In normal cases, death occurs when all the sanskaras seeking fructification are worked out. When the soul drops its physical body, it is completely 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. Unlike the exceptional cases of spirits still obsessed with the gross world, ordinary souls try to reconcile themselves to the severance from the gross world and conform to the limitations of changed conditions. They sink into a state of subjectivity in which a new process begins of mentally reviewing the experiences of the earthly career by reviving the sanskaras connected with them. Thus death inaugurates a period of comparative rest consisting in a temporary withdrawal from the gross sphere of action. It is the beginning of an interval between the last incarnation and the next.
-Discourses 7th Ed., 305