On a scale of 1 to 10, how surprised would you be to discover the afterlife actually exists?

 My perspective of ‘afterlife’ is “life in a different body”. Since my body is no longer the body my mother gave birth to, I’m already in a different body, and still alive.

Since I accept the teachings of Sri Krishna in Bhagavad Gita, I’m confident that life is eternal, never having been created and never destroyed. The only question is where this spark of life is going to exist. So there is no such thing as ‘afterlife’. There is always life. There is after-this-body life, and after-that-body life. Life goes on forever, so nothing comes after it. Bodies come and go, so ‘afterlife’ simply means life after this body.

In the material world, life goes on in a succession of material bodies, with each new body influenced by the previous one. We don't enter each life as blank slates. We bring with us a particular nature, with particular interests, tendencies, abilities and attractions developed over previous lives.

Heredity, upbringing and circumstances certainly have an influence, but they act upon what is already present. A young child may not yet have had enough time to develop or express the tendencies carried from previous lives. As the child grows, heredity, upbringing and circumstances can encourage, restrain or redirect those tendencies, but they don't create the underlying nature.

We make the same mistake in many other areas of life when we confuse a contributing factor with the determining cause. Correlation doesn’t imply causation. For example we like to think that hard work leads to success. Hard work plays its part, but plenty of hardworking people never become successful, while some people achieve great success without much effort. Hard work is a factor, but it isn't the whole explanation.

The same applies to upbringing. Not all criminals come from broken homes or abusive childhoods. Many had loving families and every advantage, yet still turned out badly. And the reverse is also true: some people raised in terribly dysfunctional circumstances grow up to become admirable and responsible adults. The circumstances matter, but they are acting upon a person who already has a particular nature.

This also helps explain why children with the same parents, brought up in the same circumstances, can nevertheless develop remarkably different interests, abilities and dispositions. One may become a policeman while another becomes a criminal. They didn't begin life as identical blank slates and then somehow become different. They brought different histories with them.

What we develop an interest in, become attached to, or cultivate in one life carries forward into another. In this life we can run with it some more, or drop it as no longer being interesting, and that will be reflected in our future embodiment. Child prodigies may well have spent several births getting to where they are. It certainly wasn't one.

So I would be no more surprised to be in another body after this one than I would be surprised if my father were to say, “Pack up, we're moving to another house,” and then finding another house waiting. Suffice to say I’m quite sure this birth is already an ‘afterlife’ and after this birth will be another life with a new identity based on my new body.

The living entity in the material world carries his different conceptions of life from one body to another, as the air carries aromas. Thus he takes one kind of body and again quits it to take another. Bhagavad Gita 15.8