January 20, 2022

How to Merge Matter and Spirit

36 minutes

Within us we each have two primary forces -- two distinct voices -- tugging us in different directions. The drive to survive and the drive to transcend. The first is is consumed with ensuring that we get our material needs met -- food, clothing, shelter, social connections, earning money to pay for these needs. The second seeks to transcend the physical parameters of our routines and discover deeper purpose, meaning and soulfulness. This can be achieved in many different ways -- music, dance, poetry, love, romance, faith, spirituality, just to name a few. In many ways this marks the distinction between body and soul. How do we deal with the inherent dichotomy between these two extremes?

Throughout the ages, two schools of thought have emerged to address this conflict. One approach is to focus primarily on our material survival, leaving some limited room for our transcendent needs. Matter takes precedent over spirit. The second approach is to disengage from the distractions of our material pursuits in order to engage in our spiritual lives, to the point of asceticism for some. Both approaches, however, have one thing in common: These two worlds of matter and spirit, body and soul, cannot coexist. Thus, most of us ultimately compartmentalize our lives, dividing our time between the two.

Please join Rabbi Jacobson and discover a third approach -- one that does not surrender to a life of duality, but accesses a third dimension, beyond the corporeal and the ethereal, which allows us to integrate the two. Just as science has revealed that energy and matter are really one, and technology taps the energy within matter, so too is it with your body and soul. You can actually live a life of utter unity and harmony by learning how to tap the spirit within matter and spiritualize the material, ultimately experiencing total and seamless fusion between the two.

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