On the Constant state of change and the unity of identity over time.

There IS no past. There IS no future. There IS only now. The past exists only as memory and has no meaningful physical reality, as the future exists only as mental expectation with no true physical existence. They are as existent as are the stories contained in a novel. That which WAS in the past, passed out of existence as it became that which IS now, as that which will be the future comes into being through the annihilation of that which IS now as it passes out of the present into the past being simultaneously replaced by that which we conceptualized as the future. That which existed in the past shapes that which exists now through the process of cause and effect but as all things are in a constant state of becoming moving in time from moment to moment they cease to be as they were becoming what they are and moving forward to what they will be. This is what might be termed the "problem of generation and extinction" as it is by Masao Abe in his discussion of Dogen in Zen and Western Thought. However this is not a problem, it is merely a fact of existence. In defining it as a problem we create the concept of a solution, a solution which cannot exist. It is the naming it a problem which creates the problem, a problem whose solution is merely the acceptance of the fact and there by the destruction of the problem.
The question which is raised by this constant coming into and passing out of existence is that of the continuity of identity through time. The fact is that from one moment to the next a being is in a constant process of change but not such a radical change that the totality is unique from one moment to the next but such that over time no single aspect may be said to be identical across all moments. Being in this conception is a gradiant such that no individual point can necessarily be deistinctly differentiated from all those surrounding it, though they all do contain differences, but such that one end of the gradiant may be pure white and the other pure black with no distinct point of change between the two. There is no core aspect which is you across all points in time but rather at any given point you are the sum total of the points which have been in the past, and you are contiguous with all the points before and after the one you are currently along an essentially smooth curve, though each is differnt.