All I can say
for certain is that for some reason we have the capability to feel we are removed from our body, be it just an illusion or and actual out of body experience.
I haven't experienced me floating up there very high or some other weirder things, but I have experienced myself floating off my body a bit, so I have zero doubt that people who tell about floating up there and having weird experiences like that are lying. So at the very least this experience happening with people is not a matter of faith, but it's very much real (again, be it an illusion or a real thing).
This also makes me believe that people actually have near death experiences, so at the very least while we are still alive we can have these otherwordly feeling experiences filled with a sense of pure love or terrible agony. Now, this is more of a thing of faith from my part as I haven't experienced that myself, but as I said, my experience of feeling myself being removed from my body makes me believe their experiences are true.
So the question is, is it just an illusion or is it in any way real? Or does it matter if it's an illusion?
Who knows if it is just an illusion but just like you sometimes feel you have had hours and hours and hours long dream even if you've just been asleep for two minutes, maybe this experience we have in our deaths feels like an eternity to us even though for people around us it is just a second. When they take their next breath after we have died, that "otherworldly" experience of us has already ended, but the way we have felt it has been an eternity.
Or if it's not that, it's still a very nice thought that in our deaths we might have this nice moment of feeling pure calmness and love. Maybe that really happens and then slowly fades away. And because we feel how good it is, it fading away doesn't even bother us at all.
Now, then the question arises,
why we can have these experiences? Pure naturalism doesn't explain it at all. Why do some people who have survived drowning say that at the moment of "death" they felt warm embrace? It can't be about this experience being somehow advantageous for us evolutionarily speaking and that's why we would have this capability. If it was, then back in the day there should've been a lot of people nearly dying but surviving and this weird accidental illusion being advantageous to so many people it ended up becoming a thing for us, and that seems odd as the chances for people surviving from accidents or diseases were really really low back then, so I can't see how there would've been situations where the advantage was even possible to happen. Most likely people who got in a situation where they will die very soon had the weird experience and then died for good without being able to tell anyone about it. But now as our technology and skills to heal have become better we are hearing about these experiences more and more.
In any case, it seems like it's a fact that when people are dying, they either always or at least sometimes go through an experience where they feel they get removed out of their bodies and/or feel they enter an afterlife type of situation. And while it might actually last only a second, there is a possibility it feels it lasts at least a bit longer. And even if it lasted only for a second, it might be the best feeling you've ever had (or the worst too). The undeniable fact in any case is that at the very least for some there will be an experience that feels like they're entering some afterlife thing, even if it would be only an illusion.
My consciousness could possibly be a chemical compound of some sort. Chances are, it’s possible the right mixture could occur again. Just pulled that out of my ass.
Or maybe these chemical reactions are not the cause of consciousness, but consciousness is the cause for chemicals acting and reacting and making our brains and bodies react to consciousness.
Pulled that out of my ass too, but still, an interesting thing to ponder isn't it?