If death is implicit in care, so is the self. Anticipatory resoluteness, activated by the call of conscience that reveals the 'lack' of my groundlessness, pulls me together out of dispersion in chance possibilities and illumines my being as care. This implies a self that cannot be understood as an ego-subject 'in' time: 'The ego cannot be conceived as temporal, i.e., as intra-temporal precisely because the self originally and in its innermost essence is time itself' (Heidegger 1951/1968: 200). (Later Dogen will be quoted making the same point but to a different end.) The abiding nature of the self is grounded in the self-unifying nature of temporality that 'generates itself.'

　　 So the issues discussed above finally boil down to the nature of time, which is revealed as the 'horizon' of the Being that Heidegger seeks; in Being and Time, 'to be' means to appear according to the temporal 'ecstasies' of past, present, and especially the future. Heidegger's treatment of temporality also distinguishes the authentic and inauthentic ways of experiencing time. With inauthentic life, scattered by the distractions of everyday affairs, we experience time as an interminable sequence of 'nows' that have been 'leveled off,' each shorn of its intrinsic relations with the others so that they simply line up in a uniform succession. One's attention is caught, now by this, then by that, because there is nothing to hold these nows together. In terms of such de-structured nows, Heidegger believes it is not possible to clarify the true nature of the present or of time generally. Authentic temporality, which 'temporalizes itself primarily in terms of the future,' is revealed only in resoluteness. 'Temporality gets experienced in a phenomenally primordial way in Dasein's authentic Being-a-whole, in the phenomenon of anticipatory resoluteness.' Such resoluteness pulls the present out of dispersal on objects of immediate concern and binds it firmly with the future and the past; this gives us the authentic present. Heidegger understands our usual 'now-moment' only in terms of the even more basic 'stretching-along' of future-oriented temporality. 'The "now" is not pregnant with the "not-yet-now", but the Present arises from the future in the primordial ecstatical unity of the temporalizing of temporality' (Heidegger 1927/1962: 476, 479).

　　 But what if there is a 'now' that is pregnant with the 'not-yet-now'? Which cannot be understood as a mere sequence of monotonous, levelled-off moments? The nunc stans of medieval philosophy (and the philosophia perennis generally) has traditionally been offered as such an alternative, but Heidegger brusquely dismisses this possibility in a footnote: eternity conceived as a nunc stans is derived from the ordinary (i.e., inauthentic) way of understanding time and as such does not need to be discussed in detail (Heidegger 1927/1962: 499, fn xiii). From the Buddhist perspective, however, this dismissal overlooks something about the now-as-now. Both of Heidegger's alternatives, authentic and inauthentic, are preoccupied with the future because in different ways they are reactions to the possibility of death; thus both are ways of running away from the now. Neither experiences the present for what it is in itself, but through the shadow that the inescapable future casts over it.

　　 'The "purposive man" is always trying to secure a spurious and delusive immortality for his acts by pushing his interest in them forward in time' (Keynes 1932: 370). If even our 'purposive' preoccupation with the future is a reflex of death-terror (and nothingness-terror), no wonder we are obsessed with keeping busy. But if that obsession is historically-determined, we should hesitate before generalizing it. According to John Mbiti, an African philosopher, traditional African consciousness lacks the Western concept of the future. Time is divided into those events which occurred in the past, those happening now or in the immediate future, and those that recur in the rhythms of natural phenomena. Anything that doesn't fit into these three categories is not apprehended as time. 'The most significant consequence of this is that, according to traditional concepts, time is a two-dimensional phenomenon, with a long past, a present, and virtually no future. The linear concept of time in Western thought, with an indefinite past, present, and infinite future, is practically foreign to African thinking.' (Mbiti 1969: 17) This is usually true of traditionalist cultures, which emphasize the patterns of the past. The modern West reverses this: we are driven by the future. These may be viewed as different ways of trying to cope with our sense-of-lack: by identifying with 'the old ways' (another version of Yalom's fusion), or by striving for something new which will fill it up (Yalom's individuation). More generally, each feeds on the other: individually and collectively, we dream of the Golden Age to come, which will restore the dimly-remembered Golden Age of the past (our childhood, Periclean Greece, the 1960's, etc.).