beyond wishful thinking 13most important examples, emphasizes the impermanence of all the
kinds of being— the natural kinds, as they are sometimes called—
through which nature momentarily presents itself, and therefore as
well of all the regular relations among these types of beings. Under the
changing disguises of nature, it discerns changeless and unifi ed being.
Th is radical impermanence suggests that not only is all phenomenal
distinction, including distinction among selves, illusory, but that time
itself is only “the moving image of eternity.”
Our sole reliable grounding, according to this view, is the one that
enables us to disentangle ourselves, through insight and striving, from
the coils of the phenomenal world and to increase our participation in
the underlying one reality: the reality of being. Such is also the route to
an inclusive compassion, seeing beyond the shallow and ephemeral di-
visions among us and within the world.
Death confi rms, with respect to our embodied existence, the truth
of impermanence. It signals our return to the ground of being, from
which we never truly departed. Th us, the responses to death and to
groundlessness have the same source and work in the same direction.
Here is news that is not as good as the news about our friend the
creator and master of the universe and his plan to rescue us from death
and groundlessness. It bears a loose resemblance to the outcome of the
argument about speculative groundlessness, the view prophesied by
Anaximander: “All things originate from one another and vanish into
one another, according to necessity,... under the dominion of time.” A
major diff erence may lie in the rejection of the reality of time, oft en al-
beit not invariably associated, in this tradition of thought, with the de-
valuation of phenomenal distinction and of the distinction among
selves. If time is illusory, so is history, and our worldly engagements
turn out to be either paths without goals or goals without paths.
To accept this way of dealing with our existential groundlessness, we
would have to begin by denying or by devaluing the reality of the mani-
fest world and of time. It is one thing to affi rm the thesis of imperma-
nence. It is another to diminish the reality of the impermanent so long
as it exists. It is in this respect that the news is incredible.
Th en, we would have to entertain our merger into hidden and uni-
fi ed being as a substitute for our embodied and individual existence. In
exchange for the unique self, we are off ered the one mind constitutive