Acharya Prashant addresses the question of what happens after death by stating that one simply disintegrates. You don't really go anywhere; you arose from the soil, and you go back to the soil, the air, and the water. Then, one day, randomly, those atoms combine again, and the self rises again. There is hardly any difference in the body in the moment before and after death. The body is exactly as it was when you called it alive; it's just that a particular configuration is gone. He further explains the concept of life by taking the example of conception. When the male cell meets the female cell in the womb, it's not immediately that you say the embryo is alive. It takes a few months before you can ascribe life to the fetus. This is why in debates over abortion, people talk about the month of pregnancy up to which it is ethically sound to terminate it. Hindu books say it is in the seventh month that the lump of flesh attains ego-agency (Atma-bhav). Before the seventh month, there is the thing, but the thing has no self. The self arises from the development of the body; therefore, the self is a thing of the body. When that configuration is gone, the self is gone. It doesn't really go anywhere. Acharya Prashant refers to Shri Krishna's teachings in the Gita, which state that what you consider as living and not living, animate and inanimate, are really one. Mind and matter are not really two. The entire discussion over where consciousness comes from disappears. Consciousness does not come from anywhere; it is material and arises from matter. However, the strange thing about consciousness is that, though birthed by the body, it does not want to remain confined to the body. This urge is desire, and in its purest sense, it is the spiritual quest towards liberation. Science, being the study of the material, can definitely give birth and can extend the material basis of consciousness for a long time, but it cannot satisfy consciousness. In a dead man, life has returned to the very atoms it came from. It is not manifest or expressed anymore.
