Actually, time doesn't care what culture we come from, and it's not a linear flow, either. In Special Relativity, there's something called the Interval. What this means is that actually, the dimensionality of our Universe is 4. It's Space-Time. It's very very odd, but it's true: Depending on how things are moving relative to each other, the 4 dimensions shift around, stretching and bunching, but the "Interval" stays constant. It's very very weird, but that's how things work.

You can do a little meditative trick: Rather than viewing time as a river flowing past you. jump in the river - And then you'll see it's an ethos, and a food, a sustenance in its way. Just as you can't jump out of space, you can't jump out of time, either.