Where do you stand in the belief of an existence of a soul without believing in religion and the existence of a higher conciousness from within ?
i say there is no such thing. when you're dead you're dead, consciousness isn't higher or lower, it just is, and it's the result of energies including electrical ones from the brain. when the brain's dead it's gone. we can talk about a soul in a figurative way, as in a person with a lot of soul (meaning a good person, with a lot of heart, which also has nothing to do with the actual heart but at least we know there IS such a thing as a heart!) but to speak of it as a literal entity, perhaps one which survives the body? nah-ah.
g
What people call a "soul" is merely our awareness of our own existence. This awareness is the result of a highly evolved brain. Upon death, our brains cease to function and as a result all self-awareness ist terminated.
Soul as the human 'spirit' sure but as soon as you muddy the water with divinity, supernatural, or ill defined planes of nebulous higher conciousness you lost me. There is consciousness that is beyond our immediately knowable experience as described in the scientific literature and popularized in books like Blink by Malcolm Gladwell and What the dog saw by Oliver Sacks but that consciousness is entirely human rather than metaphysical.