Human civilization is an elaborate, symbolic defense mechanism against the knowledge of our own mortality Ernest Becker argued in his Pulitzer-winning book. But unlike our denial of death, our consciousness of death is a powerful life-affirming force that can help us change the way we live — and die — argues Yoel Hoffmann in his captivating volume Japanese Death Poems: Written by Zen Monks and Haiku Poets on the Verge of Death. Please savor this selection of exquisite short poetry composed by Zen monks moments before they passed away.

At a young age of thirty one, Zen monk Bassui Tokusho heard the running of water in a brook and was enlightened. Being a recluse, he spent most of his days in a hut in the mountains, and whenever visitors came to hear his teaching, he would flee. But despite his love of solitude, Bassui was known as a monk who didn’t turn away from simple people and taught them Zen in a way they could understand. When the time came for him to pass away, he turned to the gathered crowd, uttered the death poem below, and died.

BASSUI TOKUSHO 抜隊得勝
Died 1387 at the age of sixty-one

Look straight ahead.
What’s there?
If you see it as it is
You will never err.

Sensing that his final hour was near, Zen monk Kozan Ikkyo called his pupils to gather around him. What followed were his instructions to bury him without any ceremony and without any services in his memory. On the morning of his death he wrote the poem below, laid down his brush, and passed away.

KOZAN IKKYO 固山ー鞏
Died 1360 at the age of seventy-seven

Empty-handed I entered the world
Barefoot I leave it.
My coming, my going —
Two simple happenings
That got entangled.

Feeling the inevitable, Zen monk Goku Kyonen gathered his disciples, tapped the floor with his stick one time, and said the death poem below. Once finished he tapped the floor with his stick one more time and shouted, “See! See!” Then, sitting upright, he died.

GOKU KYONEN 悟空敬念
Died 1272 at the age of fifty-six

The truth embodied in the Buddhas
Of the future, present, past;
The teaching we received from the
Fathers of our faith
Can all be found at the tip of my stick.

Japanese Death Poems is a kind of read that stays with us for life — and death. Complement with spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle on endless cycles of renewal and our biggest misunderstanding about life and death and then, for a different kind of contemplation, revisit symbolist painter Gustav Klimt’s masterpiece on what scares us the most.

“I am committed to the view the whole point and joy of human life is to integrate the spiritual with the material, the mystical with the sensuous, and the altruistic with a kind of proper self-love,” writes Alan Watts in his book In My Own Way: an Autobiography. “So I have always done things in my own way, which is at once the way that comes naturally to me, that is honest, sincere, genuine, and unforced.”

Right from the beginning Alan Watts — who has done perhaps more than any other writer to open the eyes of the West to the spiritual significance of Eastern religions and philosophies — demonstrates that his life was full of paradoxes and contradictions. A lot of it was due to the fact that he attempted to describe mystical experience — not of formal visions and supernatural beings, but of reality as seen and felt directly in a silence of words and mindings. But there was no heaviness to it, no preaching or trying to edify the listener or reader. “Truly religious people always make jokes about their religion; their faith is so strong that they can afford it,” he writes in the prologue, and so humor and lightheartedness permeate every page of his autobiography, and the following excerpt is no exception. In it, he describes the paradox of ego awareness and how he doesn’t take his self too seriously. Alan Watts writes:

My existence is, and has been, a paradox, or better, a coincidence of opposites. On the one hand, I am a shameless egotist. I like to talk, entertain, and hold the center of the stage, and can congratulate myself that I have done this to a considerable extent — by writing widely read books, by appearing on radio and television, and by speaking before enormous audiences. On the other hand, I realize quite clearly that the ego named Alan Watts is an illusion, a social institution, a fabrication of words and symbols without the slightest substantial reality; that it will be utterly forgotten within five hundred years (if our species lasts that long), and that my physical organism will shortly pass off into dust and ashes. And I have no illusions that some sort of proprietary and individual soul, spook, or ghost will outlast it.

Nevertheless, I know too that this temporary pattern, this process, is a function, a doing, a karma, of all that is and of the “which than which there is no whicher” in just the same way as the sun, the galaxy, or shall we bold to say, Jesus Christ or Gautama the Buddha. How can I say this without offense — without seeming proud, haughty, and pretentious? I simply, and even humbly, know that I am The Eternal, even though such supremely enlightened people as Jesus, Buddha, Kabir, Sri Ramakrishna, Hakuin, and Sri Ramana Maharshi may have manifested this knowledge in a more forceful and authoritative style. I would be affecting the most dishonest false modesty if I did not acknowledge this, and yet the idea of my coming on as a messiah or great guru just breaks me up with laughter.

