thank you for the comment. yes, i understand that “soul” maybe said in many ways, to paraphrase Aristotle. i tend to see these questions as “definitions” or “categories” or “regulative principles” that allow us to parse our experience into intelligible phenomena. in this sense, i would employ “soul” to refer to something like the locus of our phenomenal, lived experience and reserve a term like “atman” or “pure consciousness,” and in some contexts, “spirit,” to point to the transcendental(al) conserved quantity in all experience that, as you indicated, does not change. from this outlook, it would be senseless to quibble over doctrines between one tradition and the other, since the point is to look through the terms and not at them, so to speak; they are like “fingers pointing at the moon.”
thank you for the comment. yes, i understand that “soul” maybe said in many ways, to paraphrase Aristotle. i tend to see these questions as “definitions” or “categories” or “regulative principles” that allow us to parse our experience into intelligible phenomena. in this sense, i would employ “soul” to refer to something like the locus of our phenomenal, lived experience and reserve a term like “atman” or “pure consciousness,” and in some contexts, “spirit,” to point to the transcendental(al) conserved quantity in all experience that, as you indicated, does not change. from this outlook, it would be senseless to quibble over doctrines between one tradition and the other, since the point is to look through the terms and not at them, so to speak; they are like “fingers pointing at the moon.”
in case you’re interested, i made this inquiry into “soul” or “psyche” here that explores another aspect to the question of the term: https://theoriapress.substack.com/p/what-is-life-32