Buddha, what happens when we die? (video)

Dhr. Seven, Amber Larson, Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly; The Journey of Purpose

According to science, when you die you know you are dead: Mind continues (CBSN).

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What did the Buddha teach?

The Wheel goes on.

The impersonal process of "consciousness continues after death," science finds. So what happens when we die? There are two wrong views living beings typically hold. They sound like opposites, yet they are both wrong.

The first is annihilationism (uccheda-view), the view that when we die it's lights out and everything is over, that the self is annihilated at death. This is wrong. Life goes on.

The second is eternalism (sassata-view), the view that when we die it's lights on and everything continues, that the self lives on eternally in one state or another (an eternal heaven, hell, or intermediate state). This is wrong. Life ends at every moment of being, which is actually becoming (and re-becoming) and never static "being." What is right view? What did the Buddha teach?

Birth completes in death, death in rebirth...

First, we must ask, What exists now? (The answer is the Five Aggregates Clung to as Self). There is no self to die or live on endlessly. So what exists?

There's ignorance and the "suffering" (woe, disappointment, unsatisfactoriness) that proceeds from it; there is this impersonal process.

The Truth is far stranger than the fictions we imagine. So we cannot rest easy thinking it will all take care of itself. It won't. Nor should we worry thinking there is nothing that can be done. There is. There is a Path to the end of all suffering and all future rebirth.

Why/how am I reborn? Dependent Origination

But clinging to the hankering and pursuit of sensual pleasures, we remain in bondage to this wheel samsara -- this near-endless round of becoming, this impersonal process of birth, death, rebirth (relinking), redeath...

All the while we are ensnared by craving, hounded by hate, and clouded by delusion about what's actually going on by ignorance.

Ignorance, which supports hate/fear (aversion) and craving (attraction), has a permanent antidote: enlightenment leading to liberation.