Soul

[9] Other religions (most notably Hinduism and Jainism) believe that all living things from the smallest bacterium to the largest of mammals are the souls themselves (Atman and jiva) and have their physical representative (the body) in the world.

[a] The Baháʼí Faith 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".

The non-existence of self (anatman), the impermanence of all things (anitya), and the suffering (dukkha) experienced by living beings due to attachment to ideas of self and permanence are central concepts in almost all Buddhist schools.

The doctrine of Buddha-nature, while sometimes misinterpreted as referring to a "true self" or "soul" of some kind, actually depends upon acceptance of the concept of anatman to be properly understood.

[15] According to some Christian eschatology, when people die, their souls will be judged by God and determined to go to Heaven or to Hades awaiting a resurrection.

The present Catechism of the Catholic Church states that "[The term 'soul'] refers to the innermost aspect of [persons], that which is of greatest value in [them], that by which [they are] most especially in God's image: 'soul' signifies the spiritual principle in [humanity].

[30][31] Various new religious movements deriving from Adventism including Christadelphians,[32] Seventh-day Adventists,[33][34] and Jehovah's Witnesses,[35][36] similarly believe that the dead do not possess a soul separate from the body and are unconscious until the resurrection.

"[37] Latter-day Saints believe that the soul is the union of a pre-existing, God-made spirit,[38][39][40] and a temporal body, which is formed by physical conception on earth.

In order to attain liberation (moksha), a human being must acquire self-knowledge (atma jnana), which is to realize that one's true self (ātman) is identical with the transcendent self Brahman according to Advaita Vedanta.

In Jainism, jiva is the immortal essence or soul of a living organism, such as human, animal, fish, or plant, which survives physical death.

[66] The concept of Ajiva in Jainism means "not soul", and represents matter (including body), time, space, non-motion and motion.

Judaism relates the quality of one's soul to one's performance of the commandments (mitzvot) and reaching higher levels of understanding, and thus closeness to God.

Therefore, Judaism embraces the commemoration of the day of one's death, nahala/Yahrtzeit, and not the birthday,[72] as a festivity of remembrance, for only toward the end of life's struggles, tests and challenges could human souls be judged and credited for righteousness.

[96] The "free soul" is said to leave the body and journey to the spirit world during sleep, trance-like states, delirium, insanity, and death.

Many[quantify] religious and philosophical traditions support the view that the soul is the ethereal substance – a spirit; a non-material spark – particular to a unique living being.

Higher than the soul is the spirit, which is considered to be the real self; the source of everything is called good—happiness, wisdom, love, compassion, harmony, peace, and so on.

[110] Greek philosophers, such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, understood that the soul (ψυχή, psykhḗ) must have a logical faculty, the exercise of which was the most divine of human actions.

Latin anima) comprises the mental abilities of a living being: reason, character, free will, feeling, consciousness, qualia, memory, perception, thinking, and so on.

[112] The ancient Greeks used the term "ensouled" to represent the concept of being alive, indicating that the earliest surviving Western philosophical view believed that the soul was that which gave the body life.

[121]The Phaedo most famously caused problems to scholars who were trying to make sense of this aspect of Plato's theory of the soul, such as Dorothea Frede and Sarah Broadie.

[129] Advocates exist for both sides of the controversy; it is argued that there will be permanent disagreement about its final conclusions, as no other Aristotelian text contains this specific point, and this part of De Anima is obscure.

[132][133] While he was imprisoned, Avicenna wrote his famous "Floating man" thought experiment to demonstrate human self-awareness and the substantial nature of the soul.

[140] In his discussions of rational psychology, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) identified the soul as the "I" in the strictest sense, and argued that the existence of inner experience can neither be proved nor disproved.

[k] Gilbert Ryle's ghost in the machine argument, which is a rejection of Descartes's mind–body dualism, can provide[vague] a contemporary understanding of the soul/mind, and the problem concerning its connection to the brain/body.

[142] Soul belief prominently figures in Otto Rank's work recovering the importance of immortality in the psychology of primitive, classical and modern interest in life and death.

In The Denial of Death, Becker describes "soul" in terms of Søren Kierkegaard use of "self" when he says that "what we call schizophrenia is an attempt by the symbolic self to deny the limitations of the finite body.

According to Cognitive scientist Jesse Bering and psychologist Nicholas Humphrey argued that humans are initially inclined to believe in a soul and are born as mind-body dualists.

[153] Neuroscience research hypothesizes that a near-death experience (NDE) is a subjective phenomenon resulting from "disturbed bodily multisensory integration" that occurs during life-threatening events.

[160][m] Some parapsychologists attempted to establish, by scientific experiment, whether a soul separate from the brain exists, as is more commonly defined in religion rather than as a synonym of psyche or mind.

He claimed that there was weight-loss of varying amounts at the time of death; he concluded the soul weighed 21 grams based on measurements of a single patient, discarding conflicting results.