Stevenson's material on reincarnation goes a long way to convince me, but I'm not so convinced on what I've read regarding near death and out-of-body experiences. During OBEs, people often see things in the so-called physical world which are not, in fact, occuring; in the `other side' portion of NDEs in the West, people certainly see dead relatives, but sometimes those who are alive and in good health. Its also been shown that how the afterlife appears, what religious figures one sees and why one is sent back is all heavily dependent upon the culture to which one belongs. This indicates the experiences, in the traditional objective sense, are caca. They are experiences influenced by culture, ultimately individual, and generated by one's own mind -- through not nessesarily the brain.
In accepting Stevenson's evidence one has to accept that consciousness is not a mere epiphenomenon of the brain and must exist somewhere in between bodies. so I assume there is some in-between place; a `bardo' as the Buddhists would call it, perhaps what we would call an extra spatial dimension (if my understanding of the concept is accurate through reading the descriptions of such spatial dimensions in the story Flatland, and elsewere).
So all in all, I suppose that currently I believe that after the physical body expires we go into a dream-state, potentially lucid, and after the data of a lifetime has been sorted out (as it seems our dreams do in regards to our day-to-day affairs) we then reincarnate.
It is not death I fear so much as the manner in which I may die. I want to feel whole again, I want loose ends tied up, I want to feel complete. And dying prematurely, especially violently, would tend to fuck that up.
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