'Something deep within us has put us in a position where we must
necessarily rise to our full potential as a species or go the way of the
dinosaur.'
By Caitlin Johnstone: Zen Buddhism is full of stories about practitioners staring death in the face in order to cut through their mental habits and force a direct confrontation with the fundamental matter. Monks doing zazen on a cliff’s edge to keep themselves alert, rōshis telling frustrated students to kill themselves if they cannot achieve satori by next sunrise, students taking death vows if they fail to awaken within a given period of time, etc.
In Helen Tworkov’s Zen in America for example we are told of “the monk who sat with a stick of incense in one hand and a knife in the other and vowed to kill himself if he didn’t get enlightened by the time the incense burned out.