I've never been convinced that experience is linear, circular, or even random. It just is. I try to put it in some kind of order to extract meaning from it, to bring meaning to it.
As a coach, they would love to sit there and say, 'It's going to be five steps, you're going to hitch up into a perfect pocket, you're going to look at number one - no; you're going to go to number two - no.' It doesn't work that way.
The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves.