Having brushed up against the edges enough, I'm not sure this side isn't the illusion.

Part of the problem is how we think of time. As these mobile organisms, this interface between body and world operates as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so we think of it narratively and wonder what comes next. The reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, becuase the earth turns.

There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

Energy is conserved, because it is the present, going past to future, as the forms generated go future to past. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall.

Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Though it's the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy and feeding the flame, while the central nervous system sorts the information, signals from he noise.

So energy is conserved, why not consciousness? It's just the forms it manifests come and go, but they wouldn't exist otherwise. Without the ups and downs, it's a flatline.

Lives go birth to death, being in the future, to being in the past, as life goes the other way, moving onto new generations, shedding the old.

So think of life as like a sentence. The end is just punctuation. What matters is how well you tie the rest of the story together.