The Soul...?

There are times when I wonder if there's a sort of explanation for what, exactly, a soul is. The soul in the sense that spiritual people believe in, the thing that supposedly animates the conscious and sets them apart from the unconscious. In fact, I think the soul is separate from life in that the soul is effectively a form of consciousness rather than life itself, which seems to be little more than a set of ongoing chemical processes. Not quite the cultural perception of a place that has a vibrant, appealing way of life, though perhaps it is related.

If I were to consider what a soul is, I'd think that since the belief is that they're unique things that live on after the living creature's untimely demise, I'd think that it was a sort of energetic equilibrium that is established by the peculiar and unique material makeup of the physical form. While this is probably impossible, that'd mean that a soul living on after the body has died has somehow managed to hold those energies in equilibrium even after separation from the physical form.

The loss of equilibrium (leading to the "death" of the soul) or a detachment from the point of anchorage will result in the physical form losing its soul, and thus might be to all appearances alive but not quite "whole".