It seems obvious to assume that death is inevitable relative to birth. Something has to be conditioned and born for death to happen, eventually. So let’s back up and begin with that night in the back of the SUV at the side of the road, or some hotel room during our honeymoon.
After successful conception, an incarnating entity or gandhabha enters the mother’s womb to undergo a trimester process of bonding itself with the developing fetus (this is the activity of rudimentary desire). In time, a newborn emerges from the birth canal of the mother and everyone lives happily ever after. Well, not really. Let me unpack this.
In Buddhism, the term gandhabba (S., gandharva) is used to denote a particular state of samsaric consciousness (P., viññāṇa). Such a consciousness is a doubling of the one (eka) into subject and object knowing (P., ñāṇa) or the same, observer and observed knowing. Because this implicit duality found in consciousness is never transcended, except in nirvana, birth and death and rebirth are, with rare exception, inevitable for humans. Consciousness is the transmigrant from one life to the next. It doesn’t die. We could even call it the bad infinite.
Knowing this is important in Buddhism so as to avoid an unsatisfactory rebirth after our inevitable death.
The sad and tragic thing about modern culture is we lead sloppy, unspiritual lives not caring about our own next life after this one in addition to rearing children in such a way that they grow up having learned maladaptive patterns of behavior which neither benefit them nor make for a good society.
Buddhism tries to correct this as much as it can but it is undercut by the modern disposition of skepticism: the tendency to disbelieve something that doesn’t agree with one’s own personal narrative. The only thing believed in seems to be the inevitability of death with no chance of rebirth.
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