Rabbi Schneider - Why Am I Here? Is There More Than This?
Why am I here? For some of us, if we examined our lives we would think that the reason that we're here is to become successful, or to get a promotion, to find a mate, etc. But why are we here at the most basic level? At the end of the day, success will never absolutely satisfy. Money can never completely fulfill us. But if we looked at our lives, many of us we get up in the morning. We quickly get a cup of coffee. We run out the door. We come to work, work all day, come back home, we have dinner, we watch TV for a few hours, we run back to work the next morning. We're on this rat race, almost like a hamster on a spinning, spinning, spinning, as if money, success, fame, could fulfill us. But it never can.
And as somebody once said, the only people that think that money is the answer, are people that have never had money; because anybody that has money realizes although it's a lot easier to have money than not have money and although money does solve a lot of problems, it can never satisfy our soul. So why are we here? It gets down to relationship. Relationship is what brings depth in our soul. It's what brings contentment, it's what brings fulfillment. If you recently, for example, had a grandchild or a baby born into your family; the joy that you felt having this little, precious child born into your life, brought such satisfaction, there was such an intimacy there, there was such a sense of peace associated with that. Nothing in the world can compare to that.
So many today, they're looking to find a soul mate, they're looking to find a significant other, of course this is why dating apps are so popular today. People are looking to connect. Why are people so longing to connect with somebody else, to develop an intimate relationship? They want it more than anything else in life. Why? Because relationship more fully satisfies, it more fully completes us than anything else. And human relationships are just a hint towards the divine. Even as we desire intimacy with another human being, God, who created us in His likeness, He also is looking for relationship with you and I. He created us to have relationship with Him and that is why we are here, to develop intimacy with the One that created us and in this is true fulfillment found. Love, joy, peace, and security are found when we truly come to know the God that created us for Himself.
Is there more than this? In other words, is there more to reality then what we can perceive with our five senses in this present world? Do you know there's a tremendous amount of research that has been done in what is known as near death experiences. I'm not talking about hokey research. I'm talking about medical doctors and PhD's that have done a tremendous amount of investigation into what people experience when their body has been pronounced clinically dead, but they're resuscitated back to life. And what we find is, there are tremendous similarities. People experience leaving their body, being able to look down at their body. In other words, they're not in their body anymore, they're existing now in some type of spirit form. They look down at their body, they can see even the doctors that are trying to resuscitate them back to life. And then often times there's a life review and they encounter a being of divine light.
There is more to life than this. What we are experiencing with our five senses in the eighty, ninety, seventy years, whatever it is that we live on this planet. What we're experiencing here is less than 1% of what is really real. Consider this analogy, you look at somebody. You look at another human being. You can see what color that person's hair is. You can see if they're a man or a woman. You can see their approximate age. You can see how tall they are. You can't see their physical organs. Those are buried on their inside. You can't see their thoughts. You can't see what makes them who they are. You only see their skin. We only see the surface and that is the same thing that is happening right now in terms of what we're experiencing in a sliver of reality on this earth. There is so much more than this.
You see, we're born into this world and as we first begin to experience life as young people, everything is new. Right? Nature is so fresh and so new when we're young. And then we begin to date and everything is so new when we begin to enter the dating world as teenagers. And then we're experiencing our first career, everything is new at first. But if you're like me, eventually the newness wears off and in this world that becomes an analogy for what life is. Pretty soon you've been there, you've done that. The question is: is there more than this? There absolutely is. You see, when we expire, when our body passes away, something in us is still alive. It's called our soul. And our soul now meets the one that created it. Now I encourage you, watch the last video to discover more.