I frequent and enjoy http://www.templesofwisdom.org BROTHERHOOD OF LIGHT website and though I would pass along this article which may of interest to some.

Because death brings dissolution, it is important to have one guiding thought which keeps everything together. That can be a god, a heaven, a mantra, or a loved one. This slows the dissolution, and allows the dying person to concentrate on something outside of himself. Then, there is more peaceful transcendence, and less panic at the side effects of death. 

Spiritual guides can be helpful at the time of death, but they cannot be everywhere, and many people die simultaneously. Links forged while alive will bring the guide to the dying person at the time of death. There are many kinds of spiritual guides. Some are specific to religious traditions, like angels, bodhisattvas, or immortals. Some are more general and nondenominational like those in the Brotherhood of Light. Other examples of nondenominational guides are shamans, ancestors, and dead friends. The figure of the Psychopomp who was a guide for the dead existed in ancient Greece but no longer exists in the modern world.

Guides bring people to their destinations. Most relationships with guides are the result of karmic connections. Sometimes people have created links with specific gods and heaven worlds, and go there after death. Sometimes guides give options for reincarnation but the options are limited by the person's karma. The individual can choose a new birth from one of the options given.

But in the modern world, most people flounder at death, especially if their religious faith is superficial or non-existent Then they don't have a goal, and they often get trapped, waiting for something to happen. For these persons, the pain and upset of death will gradually lessen, and the person will stay in a gray world, neither good nor evil, but vague and insubstantial. Here they will await the vortex of rebirth where they will be drawn into another womb and reincarnate in a new body.

The ability to travel spiritually and meditate in the current life is knowledge that is usually maintained when people die. Some types of knowledge stay and some disappear after death. Specifics like names, dates, and places disappear along with many skills. Basic emotions and habits stay, along with spiritual abilities.

However, certain kinds of action in life can obstruct spiritual abilities. They place a barrier between the soul and some types of knowledge, as well as its karma. It cuts the soul in two, so that things that are normally remembered are forgotten.

This does not occur with minor bad karma, which weighs down the soul and blurs its vision, but does not split it. However trauma, or the infliction of trauma on others breaks the unity of the soul. Pain (one's own or another's) severs the soul's access to knowledge.

Free will at death depends on the acceptance of the dying process and the ability to concentrate and focus attention during life. If the dying process is not accepted, the soul becomes clogged with fear and other negative emotions, and the pathway is obstructed. Ability to concentrate during life allows that habit to be maintained at death, for habits are maintained more easily than rational thought. Concentration allows observation of the process of death, and conscious control over the speed of events. Inability to concentrate means a large number of events happen at once, with the soul being dragged along in a semi-conscious state. In this situation, there are pieces of the self floating around, and the person literally needs to keep himself together.

We of the Brotherhood of Light can help at death, if we are called. We can protect the soul, and unite its pieces as it is pulled through the vortex out of the realm of embodied existence and into the plane of spirits. Then we can guide the soul to a more peaceful location, and give it some options depending on its karma.

Reincarnation weaves the web of life, with billions of life forms interacting through time and space. It makes the universe a more complex place than it would be without such causality, but one with more relationships than philosophers and theologians can possibly imagine.

It means that each being is not only itself, but is also composed of the remnants of those which came before it. These appear as impulse, luck, coincidence, and knowing that which should be unknown. Within each being is another (i.e. a past life), and another within that, creating a vast chain of lives making up the mandala and stained glass windows of the spiritual past.

When karma first arises, it is in the context of necessity, of action that must be performed, or experience that must be endured. But when karma is studied, the individual can become conscious of its existence and effects. Karma charts out the meaning of a life, and a trajectory of lives. It determines what a person will accomplish, and what he or she wishes to accomplish.

Karma is a chain until it is recognized and understood - then it becomes a fire for the casting of metal, and creation of lives. It devours the pain and the joy of the past, and becomes clay to be shaped. To control one's karma is an important part of the spiritual path.