2. The Eonic Effect:
Climbing
Mt. Improbable
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| 2.6.4 World Line Of The Eonic Observer | ||||
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Short of a
science of history, we need someone to be a simple observer of the eonic
effect
. We can call him an ‘eonic observer’. He can definitely aspire to a
science of history, and to be a Universal Observer, and yet that is the
whole point, he is limited by the time and circumstance of historical
immersion, and ideological participation. The first and most telling example
of the eonic observer lies with the redactors of the Old Testament, who were
unwittingly observing the Axial Age. Our observer can be immersed in history
and still record ‘eonic data’. He should graduate to ever larger data sets
and be collecting data over many millennia, at the end of which he starts to
do theory. It would be nice to be outside of time, or in a rocket module in
orbit, going into suspended animation during off periods. In fact, he is
embedded in history, and going through paradigm changes in each of our
transitions, executing scripts in each revolution. That is all of us. Every
time we use the term ‘modern’ we are observing the eonic effect, looking
backward. We are all eonic observers. We use terms like ‘rise of the
modern’, the ‘middle ages’, the ‘age of revelation’, and so on. For real
science we should be objective observers, assessing data to be put in a time
capsule until the end of the eonic sequence, if ever. The last eonic
observers, if any, might have a hard time seeing how the data was filtered
through the local paradigm of his previous incarnations. Thus, we can make
a formal idea out of the observer of the eonic effect. We can invoke the
image of an ‘eonic observer
’, with a serious or humorous image of
a scientific type, jungle hat, library card, lab smock and clipboard, stop
watch, rocket ship, anthropologist and time and motion man of civilization,
with his atomic stopwatch designed for time measurements on the order of
millennia. One more piece of equipment: a paper stamp labeled ‘Eonic Data’.
Wishing to be a neutral observer, he finds himself temporally bound, and his
theories prone to become scripts to create further history. We will see this
type in several manifestations already embedded in history, and the section
on ‘Axial Ages and Eonic Observers
’ will show the birth our type. We
need with some urgency to apply that paper stamp to the Old Testament, ‘Eonic
Data’. The point is also that the observer and his observed history cannot be separated in any attempt at a science of history . As we will see, the debate, for example, between the ancients and the moderns is at one and the same time observing, and yet also creating, the transition to the modern. This model will automatically reproduce this kind of property. This factor will clearly help us to sort out the Old Testament account of history, whose observations are of the eonic effect, not the action of a divinity. Our eonic observer is thus present, for example, among those who have noticed the ‘rise of the modern’, an eonic observation, and while his stance should be to put the data into a time-capsule, until the next or last ‘period transition in the sequence’, he is prone to interact with the dataset in the present to create the outcome of the last observer phase of the eonic effect. To do theory he must ‘pull rank’ on everyone, and this creates the problem that he tends to be inside the potential well of his most recent data, viz. here the modern. Now note
something remarkable. Look at the Old Testament. It is good example of a
time capsule of eonic data by eonic observers casting their observations
according to their local paradigm, which was itself going through eonic
transformation up to the time of the redaction, which starts explicitly in
the period of the Exile and thence onward. Thus emergent Judaic monotheism,
as an eonic emergent, was the paradigm used to record the local perception
of the eonic effect, at that cycle. Canaanite polytheism suddenly turned
into monotheism (actually we look later at the ‘relative transform’ effect,
and the influence of Zoroastrianism), and at the end of the transition the ‘eonic
observers’ used the output of the transformation to record their data.
Confusing, but we can extract the data as ‘eonic observations of a
transition’. We would like to record our own eonic data as a superset of
this data, plus much else, using the protocols of science. But note that we
would tend to do the same thing again, use the paradigm outcome of the
modern transition, i.e. a scientific language, to record that data.
Le plus ça change. The Old
Testament as a record of eonic evolution We arrive at a tremendous irony, given the That is, after
the Exile (in fact, slightly before) men began to notice that there was a
remarkable series of events in a compressed cluster in their history, the
eonic emergence of the Prophets, for example. These redactors were eonic
observers, and noticing a specific time
interval as an age period of the
effect, theology quite apart here. We are turning into eonic observers of the rise of the modern in the transition clearly visible in the early modern. |
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