When people claim that in "non-Western cultures, time is cyclical rather than linear", what do they mean by this? Is this nothing more than another way of stating the truism that history repeats itself? It seems that even within cycles, there must be linearity of some kind - consider for example the carbon cycle, where the cycle is little more than a repeating linear loop. Throughout my life, I have only ever been growing older, and I will not suddenly be young again - or start getting younger - when I stop aging. So what does it mean to say that time is cyclical and not linear?