What Is the Shape of Time? The Wheel or the River

Linear Progress or Eternal Return?

Image: istockphoto.com

Steve Miller sang that “time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future.” This image—of a past of completed moments, a present that is unfolding, and a future yet to arrive, all arranged in an absolute order—suggests that time has a linear geometry. It feels intuitive: we chart history on timelines, flip through daily planners with past appointments behind us and future ones ahead.

This linear conception is deeply embedded in the Biblical imagination. The Hebrew Bible opens with “In the beginning,” establishing a definite starting point for time itself. Creation unfolds, history advances through covenants, exile, and redemption, and the narrative assumes the story is headed somewhere. Linear time begins with a Genesis declaration of origin and carries the presumption of an eventual end or fulfillment.

In contrast, the Buddhist worldview offers a radically different picture. Rather than a single beginning and final conclusion, existence cycles endlessly. The doctrine of samsara describes an eternal wheel of birth, death, and rebirth. Worlds arise and dissolve, lives begin and end, but the process has no first moment and no ultimate conclusion. Time here is not a line from creation to completion but a circle turning without beginning or end.

Yet our everyday tools for tracking time point to yet another image. The classic analog clock is round: the second hand starts at 12 and returns to 12 a minute later; the minute and hour hands follow suit over longer intervals. After a full cycle, time returns to its starting point. This feels natural too—time exhibits periodicity. History, we say, repeats itself. The sun rises and sets, seasons cycle in unchanging order: spring, summer, fall, winter. Perhaps the better musical reference isn’t Steve Miller but Billy Preston: “Will it go round in circles?”

Linear Time

In The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Isaac Newton defines absolute time as flowing “equably without relation to anything external.” Time moves like a river—undammable, carrying moments steadily from the upstream past to the downstream future. This is the linear model.

Any religious framework that distinguishes future from past in a directional way affirms this geometry. Waiting for a Messiah—first or second coming—requires time to be linear, with a trajectory from origin to destiny.

The Biblical narrative answers clearly: time begins with creation. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” A definite start makes an end conceivable—a completion or fulfillment toward which history moves.

Aristotle, however, saw time as open-ended, extending infinitely into the past. He viewed the cosmos as eternally in motion, perfectly circular in deference to divine perfection, without beginning or end.

Thomas Aquinas rejected this. An eternal past would negate creation. He reconciled Aristotle with Genesis to insist on a unique starting point in the pastward direction, preserving the linear imagination: time begins with creation and unfolds toward ultimate fulfillment.

Circular Time

Image: philosopedia.org

Friedrich Nietzsche argued that a mechanistic, Newtonian universe actually implies circular time. In a deterministic cosmos governed by unchanging laws, every precise arrangement of atoms (positions and velocities) will eventually recur. Given infinite time, the same configuration must reappear, and the same history must replay identically. This is Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence—the strictest form of circular time.

Looser versions appear in cyclical calendars and seasonal patterns. Ecclesiastes declares, “For everything there is a season.” No two springs are identical, yet spring always returns. Hope springs eternal, but so does the next spring—if not now, just wait.

Such circularity often appears in worldviews of complementary forces: yin and yang in Taoism, or the oscillating good and evil in Manichaeism. (Even stock-market cycles hint at a secular version.) Empedocles described a cosmic cycle where the elements unite under Love and separate under Strife, oscillating between harmony and chaos: “Sometimes by Love all coming together into one, / Sometimes again each one carried off by the hatred of Strife.” Harmony builds eras of construction; strife tears them down. In calm times, chaos is merely paused; in chaotic ones, peace will return. Adapt to the zeitgeist.

Twentieth-century sociologist Pitirim Sorokin saw societies oscillating between sensate (material, empirical, hedonistic) and ideational (transcendental, value-oriented) phases. Sensate eras breed instability and shallow selfishness; the unsatisfied yearning for meaning shifts culture ideational. Over time, neglect of the material world pulls it back, and the pendulum swings again.

Is It Up to Us?

George Santayana warned, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This suggests the shape of time may be partly contingent on human action. Like Phil Connors in Groundhog Day (written by Buddhist Harold Ramis), we might break the cycle by getting it right—transcending repetition through better living, echoing reincarnation tied to karma.

Newton and Aquinas saw time flowing inexorably forward, regardless of us. Nietzsche, Empedocles, and Sorokin viewed periodicity as inherent to reality. But do we help shape it?

Martin Luther King, Jr. often invoked the idea that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” He grounded this in Hebrew prophets, especially Amos: “But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream” (Amos 5:24). Here time is a river—never stopping, always rushing forward under irresistible current. History does not oscillate endlessly; it presses toward justice. King echoed the Biblical imagination from Genesis: time begins “in the beginning” and advances through human action toward redemption. The prophets urged righteous living, especially for the vulnerable—and it changed the world.

As Santayana suggests, is it up to us to bend the arc, and thus the shape of time? One thing is certain: time keeps slipping into the future. It happens to us every day. And please click the link before slipping away.