Eastern Philosphy Reincarnation Theory - THIS explains it! by Nuyorkster

The Bhagavad Gita states:
"Never was there a time when I did not exist; nor in the future shall any of us cease to be".

THIS explains it! The sideways world was indeed an afterlife where the characters were reincarnated and had rebirth. Rebirth is conditioned by the karmas (actions of body, speech and mind) of previous lives; good karmas will yield a happier rebirth, bad karmas will produce one which is more unhappy. Those that redeemed themselves, bought closure to relationships, ‘let go’, found peace and ‘moved on’ (Jack, Kate, Sawyer, all the others people in church). Those that still had issues to resolve stayed back until they did (Ben, Michael, Daniel etc.) All those ‘rememberance’ flashes they had were from their previous life – on the island when they connected deeply with each other.

They all died but at different points in different lives. Whoever died, died when they died as we saw them on the show – there is no ‘twist’ or mystery there. Those that we did not see die, died at some off-island related incident.
Within one life and across multiple lives, the empirical, changing self not only objectively affects its surrounding external world, but also generates (consciously and unconsciously) its own subjective image of this world, which it then lives in as 'reality'. It lives in a world of its own making in various ways. It "tunes in" to a particular level of consciousness (by meditation or the rebirth it attains through its karma) which has a particular range of objects - a world - available to it. It furthermore selectively notices from among such objects, and then processes what has been sensed to form a distorted interpretive model of reality: a model in which the 'I am' conceit is a crucial reference point.