So what does this all mean? Why is there a physical universe, along a spirit realm? Why is there suffering?
This is my view (after having studied a lot of spiritual sources, as well having gathered a fair amount of personal experience and wisdom through meditation, self-inquiry and psychedelics):
The physical universe was created to: 1. Have the unique experience of being limited organisms 2. Experience growth as a soul. A being whom has known limitation, pain, fear and other (human) emotions and relationships, is wiser and greater and can know itself in a more specific way than if it hasn't had these experiences. 3. It provides a contrast through which we can know love, peace, oneness, by having experienced the opposites of fear, judgment, feeling separate.
But living in a physical does mean we have to suffer! We can, while in the body, realize boundless consciousness, realize we are not just the body, and live in unconditional love, and live as a Buddha, as a Christ.
Through learning to love, to surrender and through insight (:through meditation, self-inquiry or even prayer), we can experience the light here. That is the way. Physically destroying the body will probably not be a way of surrender.
According to the Buddhist and Hindu's, and other spiritual teachers, when one leaves the body, but is still too attached to being a limited self, one will be granted another physical incarnation to learn to awaken and surrender. If you can't surrender during this life, you might not be able to surrender after it.
And so that must also the point of our human lives, to be happy and free, to live in love, because when we do, or need for meaning is fulfilled by itself. Peace!