The soul

    Etymology

The Modern English word "soul", derived from Old English sáwol, sáwel, was first attested to in the 8th-century poem Beowulf and in the Vespasian Psalter —it is cognate with other Germanic and Baltic terms for the same idea, including Gothic saiwala, Old High German sêula, sêla, Old Saxon sêola, Old Low Franconian sêla, sîla, Old Norse sála and Lithuanian siela.

Further etymology of the Germanic word is uncertain. The original concept is said to mean originally 'coming from or belonging to the sea/lake' because of the Germanic belief in souls being born out of and returning to sacred lakes; Old Saxon sêola (soul) compared to Old Saxon sêo (sea).

    Religious views

Ancient Near East

In the ancient Egyptian religion, an individual was believed to be made up of various elements, some physical and some spiritual.

Similar ideas are found in ancient Assyrian and Babylonian religion. Kuttamuwa, an 8th-century BC royal official from Sam'al, ordered an inscribed stele erected upon his death. The inscription requested that his mourners commemorate his life and his afterlife with feasts "for my soul that is in this stele". It is one of the earliest references to a soul as a separate entity from the body. The 800-pound (360 kg) basalt stele is 3 ft (0.91 m) tall and 2 ft (0.61 m) wide. It was uncovered in the third season of excavations by the Neubauer Expedition of the Oriental Institute in Chicago, Illinois.

Bahá'í

The Bahá'í Faith (founded in 19th century Persia) affirms that "the soul is a sign of God, a heavenly gem whose reality the most learned of men hath failed to grasp, and whose mystery no mind, however acute, can ever hope to unravel". Bahá'u'lláh stated that the soul not only continues to live after the physical death of the human body, but is, in fact, immortal. Heaven can be seen partly as the soul's state of nearness to God; and hell as a state of remoteness from God. Each state follows as a natural consequence of individual efforts, or the lack thereof, to develop spiritually. Bahá'u'lláh taught that individuals have no existence prior to their life here on earth and the soul's evolution is always towards God and away from the material world.

Buddhism

Buddhism teaches that all things are in a constant state of flux: all is changing, and no permanent state exists by itself. This applies to human beings as much as to anything else in the cosmos. Thus, a human being has no permanent self. According to this doctrine of anatta, "no-self" or "no soul" – the words "I" or "me" do not refer to any fixed thing. They are simply convenient terms that allow us to refer to an ever-changing entity.

The anatta doctrine is not a kind of materialism. Buddhism does not deny the existence of "immaterial" entities, and it (at least traditionally) distinguishes bodily states from mental states. Thus, the conventional translation of anatta as "no-soul" can be confusing. If the word "soul" simply refers to an incorporeal component in living things that can continue after death, then Buddhism does not deny the existence of the soul. Instead, Buddhism denies the existence of a permanent entity that remains constant behind the changing corporeal and incorporeal components of a living being. Just as the body changes from moment to moment, so thoughts come and go. And there is no permanent, underlying mind that experiences these thoughts, as in Cartesianism; rather, conscious mental states simply arise and perish with no "thinker" behind them.

When the body dies, Buddhists believe the incorporeal mental processes continue and are reborn in a new body. Because the mental processes are constantly changing, the being that is reborn is neither entirely different from, nor exactly the same as, the being that died. However, the new being is continuous with the being that died – in the same way that the "you" of this moment is continuous with the "you" of a moment before, despite the fact that you are constantly changing.

Buddhist teaching holds that a notion of a permanent, abiding self is a delusion that is one of the causes of human conflict on the emotional, social, and political levels. They add that an understanding of anatta provides an accurate description of the human condition, and that this understanding allows us to pacify our mundane desires.

Various schools of Buddhism have differing ideas about what continues after death. The Yogacara school in Mahayana Buddhism said there are Store consciousness which continue to exist after death.[36] In some schools, particularly Tibetan Buddhism, the view is that there are three minds: very subtle mind, which does not disintegrate in death; subtle mind, which disintegrates in death and which is "dreaming mind" or "unconscious mind"; and gross mind, which does not exist when one is sleeping. Therefore, gross mind less permanent than subtle mind, which does not exist in death. Very subtle mind, however, does continue, and when it "catches on", or coincides with phenomena, again, a new subtle mind emerges, with its own personality/assumptions/habits, and that entity experiences karma in the current continuum.

Plants were said to be non-sentient but Buddhist monks should avoid cutting or burning trees, because some sentient beings rely on them. Some Mahayana monks said non-sentient beings such as plants and stones have buddha-nature. Some buddhists said about plants or divisible consciousnesses.

Certain modern Buddhists, particularly in Western countries, reject—or at least take an agnostic stance toward—the concept of rebirth or reincarnation, which they view as incompatible with the concept of anatta. Stephen Batchelor discusses this issue in his book Buddhism Without Beliefs. Others point to research that has been conducted at the University of Virginia as proof that some people are reborn.

Shinto

And finally, one that I'm particularly fond of: the Shinto religion.

The ancient native religion of Japan, Shinto literally means “the way of the gods”. The idea of karma is alive and present in this faith, as are spirits and souls. But it is a religion more akin to animism, where nature, objects, elements and energy are imbued with deep sacred meaning. Shinto stresses the balance between humans and nature, and the responsibility for us to maintain that balance with our efforts.

Central to Shinto are kami: nature spirits, spiritual presences, godlike beings, or all three. They can exhibit many characteristics: harsh, sweet, kind, weak, or mischievous. But there is no dualistic nature to these qualities. It’s understood that each kami has a rough and gentle side.