Full of personal anecdotes, reflections, and meditations on the meaning of life, In My Own Way will be your doorway into the mind of one of the most influential spiritual writers of the 20th century. It will show you how his work was fully concerned with the mystery of being, and that he was more interested in religion as feeling and experience than as conception and theory. Complement with Ruth King on the dichotomy of “no-self” and the “conditioned self” in the context of racial suffering, Christina Baldwin on bridging the outer and inner world through writing, and Carl Rogers on what it means to enter another person’s world without prejudice.

“Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends,” wrote Albert Einstein while contemplating the irreconcilable dichotomy of science of religion. “To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man.”

We were born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith in God, Nature, the Sacred, or whatever word we used to denote that which lied beyond our sense-perceived reality. Confident that we knew everything, we were lulled into a false sense of security. But how quickly that illusion shattered when the events of last year forced us to stay locked up in our own homes, unable to go outside, afraid for our own health and those close to us. It was at that time that many of us started to question everything we did up until that point. What was it all for? We might have forgotten the essential questions of human existence, but the TED-Ed video below makes it clear that since time immemorial our ancestors always wondered about the purpose of their life on this planet and asked, “Why am I here and what is my purpose?” These are exactly the type of questions that religions are meant to answer. Please enjoy this video overview of the five major world religions which covers their origin and their main message.

THE FIVE MAJOR WORLD RELIGIONS
by John Bellaimey and TED-Ed

In all times and places in our history, human beings have wondered, “Where did we come from? What’s our place in the world? What happens to us after we die?” Religions are systems of belief that have developed and evolved over time in response to these and other eternal mysteries, driven by the feeling that some questions can only be answered by faith, and based on an intuition that there’s something greater than ourselves, a higher power we must answer to, or some source we all spring from and to which we must return. … Religion has been an aspect of culture for as long as it has existed, and there are countless variations of its practice. But common to all religions is an appeal for meaning beyond the empty vanities and lowly realities of existence, beyond sin, suffering, and death, beyond fear, and beyond ourselves.

For a more in-depth study, you can’t go wrong with the classic in the field titled The World’s Religions by Huston Smith, which remains a common introduction to comparative religion. This book explores essential elements of the world’s predominant faiths, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and the native traditions of Australia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas.

“It took modern humans tens of thousands of years to reach a population of seven hundred million and then we tapped into millions of years of stored energy known as fossil fuels. Our human population exploded. It increased by ten times in a mere two hundred years. Our consumption has also exploded: on average ten times per person and many times more in the Western world,” notes Jeff Gibbs in his controversial and highly criticized film. “You put the two together and the result is a total human impact one hundred times greater than only two hundred years ago. And that is the most terrifying realization I have ever had. We, humans, are poised for a fall from an unimaginable height. Not because of one thing, not climate change alone, but all the human-caused changes the planet is suffering from.”

Right after this reflection Jeff Gibbs goes on to interview a social psychologist and writer Sheldon Solomon about the predicament different environmental movements face when trying to solve the immense human-caused threats that face our planet. The most interesting part of that conversation is that they go beyond technological solutions and talk about underlying issue at the core of the human psyche — our denial of death. Towards the end, Sheldon Solomon notes, “If we’re to make progress, whatever that word means, or even to persist as a form of life, we’re going to need to radically overhaul our basic conception of who and what we are and what it is that we value. Because the people that you referred to earlier both on the left and the right that think we’re gonna be able to discover more oil or solar panel ourselves into the future where life looks pretty much like it does now, only cleaner and better, I think that’s just frankly delusional.”

So what can we do to prevent the inevitable fall of our own and of our planet? The answer is complicated and multifaceted and requires global human cooperation that is highly unlikely in this day and age. But on an individual level, we still have the power to help our planet notes environmentalist, poet, and writer Wendell Berry in his revitalizing volume titled The Art of the Commonplace.

Wendell Berry writes:

We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has been based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what was good even for us. We have fulfilled the danger of this by making our personal pride and greed the standard of our behavior toward the world — to the incalculable disadvantage of the world and every living thing in it. And now, perhaps very close to too late, our great error has become clear. It is not only our own creativity — our own capacity for life — that is stifled by our arrogant assumption; the creation itself is stifled.

We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it. We must learn to cooperate in its processes, and to yield to its limits. But even more important, we must learn to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never entirely understand it. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe. We must recover the sense of the majesty of creation, and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For I do not doubt that it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.

Complement this portion of The Art of the Commonplace, a refreshing read for our fast-paced lives, with Richard Louv on the spiritual necessity of nature for the young, Henry David Thoreau on why he went to live in the woods, and then revisit Deborah Underwood and Cindy Derby’s watercolor meditation on our inseparable link to the natural world around us.