It Makes Sense to Believe in the After Life
What I heard the kind Buddha said, if he were here today
I love reading about the Buddha and his teachings on ending human suffering. Nowhere else have I found a set of teachings that makes logical sense, shows how to manage emotions, and offers a path to practice devotion.
But there’s nothing harder to wrap my mind around than the idea of rebirth. How did an esoteric idea about past and future lives have anything to do with being pragmatic about liberating us from suffering?
A lot. Rebirth is a central theme in everything the Buddha taught. Does that mean you should stop listening to him if you don’t believe in rebirth? Of course not. But you benefit more if you do. It’s like the difference between receiving a 5% discount and 100%.
What the Buddha said about freeing ourselves from suffering makes sense to many people.¹ At first glance, rebirth isn’t one of them.
A concept that always bothered me is the idea that our human experiences continue after our body dies. This means that we will always reap the results of our actions, even if we may not have human experiences in our next lives. This is rebirth.
Being a talented investigator himself, the Buddha had tools to determine what to believe in. He suggested applying two checks on his teachings. He instructed:²
- to believe our own direct experience and,
- to choose ideas that benefit us.
If Buddha were alive today, I bet many will consider him an optimist. He’d be selling online courses to reach everyone. On his website, the FAQ section would have this entry:
Q: How do we directly experience rebirth? What benefits does believing in rebirth have?
A: It is difficult to have a direct experience of rebirth. But there’s a huge benefit to believing in it and the existence of future lives.
The long answer:
First, we start with what’s observable. We can observe that in every moment of our lives, experiences happen in sequence³. For anything we experience, there’s a result that comes after, and that result becomes the impetus for the next result, and so on indefinitely.
The sight of something brings up our past feelings about it. When we think, we also experience the emotions attached to those thoughts. Memories trigger past behaviors. For every action, behavior, or thought, there’s a reaction.
Here’s an example.
I’m sitting with friends in a restaurant. The sight of food reminds me of my favorites. When dinner is served, I smell the dishes and taste them. Some foods are pleasant, while others are not. After a while of eating a thought pops up in my head, “Hey, I’m enjoying this.” The contentment I felt was cut short. All of a sudden I’m so full and it’s time to go home — waved my friends goodbye. My steps to the taxi and through my front door are heavy. I feel happy to have such a great meal tonight. I bet I can revisit it in the shower as memory or later in a dream tonight, or farther in the future.
Where did our human experience begin?
There must be something that began all our experiences, all the way back to when we were kids that traced our choices in life. What could that be? When was that moment when we first existed, as a child, or before that, that started it all?
However, try as we might, we are unable to recall that first experience. Trying so gets us nowhere. We simply cannot observe that first moment. Because we are not sure of the first memory, we can’t use it to further our understanding.
On the other hand, accepting that our experiences have no beginning gets us unstuck. We do this not with faith, but as a hypothesis.
Where does human experience end?
We associate death with the end of our experience. Death may come without notice that we may miss out on enjoying the fruits of the lives we built. Or unfairly, when bad things happen to good people. Sometimes death comes early to the young.
However morbid, death remains a second-hand account. As long as we’re living, we’ll never have a direct experience of dying.
Our working hypothesis so far is this: all our experiences comprise individual events happening one after the other. We think about them in terms of cause and effect, which has no beginning. But, on the contrary, our experiences may have an end when we die.
When we die, we can guess two possible outcomes:
1. Annihilation — when our body dies, all experiences stop. The cause and effect pattern we’ve observed when we’re living is not true anymore.
2. Rebirth — our actions, thoughts, and emotions have results that extend beyond when our bodies die. We may not retain all of our experiences in our next lives, but our past actions will have an impact.
Among the two, the idea of rebirth is compatible with our hypothesis. What we observe as cause and effect when we’re alive, continues after death. Death can be considered as just another experience within a long cycle.
And to break away from that cycle is to be free of suffering. This liberation is not the same as dying. Rather, this liberation is what the Buddha wants us to learn.⁴
Just what this liberation from suffering is exactly is another topic the Buddha talked extensively about. What will give us more understanding is believing in rebirth. Believing in future lives is the first step towards the 100% discount.
And if I’m still confused?
Rebirth starts to make sense if we accept it as a working hypothesis. And for people like me, who have a bit of analytical understanding of rebirth but still lacks visceral emotions and familiarity to believe in it wholeheartedly, the Buddha gave this motivation:⁵
1. If rebirth does exist, and we follow his teachings, we reap the benefits in this life and the next. Wouldn’t that be nice?
2. If rebirth does not exist, and we follow his teachings, we reap the benefits in this life. Wouldn’t that be nice too?
Again, the Buddha asks us to consider believing in what benefits us.
Footnotes:
Siddhartha Gautama is a man that lived about 2,500 years ago. Many followed him because of his research on how to end human suffering. He is also known as the Buddha.
We know about him from people who preserved his ideas. His teachings have been adapted and passed on from one generation to another across borders and cultures. A lot of his lessons were useful back then. And today, people are still benefiting from them.
[2] [5] Taken from a long discourse translation, “Kalama Sutta: To the Kalamas” by Thanissaro Bhikkhu.
[3] Human experiences are also called the Five Aggregates. This article breaks it down.
[4] It might be helpful for understanding liberation to think about the five types of awareness, as suggested in this article by Alexander Berzin.
[6] Read more about rebirth: “The Truth of Rebirth” by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
