Though if one believes in reincarnation, wouldn't they already be in an afterlife?

I think a big part of the problem with understanding life, as well as death, is our concept of time.

As these mobile organisms, this sequential process of perception is a function of navigation. Which creates the effect of time as the present moving past to future.

From which we have narrative based cultures and which physics codifies as measures of duration.

The reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as the events come and go.

There is no literal 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. As such, it goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past.

In terms of the wave, energy drives it, while the fluctuations rise and fall.

Also, consciousness goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form go future to past.

Though it's the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy, feeding the flame, while the central nervous system sorts the information. Signals from the noise.

Lives also go future to past, while life goes past to future.

The logical fallacy of monotheism is that a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. It's just that only children are allowed to revel in sentience, while the rest of us have to keep moving. The whole mobility thing.

So it's more the light shining through the film, than the images on it.