The Denial of Death
Most religious traditions are “top down.” Scripture and tradition define the religion, and the follower starts by accepting these definitions axiomatically on faith. Top down religions require lots of initial “buy in” up front.
However, there are a few examples of bottom up religious thinking. Bottom up religions require very little buy in to get started. My first teacher, Richard Rose, said we should start from where we are. Like Socrates, his teachings started with a humble admission of ignorance. The only belief he required was that “we can be less stupid tomorrow then we are today.” And even this was just a working hypothesis for Rose. After all, he would say, perhaps the more we think the stupider we get.
Zen, especially in its purest form, is also bottom up. Zen starts with the axiom that life is a problem that needs to be solved: A problem that Zen calls “The Riddle of Life and Death.” To get started in Zen you don’t have to “believe in” much more than this problematic nature of life.
The Denial of Death, a Pulitzer Prize winning book by Ernest Becker, uses the psychological discoveries of Freud, Jung, Rank, and others to get to the essential problem of human existence. The problem we have is that we are creatures, and as creatures we are doomed to die. Yet as conscious human beings we have a capacity for abstract thinking, what Becker calls a symbolic self, and as a result we are the only animals that know we are going to die. A creature that longs for life but knows it is going to die is in a horrible dilemma.
To cope with this nightmare according to Becker, we deny our mortality through repression and this self-hiding makes our whole life false. We are not living authentically and deep down inside we know it. Denial of Death does not offer a solution to the problem; Becker is an atheist and we have to turn to spirituality for that. As Einstein and Nietzsche said, the most important problems are not answered, they are transcended, and transcendence is the province of religion.
However no one poses Zen’s Riddle of Life and Death better than Ernest Becker. And he does it based, not on his opinions, but on solid psychological research. Denial of Death poses the problem I set out to solve – what only spirituality can solve.
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