In response to a question about what happens after death, Acharya Prashant explains that one simply disintegrates. You don't go anywhere; you arose from the soil, and you go back to the soil, the air, and the water. He states that 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; it is exactly as it was when you called it alive. It's just that a particular configuration is gone. Acharya Prashant elaborates that what is called life begins when the male cell meets the female cell in the womb, but it is not immediately that the embryo is considered alive. It takes a few months before life can be ascribed to the fetus. He references the debates over abortion and notes that Hindu books say it is in the seventh month that the lump of flesh attains ego-agency (aatmabhav). Before the seventh month, there is the thing, but the thing has no self. The self arises from the body, from the development of the body. Therefore, the self is a thing of thebody. When the body's configuration is gone, the self is gone. He further explains, citing Shri Krishna from the Gita, that what is considered animate and inanimate, or mind and matter, are not really two separate things. Consciousness 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 it. This urge is desire, and in its purest sense, it is the spiritual quest for liberation. Science can create and sustain life, but it cannot provide liberation or satiate consciousness. After death, nothing flies out of the body; rather, life returns to the atoms it came from, where it remains latent, like a seed, until it can sprout again under the right conditions. This process can be called reincarnation.