first published in The Vak,Volume X, No. 1, Winter 1991-92, p. 1.
Seminar participants often ask how a particular NLP pattern evolves. If we can track how new patterns evolve, we can help point the way to further useful discoveries and developments.
Every pattern has many antecedents, and most patterns continue to be developed and refined after the first successes. Philosophers have thought about time for millennia, even before Heraclitus said, "You can't step in the same river twice", some two thousand years ago. More recently, Peter McKeller's book Imagination and Thinking (1957) included detailed illustrations of some of the different ways that people represent the flow of time as various kinds of lines or paths in space.
People have recognized for centuries that different people tend to be more oriented toward past, present, or future. Edward T. Hall's book, The Silent Language (1959) includes abundant examples--both individual and cultural --but without a hint of why these differences exist.
In the early 1980's NLP training included the categories of "in time" and "through time" as aspects of a person's relatively fixed "meta-programming," again with no explanations of the underlying experiential structure.
Thank you all again for your support of the ABNLP and the growth of this wonderful field of NLP. 
International Coaching Federation 2009 Conference