Although kami don’t belong only to people, every human being contains one within. This is what lives on when the individual passes away. After death, a person becomes a spirit-deity, eventually joining in a great ancestral collective which is the manifestation of the great Divine.

Four main pillars are central to the Shinto faith: tradition and the family; love of nature; physical cleanliness; and, matsuri (festivals honouring and worshipping the kami). The main practices of Shinto involve ancestor worship, spirit shrines, and purification rituals. All of these are bound up with the concept of honourable duty to kin.

Shinto followers place little emphasis on death and what happens after it; death means the kami is hiding in the invisible world, the same as birth means that someone has made an entrance into the visible world. What happens during life, however, can cause pollution and dirt to stick to a person’s karma and cling not only onto their kami but also their entire family. To remain attached to your people as a “family spirit”, you must ensure that you have done your duties on earth and avoided things that cause impurity.

When certain deeds are committed, or states of mind are held, they require ceremonies of purification to cleanse the doer or thinker. If a person pays respect to their ancestors, makes offerings and dedications to shrines, and undergoes the correct rituals, they have done all they can to work their karma so they can be strong and honourable in the ancestor world.

A few decades after death, the custom is to throw away the memorial tablet of the deceased and replace it with a pebble; the resulting pile of pebbles after many generations symbolizes the guardian of the family. The primary goal of religious life is to join with ancestors after death and become immortal, protecting your family that comes after you.

Although a soul or kami is eternal and able to connect with the Divine, souls have transitory and fleeting qualities – they can change shape, move around or even split so that two or more elements can exist in different places.  This adds a degree of whimsy and mysticism to a religion that is quite subdued in its orientation.  The utmost indiscretion is not doing wrong – there isn’t a strong concept of sin – but rather showing disrespect and a lack of humility.

If you want to learn more about the Shinto religion you can go on this website:
www.japan-guide.com/e/e2056.ht…

And if you want an anime that delves into this sujbect, you can watch Kyoukai no Rinne:
www.animefreak.tv/watch/kyouka…

Or Kamisama Hajimemashita:
www.animefreak.tv/watch/kamisa…

    Philosophical views

Socrates and Plato: 

Plato considered the psyche - or soul - to be the essence of a person, that which decides how we behave. He believed the soul consists of three parts:
- the logos, or logistikon (mind, nous, or reason) - located in the head and regulates the other parts.
- the thymos, or thumetikon (emotion, spiritedness, or masculine) - located in the chest and relates to anger.
- the eros, or epithumetikon (appetitive, desire, or feminine) - located in the stomach and relates to desires.
And that only the logos was immortal. 

Avicenna and Ibn al-Nafis

Following Aristotle, Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and Ibn al-Nafis, a Persian philosopher, further elaborated upon the Aristotelian understanding of the soul and developed their own theories on the soul. They both made a distinction between the soul and the spirit, and the Avicennian doctrine on the nature of the soul was influential among the Scholastics. Some of Avicenna's views on the soul include the idea that the immortality of the soul is a consequence of its nature, and not a purpose for it to fulfill. In his theory of "The Ten Intellects", he viewed the human soul as the tenth and final intellect.

While he was imprisoned, Avicenna wrote his famous "Floating Man" thought experiment to demonstrate human self-awareness and the substantial nature of the soul. He told his readers to imagine themselves suspended in the air, isolated from all sensations, which includes no sensory contact with even their own bodies. He argues that in this scenario one would still have self-consciousness. He thus concludes that the idea of the self is not logically dependent on any physical thing, and that the soul should not be seen in relative terms, but as a primary given, a substance. This argument was later refined and simplified by René Descartes in epistemic terms, when he stated: "I can abstract from the supposition of all external things, but not from the supposition of my own consciousness."

Avicenna generally supported Aristotle's idea of the soul originating from the heart, whereas Ibn al-Nafis rejected this idea and instead argued that the soul "is related to the entirety and not to one or a few organs". He further criticized Aristotle's idea whereby every unique soul requires the existence of a unique source, in this case the heart. al-Nafis concluded that "the soul is related primarily neither to the spirit nor to any organ, but rather to the entire matter whose temperament is prepared to receive that soul," and he defined the soul as nothing other than "what a human indicates by saying "I".

Immanuel Kant

In his discussions of rational psychology, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) also identified the soul as the "I" in the strictest sense, and that the existence of inner experience can neither be proved nor disproved. "We cannot prove a priori the immateriality of the soul, but rather only so much: that all properties and actions of the soul cannot be cognized from materiality". It is from the "I", or soul, that Kant proposes transcendental rationalization, but cautions that such rationalization can only determine the limits of knowledge if it is to remain practical.

Thomas Aquinas

Following Aristotle and Avicenna, Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) understood the soul to be the first actuality of the living body. Consequent to this, he distinguished three orders of life: plants, which feed and grow; animals, which add sensation to the operations of plants; and humans, which add intellect to the operations of animals.

Concerning the human soul, his epistemological theory required that, since the knower becomes what he knows, the soul is definitely not corporeal—if it is corporeal when it knows what some corporeal thing is, that thing would come to be within it. Therefore, the soul has an operation which does not rely on a bodily organ, and therefore the soul could subsist without a body. Furthermore, since the rational soul of human beings is a subsistent form and not something made of matter and form, it cannot be destroyed in any natural process. The full argument for the immortality of the soul and Aquinas' elaboration of Aristotelian theory is found in Question 75 of the Summa Theologica.