The first and most important object to be reified (because the condition of all the others) is me: the sense-of-self as something self-existing. So the objectification of time is also the subjectification of a self, which arises only to discover itself in the anxious situation of being an apparently nontemporal entity nonetheless subjected to time's ravages. This entity seems to have an autonomous reality, but the nature of its supposed existence is necessarily opaque to itself, because really it is nothing: as a mental construction, the sense-of-self has no fixed reality of its own. Thus it is not surprising that life becomes the futile project of trying to make ourselves real in one way or another.

　　 The important point is not whether the self is grounded in time (as in Being and Time) or vice-versa. Rather, the spurious reality of each is dependent on the spurious reality of the other, because the apparent self-existence of both arises only from their bifurcation. And that points to the Buddhist solution, which eliminates this dualism by realizing that I am not in time because I am time; and if I am time I cannot be trapped by time. To be time is to be free from time.

　　 Here we may turn a spatial analogy -- usually dangerous -- to our advantage. We normally think of objects such as cups to be 'in' space, which implies that in themselves such objects have a self-existence distinct from space. But of course a cup is irremediably spatial: without the spatial relations among its bottom, sides and handle, the cup could not be a cup. One way to express this is that the cup is not in space but is space, or is what space is doing in that place. The same is true for the temporality of the cup. The cup is not a nontemporal, self-existing object that just happens to be in time, for its being is also irremediably temporal.

　　 This deconstructs the duality we have thought-constructed between things and time. As soon as we try to express this nonduality, however, we find ourselves limited by the dualism inherent in language, which bifurcates the subject of a sentence from its temporal relations. To overcome this, Dogen conflates that duality by saying that objects are time (objects have no self-existence because they are necessarily temporal, in which case they are not objects as usually understood), and, conversely, that time is objects (that time manifests not in but as the ephemera we call objects). 'The time we call spring blossoms directly as an existence called flowers. The flowers, in turn, express the time called spring. This is not existence within time; existence itself is time' (in Reiho 1958: 68).

　　 But if there is only time then there is no time, for there can be no container without a contained. Without nouns, there are no referents for temporal predicates. When there are no things that have an existence apart from time, it makes no sense to speak of things as being young or old. 'So the young man does not grow old nor does the old man grow old' (Nagarjuna in Sprung 1979: 147). Dogen makes the same point using the image of firewood and ashes:

We should not take the view that what is latterly ashes was formerly firewood. What we should understand is that, according to the doctrine of Buddhism, firewood stays at the position of firewood... There are former and later stages, but these stages are clearly cut.

Firewood does not become ashes; there is the being-time of firewood, then the being-time of ashes. If there are no nontemporal objects, then the present does not gain its value or meaning by being related to past or future; each event or being-time is complete in itself. But how does this free us from time?

Similarly, when human beings die, they cannot return to life; but in Buddhist teaching we never say life changes into death... Likewise, death cannot change into life... Life and death have absolute existence, like the relationship of winter and spring. But do not think of winter changing into spring or spring into summer. (in Tanahashi 1985: 70-71)

Because life and death, like spring and summer, are not in time, they are timeless. I cannot be trapped by time if I am time. In that now prior to objective time, birth is no-birth because no self is ever born. If there is no one nontemporal who is born and dies, then there are only the events of birth and death. But if there are only those events, with no one 'in' them, then really there is no birth and death. Alternatively, we may say that there is birth-and-death in every moment, with the arising and passing-away of each thought and act.

　　 We seem to end up with only the present: not the present as usually understood, but one that incorporates past and future. Yet this becomes awkward if there is no longer a past or a future to distinguish the present from.

If someone says, only the present experience has reality, then the word 'present' must be redundant here, as the word 'I' is in other contexts. For it cannot mean present as opposed to past and future... Something else must be meant by the word, something that isn't in a space, but is itself a space. (Wittgenstein 1975: 85)