What is soul? What happens to it after death?

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The soul is the reduced essence of consciousness, the absolute minimum amount of “stuff” required to carry you on as a unique being between lifetimes. Souls breathe life into physical bodies. Without them you wouldn’t see quite the diversity of personality in humans and animals that you see.

The soul is non-physical and abstract, much like consciousness itself. A word I’ve seen used for the realm of non-extant things is the ‘Unmanifest’. It’s not a spiritual concept I often work directly with, but the Unmanifest also holds areas like Heaven and Hell, and it’s where God lives.

As an abstract thing, the soul is indestructible. I believe that we have counterparts in the Unmanifest that carry on existing after we die, through the sheer force of will. We’ll call this your ‘ghost’. The ghost is non-physical, but it is not abstract. It has a form, specifically, the form your disembodied will gives it.

Afterlives are limited in duration. Your will to exist can only persist for so long. Eventually your non-physical existence will ‘fall apart’ and your consciousness will reduce down to your soul.

I’ve been kicking around different mechanisms for reincarnation. How is it chosen which body you inhabit next? Do humans ‘stay human’?

At any rate, your consciousness, reduced to essence, gets shunted off into a new body. It’s a bit like falling asleep, you dream for awhile then wake up in a new world. You come in with some memories of your past life, but they’re forgotten fairly quickly, as the memories don’t really match what’s relevant to you now.