When I say we experience time cyclically, I’m referring to the fact that night follows day, day follows night, as the seasons march by, one following the other in exact order, with regularity. For many people their routines are so rigid that they often do the exact same things at the exact same times every day, day after day, as the weeks and months creep by. In this sense, we experience time repeating itself.

On the global and cosmic scale, the phenomenon is the same. Globally, technologies arise, meet their zenith of popularity and use, and then become obsolete, to be replaced by successors who track a similar course. Meanwhile the political cycle has its obvious seasons as powerful men rise to power, struggle to impose their will, perhaps become acquainted with greatness, and then lose the reins as the ideas they espoused fall from style, to be replaced with new ideas and the younger men who carry them. Empires rise, spread their influence and dominion, inevitably overextend themselves, and then descend into the sunset of history, only to be replaced by others that will inevitably chug along the same trajectory.

The same applies to the macrocosm. In writing on cycles on the global and cosmic scale, Colgate University anthropology and astronomy professor Anthony Aveni notes in his book Empires of Time: Calendars, Clocks and Cultures, “The Babylonians and Greeks conceived of a ‘Great Year’ as the period of the world from creation to destruction to rebirth. Formally they considered it to be mirrored by the time required for the sun, moon, and planets to attain the same positions with respect to one another that they had occupied at a previous time. These celestial positions marked the time to re-create the events of the past – to literally witness them happening all over again. The lives of the great philosophers would be relived. Everyone would re-experience what had already happened. … Though the old cyclic way of reckoning eras seems outdated, it nevertheless still lies at the root of precise astronomical time keeping.”

The microcosm is not exempt from this reality. One often experiences the feeling that the flow of one’s individual life is cyclical. A plan is envisioned and pursued. New skills are acquired and goals are achieved. A period of peak-creativity is reached only to be followed by a decline in productivity that oftentimes ends in crisis – the loss of a job or business, contract or partnership. That crisis prompts the rise of the next plan.

Could the explanation for all this be, as Terence McKenna has hinted and Stephen Hawking has implied, that the space time continuum takes the shape, if it can have a shape, of a spiral?

This seems logical and helps explain déjà vu. When one dreams one’s mind is in a state of constant creation. The mind creates the images and situations one experiences in the dream and it gets inspiration for these creations from memories. For example if you dream of a house that house will likely be an abstract or exact representation of a house you once saw or an amalgamation of multiple houses you have seen. Your mind will use the memory or memories of a house or houses to create in the dream the image of the dream house. And so when history repeats itself, as it does, what is being repeated was once experienced and then remembered and after becoming a memory was employed in a dream. In other words if we use memories of the past as the materials we use to build our dreams then, because the past is going to happen again, we are really dreaming of the future.