Is the human self nonexistent?

Terrence McKenna once said top-down imposed Meaning would feel like a chokehold/shackle, but what was important was if reality was like a fallow soil where we could decide to live in ways meaningful to ourselves.

While there are no guarantees, it does *seem* that there are at the least groups of souls that sought to overlay meaning onto the bare fact of the afterlife. This of course gets into some thorny issues like the possibility of afterlife realms created by human imagination/belief...do we think of these as illusory? What lies beyond these dream-spaces?

For myself I hope there is some kind of adventure, along with a reunion between loved ones. That's probably already a lot to ask for, but I would admit disappointment if I ended up in one of the realms where you have to take up a new 9-5 job...

Then do you think that all the wonderful accounts from deep NDEers of light and love, encounters with a being of light, reunions, etc. etc. (all "realer than real" experiences and with the clear implication that the Truth is being revealed), are the result of deception by whatever powers that be? It occurs to me that that would be somewhat contrary to the principle of parsimony, since it would require a lot of additional auxiliary hypotheses, additional complication.