields invisible to the naked eye.
Whatever the case the eonic effect shows us something about the ‘evolution’ of civilizations and the clever way it does that leaving the suspicion of some kind of field effect. For the context of Israel in this discussion, along with Buddhism and/or the Greek Archaic period, etc, a careful study of World history and the Eonic Effect or Decoding World History will help. It is a massively detailed study with many gaps but the picture is improving all the time. Note that if you ascribe Israelite history to ‘god’  you would have to do the same for say Archaic Greece who ‘eonic effects’ are if anything more spectacular. You of course cannot do that with Greek or any other history.

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original post:

But a short take: The view of world history was always confused in antiquity but with the rise of archaeology in the nineteenth century our knowledge has expanded and suddenly we see a non-random pattern that resolves or starts to resolve its mystery: the intervals from 3000 BCE to the present show clear evidence of an interval sequence while at the same time (e.g. the Axial Age) we see evidence of parallel action. This pattern then is nicknamed the ‘eonic effect’ and is probably the gateway to the eonly solution to a ‘science of history’, though not in the sense of Newtonian science, i.e causal laws. The issue of causality is controversial given the discussions of freedom/free will but we don’t have to get sidetracked there: a true science would have to show the ‘causality of freedom’ in some sense, a highly vexed notion with Kantian implications but not as such a rejection of freedom or causality (but best of luck making a science there, despite its in principle possibility).
In any case, a ‘non-random pattern’ is like Friday’s footprint: Crusoe sees it and its non-randomness suggests a human on the island. The case for world history is more complex: a non-random pattern is evidence of an historical dynamic and design, but not of course of a human.
Note the discussion of yesterday on theistic historicism: a non-random pattern suggests design, and the result in religions is some kind of active theistic process. Doesn’t follow. Crusoe can recognize a human from his footprint because he is human, has seen footprints before and sees an example of another human.
With history the problem is tricky because historical processes are not created by humans and their scale in tremendous. But the confusion was made by Israelites who sensed a non-random pattern in history and not surprisingly for primitve tribalists who thought it must be a ‘huge something’ that was really a somewho but very vast but like a human and so their invented ‘god names’ for that…The false analogy to Crusoe and Friday is clear although it remains true that an historical non-random process just might suggest a designer.  But unlike Crusoe and Friday we have no prior specification of ‘god’ and a name is entirely misleading. We have forgotten the originally apt insight of the primitive Israelites: the something/somewho is humungous but we should be wary of what we call it, viz. use a glyph like IHVH instead of terms like ‘god’. Unfortunately the ‘god’ confusion took over we got pop theism and its theo-gibberish ad infinitum. The problem is a close cousin to the Taoist insight, the Tao that can be named in not the real Tao…
In fact, we can solve the problem by seeing the Israelite history shows an eonic effect and in the eonic model the term ‘god’ is simpy out the window (which is neither atheism nor theism, but a systems model, sort of ).

The original discussion and link:

TL: replied very nicely:Re: New Age, New Socialism…From: walkaway To: Nemonemini Date: Tue, Apr 11, 2023 6:16 am Yeah okay … no prob. I don’t have much time invested in the projec…

Source: TL replies nicely – New Man, New Age, New Socialism

I have many books on the subject of the eonic effect: go to the post Online Texts below and there is a library of free books, some on the eonic effect…World History and the Eonic Effect, Decoding World History…