Yoga and the Fear of Death

In a recent study Garfield (1975) found that psychedelic drug users, Zen meditators, and practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism expressed more accepting attitudes toward death than did graduate students in both psychology and religion; also, that Zen and Tibetan Buddhists were more accepting than the drug users. Garfield suggested that states of altered awareness, achieved through the use of drugs or meditation, produced experiences which involve ego-dissolution and thus resemble death, and that these experiences might make death more 'knowable', acceptable, and ultimately transcendable,