Namaste,

Having given some thought to the nature of rebirth recently, I have been pondering over this quote from Gita when Krishna tells Arjuna that "whatever state of being one remembers when he quits his body... that state he will attain without fail" and trying to understand it properly. I am already aware that the mode of the new body will be determined by one's past actions (karma) and, as the text from the Gita I have just referenced, one's state of mind. But it sounds almost as if the text suggests that if a man, dying on his deathbed, considers up until the last moments of his life who and what he is and what may lie in the great beyond after he draws his last breath, will be reborn as a human in the next life. But what if this man has spent much of his life committing the most heinous of crimes, generating bad deeds and karma for himself and others... would his merely contemplating his life as a human and remembering his being human save him from say becoming reborn as a lower form of consciousness, such as an animal? Also, which would be more indicative of the nature of soul's next body - his karma or his bhava, or is it a mixture of both?