The main thing is to keep an open mind. If you think that when you die that’s it, that closes your mind off to many possibilities. But if you are sure that when you die you are reborn in a particular way following particular processes etc - well - it can be nice to feel such certainty but again it is closing your mind off. Maybe it’s true? Maybe it isn’t? Maybe it has an element of truth but is a simplification or some aspect of the truth or just one way of looking at things?

The way Buddha taught, he made the central part of his teaching thigns we can see for ourselves. We can see the truth of suffering and unsatisfactoriness. And there are other things we can come to see such as impermanence. Eventually non self also. Not as things to achieve, things to make happen, but as truths we can come to see about ourselves, teh world, our situation etc.

So it’s the same for rebirth too. Most Buddhists probably believe that when you die you are reborn in some other form. Some of those rebirths are into states that you might think of as like a kind of a heaven - realms of pure thought, blissful states, and even more refined states than that. But Buddha taught that they are all temporary, impermanent. That if they are the results of conditions , then they come ot an end. Even if you somehow enter some refined state that maybe doesn’t even need a body in physical form at all, a refined mental state lasting for trillions of years of happiness in its most refined form, or whatever it is, eventually it will come to an end.

So, the aim of achieving a good afterlife - most Buddhists think of that as a somewhat lesser aim. It is only a temporary solution, even if it lasts for trillions of years- well at some point in the future it ends and you are back where you started from.

The Buddhist teachings are unusual because Buddha taught that you can become enlightened in this very lifetime. It’s not an afterlife, it’s right now, right here. No need to go anywhere to find it. It’s just the truth, the way things are. A truth which sonehow we are obscuring by the way we complicate everything. On and on it goes, one complexity after another, and some truth that he said is easy to see if we could but see it. We miss it because it is so obvious and clear to view, a bit like not spotting the very largest print on a map.

So that’s how we think of it, important to keep an open mind about it, most think we do get reborn - but it’s not the central part of the teaching, really, important as it may seem sometimes in the way Buddhism is taught. Far more important ot have an open mind about what happens when you die. Some schools go into many very detailed teachings about rebirth and these mental states also that you could enter when you die - e.g. in Tibetan Buddhism. At the opposite extreme perhaps the Zen Buddhist teachings - even though they also have teachings on rebirth too - there is much less emphasis on it and far more attention given to the very core teachings of Buddhism and the direct realization, seeing a truth for yourself. A truth as plain to view as the truth of suffering and unsatisfactoriness, if we could but see it. The idea that there is such a truth to be seen is like a koan in itself. However this is a rather superficial distinction. All the main schools of Buddhism have that as their central teaching, just as the Zen schools do, a truth you have to see for yourself. That’s in the original sutras, the core teachings accepted by all the main sutra tradition schools..