First of all, it is important to know that while you are still alive you have a chance to overcome death. The purpose of the scriptures is to show you how to go beyond death. The process is explained in the Kathopanishad. The Gita also teaches us that the wisest thing to do is to overcome death now rather than trying to deal with what will happen after death.

What happens after death depends on what you have done in this life and all your previous lives. Life is continuous -- you will be reborn into another family that will be suitable to your nature. You will continue your life from the past for as long as you have desires left in you. If you continue to accumulate more and more desires that need to be fulfilled, then you will continue the rebirth cycle. You will experience rebirth depending upon your activities, actions, and desires in this life. The Gita also explains that the kind of birth you get depends on the type of karma you did not only in this life but in the previous.

Other religions might explain that they believe in rebirth when their prophet will come. We specifically believe that life is continuous and just as we change our bodies from infant to adult and from adult to old age, after death we change to another body.

Death is nothing but a change. Constant change is going on in man, and we acquire a new body when old body dies. When we become adults our childhood is dead; you can't have your childhood back. Death is renouncing or dropping the old for a new, just like junking the old car for a new one.

It is important to recognize that you are getting new life even in this very birth. You are constantly changing just like every year the leaves of the trees change in the fall. In nature rebirth constantly happens. We might not understand this, but the true Hindu sages have thought about it, observed, understood and experienced this. Without belief in life after death there would be no foundation for proper behavior. People would just rampage and not care what happened to them.

-- Swami Radhanandaji