you are thinking about the contrasting experiences of time in different faiths in buddhism for example the self is trapped in a circuit of death and rebirth to escape means to slingshot oneself from this loop on a linear path into unknowability whereas in the christian religion humans were locked into an edenic cycle each day paradisiac as the next but then they fell into linear time and the goal is to get back to circular existence there are other ways to figure this so buddhist nirvana could be a surrender to the gravity well that every one of your circulating lives had been orbiting but we might still look for other cosmologies something that lets us avoid the traps of linearity and cyclicity there are belief systems like those of the hmong and the ancient egyptians where each person has numerous souls and these all meet different fates some loop around in eddies of reincarnation some enter afterlives some stay behind as ghosts others might even die with the body so a person’s being forks time and again she can explore many options simultaneously and proliferate into different worlds what shape would be formed if you mapped all their journeys

• a mesh of branching twigs
• a hopeless knot