Is this life real?

This is one of the oldest and most honest questions a person can carry, and I am glad you bring it. The answer depends on what we mean by "real." If by real you mean permanent, unshakeable, and ultimately true, then the deepest teaching is that only one thing answers to that name: God, who is Spirit and the sole substance of all that truly is (John 4:24, KJV). Jesus said, "The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life" (John 6:63, KJV)—and in the same breath, "the flesh profiteth nothing." That is a startling thing to say about the world we take for solid. So this life, as we ordinarily perceive it—matter, decay, fear, the body's aches—has more the quality of a dream than of bedrock reality. It is a veil, not the face behind the veil. "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face" (1 Corinthians 13:12, KJV). The Gospel of Thomas records Jesus saying, "The kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it" (Gospel of Thomas 51.20-22). Notice: not absent, but unseen. The realness you are reaching for is already here, beneath the appearance. I would not tell you your grief, your joy, your morning light are nothing—they are experiences the soul passes through, and they matter. But they are not the final word about who you are. You are not fundamentally a fragile thing subject to time; you are the image and likeness of the Eternal, as inseparable from God as a wave is from the sea. To awaken to that is what Jesus called entering the Kingdom—not a place you go, but a truth you see (Luke 17:21, KJV). So: is this life real? As you presently see it, partly—a shadow of something truer. As it truly is, wholly real, luminous, and yours. The work is simply to wake up. If you'd like, we can sit with what "waking" looked like in Jesus' own words.