Same here. I see three phases of time from the point of view of any individual. There’s before birth, between birth and death, and after death. For the individual, the before and the after are both empty. Pretty nearly everybody seems to accept the emptiness of the before without any problem, but many people can’t do the same for the after.
I don’t get why this is, unless it’s as simple as people not wanting their sense of self to vanish.
Nor is it free.
According to our new arrival, life is more than mere survival, and we just might live the good life yet.
If you decide that it’s time that’s an illusion, you can decide that the time that you’re alive doesn’t pass, it just stays there with you in it. I would suggest that you also decide to take time to just sit and enjoy being alive once in awhile.
Life could be a dream.
Sh-boom.
I don’t think there is really anything to enjoy about it when you strip away the man made aspects of it. Meaning, purpose, cities, home, a lot of what we take to be real is just what we make up. Home is just furniture and walls, the idea and concept is just your mind.
That being said I don’t buy into souls and stuff, well I used to but over time I found it harder to keep justifying my belief in such matters.
My favorite quote from the film Gladiator - “Death smiles at us all. All a man can do is smile back.”
Unfortunately, questions that are not adequately answered by science - or about which people are just generally ignorant - lend themselves to answers that depend on a person’s point of view or personal history. Here’s a clever little piece about personal perspective.
It’s a little like sex in that way. Before you had your first sexual encounter, you may have wondered what it would be like. Did people really do that sort of thing or was it just something in the movies? Having no personal experience, no context upon which to draw conclusions, it’s easy to come to some pretty interesting conclusions.
So, in general, two things -
Stay away from woo. It never leads anywhere you want to be. You will always be poorer as a result.
Research is important. It can supply some of the context that you lack in personal experience.
Speaking of research, the great Tom Lehrer - “If you’re looking for an adventure of a new and different kind … and come across a girl scout who is similarly inclined…”
I hope you meant this metaphorically and not literally. 
Don’t do that. This is your problem. You sit and dwell and strip away anything worthwhile, meaningful, enjoyable, purposeful in life and then complain obsessively that life in meaningless and joyless. No fucking shit Sherlock. You’ve fucking ruined it for yourself and insist on haranguing everyone with your incessant pointless whining and navel gazing.
You need to stop. Get some professional help with your obsessive behavior.
Once upon a time I was working on my computer, doing a spreadsheet with my investments. My computer malfunctioned and I pulled the battery to shut it down. When I finally recovered it, there was a file on the hard drive that looked sorta like my investments, but my net worth was eleven trillion dollars.
What I interpret this to mean is that this file was saved while my computer was completely off without power, indicating that computers have some place where they go after this life, and in that place, I’m the richest guy ever.
That’s NDEs in a nutshell.
Machinaforce, don’t take this as a personal attack - and it’s not - but what is your purpose in starting threads in which you ask a question that have an obvious answer - “is death an illusion?” (no, it’s not, it’s very real.) “Are we the universe?” (no, we are tiny humans on a tiny planet in an incomprehensibly vast universe.) What do you get out of all this?
What’s next - “Is pain an illusion?” “Does math really exist?” “Are colors real?”
If your question is based on the video, don’t waste your time. The video starts by saying that consciousness persists beyond death, and that is a contradiction in terms. It just goes downhill from there. The video is just a stream of nonsense that makes no cogent point.
It’s like Wiley Coyote when he runs off a cliff: he’s fine until he looks down.
But it’s got a clip of Jim Carrie saying, “…suddenly I realized that I am the universe!”
I’ve heard of over-sized egos, but Jim’s taken it to a whole new level.
Yeah, but he’s not dead, so I’m not sure what his point was.
He’s a method actor. He was playing the part.
It’s actually quite the opposite in terms of ego, but you are not the universe just a small part of it. I mean I’m not really sure how to define the universe per se, but my guess is that the view that we are little isolated and atomized people is “wrong” and that we are actually interconnected in a great big whole. Which isn’t really mystical so much as scientific.
I wouldn’t expect an answer from the OP, who very seldom addresses questions like this one or responds to pleas that he/she get help. I’ve decided the payoff must be the number of people who respond.