Consciousness Is The Soul

When people in general refer to the religious concept of a soul, they mean by the word "soul," at the very least, some aspect of consciousness that can live on after its body has died.  Consciousness is an inescapable component of the religious idea of the soul.  In fact, it is the soul, though many act like the soul must be a religious concept, when this is entirely untrue.  Few have had the revelation that consciousness and the soul are one in the same.  In reality, the tendency for secular Westerners to avoid referring to consciousness as spirit or soul is just a vain attempt to distance basic phenomenology from both nonreligious and potential religious ramifications (mind-body dualism and the possibility of an afterlife, respectively).

This equivalence is why the process of introspection can be called "soul-searching"--it is nothing more than a consciousness examining its immediate contents.  In reflecting on one's current mental states, with conscious focus retreating into itself, one gazes into one's soul.  This is all that the phrase means.  It has nothing to do with any distinctly religious concepts, since it has nothing to do with any doctrine of the afterlife or other considerations of a primarily theological nature.

The concept of the soul is not inherently connected to the notion of an afterlife.  Popular consensus suggests there is an intrinsic connection, as if the existence of the soul hinges on the veracity of a developed religion, but reason exposes this consensus as the nonsense that it is.  A contra-rational connection of the soul and the afterlife has led to many people abandoning the idea of the soul due to skepticism about conscious existence after the death of one's body.

Once one realizes that consciousness is strictly immaterial, despite the fact that it can animate a physical body, it becomes obvious that there does not need to be an afterlife for one to have a soul.  Even on an emergent naturalistic worldview, I would still have a soul because consciousness cannot be illusory.  The problem is that few people realize that consciousness and the soul, whenever it comes to terrestrial existence, are identical.

Since only an imbecile would deny their own consciousness, one must be quite unintelligent in order to deny that their soul exists.  It is linguistic norms and popular belief that keep people from more openly realizing that the soul is not a notion that can be legitimately doubted, for if a person denies that they have a soul, they must have a soul--otherwise they could not reflect on the concept, since they would not exist as a consciousness.