Reincarnation

One's next birth is determined by the consciousness at death as everything we do leaves impressions in the mind and influences us at death. Human existence without the cultivation of spiritual knowledge means one has to enter the lower forms of life. So how does one purify his consciousness to have a better life next time or avoid reincarnation altogether?
The importance of death is derived from attachment to particular forms, but death loses much of its sting if one takes a broader view. There is an unbroken continuity of life through these forms, old ones being discarded and new ones created for expression. Thus old generations are replaced by new ones and life is reborn. The individual soul continues to exist with all its sanskaras [impressions] in the inner worlds through the medium of its mental and subtle bodies, even after it has discarded the gross body. So, life through the medium of the gross body is only a section of the continuous life of the soul; these other sections of its life have their expression in other worlds.
When the individual soul has incarnated in a physical body, it expresses life in the gross world. Still, when it drops the the physical body, it continues to have expressions either in the subtle world through the subtle body, or in the mental world through the mental body. Life in the physical body is terminated only when the sanskaras released for expression in that incarnation are worked out. When the soul drops its body it is severed from all connections with the gross world, though the ego and the mind are retained with all the impressions accumulated in the earthly career.
Learn so much more in this revealing audiobook filled with ancient Vedic wisdom by a realized Bhakti yogi of over fifty years,