Here is another way to think about how it works.

As these mobile organisms, fauna, we experience a sequence of perceptions in order to navigate, so our perception of time is as the point of the present, moving past to future.

Culture incorporates it as narrative and phsyics codifies it as measures of duration.

The reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as the events rise and fall.

There is no literal dimensin of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Aka, causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

Energy is conserved, because it is the present, not some dimensionless point between past and future. It creates time, as well as temperature, pressure, color and sound. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.

So as present and process, energy goes past to future, while the patterns it generates go future to past. With a wave, the energy drives it, while the fluctuations rise and fall.

In a factory, the product goes start to finish, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product.

As lives go birth to death, while life moves onto the next generation, shedding the old.

Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts that give it form and structure come and go. Suggesting that consciousness is an energy, pushing its own forms.

Though it is the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy, feeding the flame, while the central nervous system sorts the information needed to navigate. Signals from the noise.

So when we try to intellectualize and rationalize the world around us, we think in terms of what we know, signals, versus what we don't know, noise. Aka, order and chaos. Even though too much signal reverts to noise.

Galaxies are energy radiating out, as structure coalesces in and we evolved in this thermodynamic environment, but our minds only really do sequence, so after chasing down many paths and often finding ourselves back where we started, we sense the world is round, but that is only the second step.

Space is described as three dimensional, but that is only a mapping device, like longitude, latitude and altitude.

If we remove all activity and definition from space, its remaining qualities are infinity and equilibrium. Which is implicit in Special Relativity, as the frame with the longest ruler and fastest clock is closest to the equilibrium of the vacuum, the unmoving void of absolute zero.

So space is the absolute and the infinite.

Then what fills space, this energy and the forms it expresses, fill out the inbetween, as energy radiates out, toward infinity, while the forms coalesce in, toward equilibrium. Between black body radiation and black holes. Both entropic, so we fluctuate between everything fading out and everything cancelling out.

Even societies are the social energies and desires driving them on, versus the civil and cultural forms giving them definition and structure. Constantly pushing out and coalescing in. No wonder there is always tension, because without it, there would be nothing.

So we exist between synchronization, pulling things into one, versus harmonization, everything spreading out and balancing.

All on one tiny little blue dot in the void.