"The mystery of time has aroused man's wonder since the dawn of history. and strongly influenced his views of self and world. A cyclical concept of time. which arises from observation of such natural sequences as the alternation of day and night and the renewal of the seasons, has always prevailed in the East: the Hindu theory of endlessly recurrant cosmic cycles of activity and rest the days and nights of Brahma), the yogic path of the self's return to union with the All, the cyclic reintegration of man with the macroscopic reality symbolized be the mandela in Tibetan Buddhism, and the Chinese concept of cyclic patterms of history as the natural develoment of an organismic world-view -- all these are examples of a conception of time as a never-ending dynamic process which continually returns upon itself, not necessarily to its starting point, but rather to an ever-mounting spiral. ...In contrast...(to this cyclic view found in the East) prior to the 20th century...(Western thought) was committed to a LINEAR concept of time, often likened to the flow of the river... The present is both the direct result of the past and the cause of the future. But...(this linear view) established two different values for time: the past is held to be static, closed and unalterable, while the future is dynamic, open fluid and problematic.... (The new physics) shatterred the rigid causality of the physical world...(suggesting instead) that there is a whole range of causal possinbilities which includes such things as indeterminacy, coincidence, simultaneity and even the reversibility of time. The perception of space-time as a continuum...also makes it possible for us to understand that time may be one indivisible whole which only appears in its threefold guise of past, present and future." by Emily B Sellon, "Causality and Synchronicity" private paper. Quoted in Anna Lemkow's Book "The Wholeness Principle" Quest Books, Wheaton