“We are not our mind, we are not our body; our true identity is found in deep meditation joined with the universe.” – Eknath Easwaran.
Our last step is to reconcile the five human immaterial features – mind, will, personality, identity, and self – with the key characteristics of soul presented in the major traditions. These include:
1. Personhood
2. Indivisibility
3. Immutability
4. Platonic Ideas
5. Subsistence
6. Timelessness
7. Connectivity to Universal Soul or Spirit
Most obviously, personality and identity seem to constitute the personhood of one of the Buddhist soul concepts, perhaps the least arguable element of man considered as soul. None of our five immaterial human features is divisible, so this part of soul theory is logically consistent as well. The identity and self are immutable and the contents of mind are the near instantiation of the Platonic Ideas. Subsistence is contained by will – Schopenauer’s thing-in-itself – which I previously noted seems to be a visceral, unthinking self-preservation or self-affirmation.
Timelessness is a quality of the mind, that is its contents, rather than its origin in the brain. Newton’s description of the laws of physics, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata do not exist in time; they are beyond time, and the thoughts they had, and similarly the thoughts we have, are not subject to the law of entropy and hence the direction of time. The will to exist, to grow, to love are not bound by time even if our biologic structure must cease to exist eventually.
Moreover the self in some circumstances can escape time, albeit briefly in terms of physical time. Hence the advice of the Tao Te Ching, “stay at the center of the circle (the Tao) and let all things take their course,” because “if you stay in the center and embrace death with your whole heart you will endure forever.” 
Plotinus similarly notes “immortality is not survival of the personality; it is the absorption of the soul in deathless things.” The metaphor of the immortality of the soul is encompassed in a spiritual experience of connection to the timeless, immaterial quality of the cosmos – the logos – which the great thinkers called the universal soul or spirit.
Our reconstituted concept of soul then is not a substance, but the immaterial depth and spiritual capacity of man. It does not require God, religion, immortality, or the supernatural. It is the seemingly universal ability of man to reflect deeply on himself and the universe, especially universal law. It involves science, art, morality, openness, freedom, hope, brotherhood, and love. It is not the concrete in our world, but the abstract, the ephemeral. All men and all women have access to it, and it ties all of us together beyond a particular body, space, or time.
