Frank,

To extend on the earlier discussion, it's not that I don't see time as real, but that it is like temperature, an effect of activity, not some foundational basis for it.

We are mobile organisms, which means navigating our environment is the most elemental purpose of our conscious thought process, thus the sequence.

Similar to how our bodies are finely tuned to the ranges of temperature and pressure in which we evolved. Which is this thermodynamic environment.

I would distinguish between thoughts and consciousness, as they go opposite diretions of time. Consciousness goes to the future, as thoughts recede into the past.

Much like energy drives the wave, while the forms defining it, fluctuations, rise and fall. So the energy passes through and on to the next, much as life goes one generation to the next, as individual ripples and lives rise and fall, future to past.