If you wanted to design a system that would be a masterpiece, a means of providing individuals with opportunity to fulfill their potential, to keep growing and learning, and meeting themselves with all their foibles and virtues, qualities and talents, vices and shortfalls to improve, and to ensure that all participants could access awareness of their effects on others (be it right away or, as seems to be more the case in our current materialistic days, in the between-lives arena) - then you would come up with the system that appears to be in play on Earth now - the masterpiece of karma and reincarnation in which we live.
2. Experiment:
Take a moment to imagine the cessation of your "I".
You can imagine the physical body coming to an end, the dissolution of the body.
But can you do so with the "I"?
The moment you try, there is your "I" standing back looking for an imagined end to itself.
It can't be done* - inferring that the Ego lives on after death.
*footnote: The "I" can be dissipated, in a sense, by oneself, or at least degraded and debilitated, through chronic substance abuse, or through long term practices of an spiritual path that espouses the dissolution of the ego (once an appropriate experience for the soul during the ancient Indian epoch, but now counter to the present leading edge of evolution - the retention and enhancement of the "Ego" or I).
3. Multi-dimensional factors and future life progress.
There are times when an overly simplistic view of reincarnation can be held.
One aspect that helps over-ride an overly simplistic view is to understand that thoughts don't carry on beyond a certain stage of the death process, except as forces, whereas enthusiasms, perceptions and feelings do pass into the next life. The conceptual life associated with an incarnation dissipates. For example, a child who spoke the Greek language in his/her past life does not learn the Greek language any more easily this life.
Another perceptual shortfall resides, for example, in the notion that a great musician must have been a musician in a prior life, and now has simply progressed to an advanced level. A more accurate perspective views the emergence of a talent as a result of progress made in a past life in another (but obliquely associated) arena of development.
4. Proportion of brain utilized
Through reincarnation, we are given the opportunity to fulfill our overall quest to become whole, fully evolved beings - a quest that is utterly impossible in a single lifetime.
It is common knowledge that we use only 10-20 versus only 10-20%). We come to know, from an overview, what our life was really about, and where we need to improve, and can then determine where we are going, and with who, and the particulars pertaining to the next life that we choose.
