Good karma, Bad Karma
Our destination?
The more good merit (justified rewards) you give, No matter if it's a good thought or that you helped your mother to take out the garbage, the more good merit is experienced by the mind.
It works the other way too. If you punch somebody, or even think about it, you loose credit. These negative and positive effects are experienced by the mind as a whirlpool of emotions. This whirlpool controls your life.
It is causing your destination.
So, Can I change my destination? Yes, If I prevent negative emotions it will change my destination. The enjoyment I experience when giving good merit will also change my destination. Enjoyment often results in a better personal world. Giving merit is a vehicle that brings you to a world based on karmic balance. The lower the level goes the more dramatic your life will be.
Stop thinking negative
Many people have a negative self image. Thinking negatively about yourself already feeds the mind and will move the vehicle to a certain world that is a perfect fit in respect to your emotional footprint. Your world is changing to a more negative world if you think bad about yourself.
The footprint of all beings having the power of perception, like humans or animals, may interfere with each other. Wandering the world with the wise and happy slowly moves your vehicle towards their world and visions.
People with great influence are able to generate emotions that cause feelings of comfort toward us therefore we tend to be like those people and we are trying to maintain the same emotional state. The more you think the same the more you start to be the same. Emotional footprints that look alike attract each other.
Where do I go?
My destination is where my life ends and a new one is started (samsara). The new life will be born having the same balance of good and bad karma that the mind takes along when I die. I can't pass my memories or my thinking. My ego decays like the body, eventually nothing is left. No more me.
It's seems that the mind has created the body with the purpose to use it as a vehicle to transport the emotional footprint. Like a car, If the car is getting old and rusty, we'll buy a new car and transportation is continued.
The mind is acting like a cursor moving me up and down the level of respective life, attracted or rejected by other emotional footprints, tracking and pointing me to my destination. When I die that very same cursor creates a new life and continues it's path where I went in decay. Only a complex emotional footprint passes on to next life.
It's what the mind is doing. The mind is reacting on emotions and creates a continues world based on the mixture of the emotions I experience every moment of the day.
The mind has it's focus on any fabric in the worlds it has created and when this ultimate focus stops, the fabric simply doesn't exist anymore. I try to narrow down this fact to the atomic level where matter appears to go out and in existence. Even eons after our bodies decayed, atoms that were part of our very own fabric may become part of other objects but ultimately each atom will fade when the mind looses it focus on it.
So, Where do I go? Nowhere. The being in me is what 'lives forever' if I may use our earthly terms, because time is a creation like everything else of the mind.
My best purpose in a human life is to give and collect good merit building up a emotional footprint that matches the footprint of a Buddha. It may be not in this life or the life's to follow in a million years but ultimately the Buddha becomes.
Enlightenment
One way to break this endless cycle of samsara (birth and death) is to really understand the Buddha mind by effectively getting rid of attachements, conditions and marks.
The Diamond sutra states that the true Buddha mind lacks all of these, therefore entering a no-mind and no-tought state in the mids of the four attitudes of walking, standing, sitting and resting. This is the true employment of the mind, the true concentrated effort. To practice the Dharma of the Diamond sutra without the mind of attainment (obtaining gain) is called the pranja of the Great vehicle.
This is actually the wisdom of the Buddha, free from impurity and without concepts. This wisdom cuts the root of birth and death. Understanding the Diamond sutra and accepting it as the ultimate wisdom of the Buddha will open the gate to enlightenment.