'We do not rest satisfied with the present, for the present is generally painful to us' (Pascal 1958: 49, no. 172). This contradicts Heidegger's conception of 'vulgar' temporality, which for him is 'lost' in the present; but ten minutes' meditation (e.g., zazen) confirms it. If our root problem is not fear of death in the future but an always-gnawing sense of lack now, the reason becomes obvious: living (in) the present is uncomfortable because it discloses our nothingness, our groundlessness. Time is the canvas we erect before us, on which we paint the dreams that then fascinate us, because they offer us the hope of overcoming that sense of inadequacy.

Being-time
When the Buddha was asked why his disciples, who lived such simple lives with only one meal a day, were so radiant, he replied: 'They do not repent of the past, nor do they brood over the future. They live in the present. Therefore they are radiant. By brooding over the future and repenting the past, fools dry up like green reeds cut down.' (Samyutta Nikaya I, 5)

　　 If our experience of time is conditioned by fear of death and denial of nothingness, genuine acceptance of them might reveal something hitherto unrealized about the nature of time and the things 'in' time. For Buddhism, the relationship between present and future will then be experienced less dualistically, as the series of leveled-off, falling-away 'now-moments' transforms into what the thirteenth-century Japanese Zen master Dogen calls uji, 'being-time':

　　 'Being-time' here means that time itself is being ... and all being is time. Each moment is all being, is the entire world. Reflect now whether any being or any world is left out of the present moment.
　　 Time is not separate from you, and as you are present, time does not go away. If time merely flies away, you would be separated from time. The reason you do not clearly understand being-time is that you think of time as only passing ... and do not understand that time never arrives... People only see time's coming and going, and do not thoroughly understand that being-time abides in each moment.
　　 Being-time has the quality of flowing... Because flowing is a quality of time, moments of past and present do not overlap or line up side by side. Do not think flowing is like wind and rain moving from east to west. The entire world is not unchangeable, is not immovable. It flows. Flowing is like spring. Spring with all its numerous aspects is called flowing. When spring flows there is nothing outside of spring... Thus, flowing is completed at just this moment of spring. ('Uji', in Tanahashi 1985: 76-80)

Like Being and Time, this passage criticizes our usual understanding of time as a sequence of falling-away now-moments, but without substituting a future-orientation to unify them: time never arrives or passes away, yet it does flow. This apparent inconsistency is the heart of the matter, but to resolve it we must first notice that time 'flies away' when we experience it dualistically, with the sense of a self that is separate from it and looking at it. Then time becomes objectified into something that I have (or don't have), quantified into a succession of fleeting 'now-moments' that cannot be retained but incessantly fall away. In contrast, the being-times that we usually objectify into objects cannot be said to occur in time, for they are time. As Nagarjuna would put it, that things (or 'thingings') are time means that there is no second, external time that they are within.

　　 For Plotinus 'time is generated by the mind's restlessness, its stretching out to the future, its projects, and its negation of "the present state".' (Arendt 1978: I,45) But since there is no future without a past, Buddhism also emphasizes the role of memory 'wrongly interpreted' in creating the illusory sense of a continuity in time which, along with intentions and hopes, reifies into the purposive sense-of-self. In contrast to Heidegger, however, this pulling-oneself-together is the problem not the solution. Such memories and expectations act as a mental superimposition obscuring the present, usually so much that we can hardly be said to experience it -- which is ironic, since no one has ever lived in the past or will ever live in the future. But our purposive activity tends to devalue the present moment into merely one of a falling-away series of causal relations, the means whereby we strive to actualize our ends.

　　 The consequence of this is a kind of karmic reversal. Having projected these temporal/causal sequences to objectify time, I then discover that objectified time is something I am 'in.' Instead of the past being experienced as a function of memories and the future as a function of expectations, the present is reduced to a single falling-away moment in a time-stream understood to exist objectively -- a container, as it were, like space, within which things exist and events occur. In this way a delusive bifurcation occurs between time and the things 'in' time, because time cannot be a container unless there is something to contain: objects. And in order for objects to be 'in' time, they must in themselves be non-temporal: i.e., self-existing. As a result of this objectification, we experience time and things as separate from each other, and each gains a spurious reality of its own.