I don’t know that we are so much misaligned, as unbalanced. Since our cultural ideal is the singular as whole, it doesn’t process the need for opposite sides as necessary. Such as between nodes and networks, our model focuses on the node. Even our cosmology argues the entire universe is a singular entity, rather than an infinite network. The fact is the Big Bang Theory cannot be falsified, as whenever there is a gap between prediction and observation, some enormous new force of nature is assumed and everyone is happy. What if accountants could just write in a figure and call it dark money, whenever they find a gap in the books? While that’s a whole other discussion, it does go to this myopia. Now we have “multiverses” as more nodes, but little attention on what the network in which they exist might be.
As I observe, the process/energy goes past to future forms, as these forms rise and fall, like waves. Future to past. So the network is the process, while the nodes are the forms and so they go opposite directions of time. As individual lives go birth to death, in the future to in the past, while life/society goes onto the next generation, shedding the old.
As fauna, we move intentionally and have a front side and a back side and go in the direction of the front. Having spent much of my life around horses and cattle, ie. prey animals, they have eyes to the sides of their heads and are very spatially aware, because food is not as much a worry as predators. We, on the other hand, have bi-focal vision, which is very good for focusing in one direction and judging distances, but our peripheral vision isn’t that good, so we are very linear oriented. Then our intellectual evolution emphasizes this, as we plan ahead and review the past. Hence the association of time with one dimension of space, ie, linear. Consider that volume is every bit as integral to temperature and pressure, if not more so, than direction is to time, yet we certainly don’t refer to them as the 5th and 6th dimensions of space.
In Eastern cultures apparently the past is associated with what is in front of the observer and the future behind, because the past and what is in front are known, while the future and what is behind are unknown. This does accord with the fact that we see events after they occur, then the energy goes onto other events. While we in the West tend to assume the future is in front of us and the past behind, because we see ourselves as distinct from our environment and moving through it, towards the future and away from the past.
So it’s not just biological, but physiological interpretation as well.
