On occasion while reading, a statement or a paragraph effects me like the booming, sympathetic vibration of a rung bell.  These statements outlining a concept of “the soul” had precisely this impact.  Almost no intellectual now-a-days, attempts to use the term “soul” let alone risks a cogent account.  The soul,—an internal incubus, an ephemeral death-defying, migrating spirit, has been discredited by the imperial empiricism of science for the last two hundred years. Science is our paradigm for all knowledge, the isolation of factors, measurable, quantifiable by mathematics, which allow us to control Nature.  Few if any believe that the personality and memory survives the dissolution of the body, except as a matter of superstition.  When the “light goes out” in the brain, the personality goes with it.  A religious person would disagree.  For a intentionally religious person, superstition is “faith,” that which they do not understand is simply accepted upon authority.*

These words seized my attention……

        The soul
does nothing, does not act,
but is only present;
it preserves. (Leibniz)
Contraction is not an action but a pure passion,
a contemplation that preserves
the before in the after.

Sensation, then,
is on a plane that is different
from mechanisms, dynamisms, and finalities:
it is on a plane of composition
where sensation is formed
by contracting that which composes it,
and by composing itself
with other sensations that contract it in turn.

Sensation is pure contemplation,
for it is through contemplation that one contracts,
contemplating oneself to the extent
that one contemplates the elements from which
one originates.
Contemplation is creating,
the mystery of passive contemplation,
sensation.
Sensation fills out the plane of contemplation
and is filled with itself by filling itself
with what it contemplates:
it is “enjoyment” and “self-enjoyment.”
It is a subject or rather an inject.

                 ___*___

Plotinus defined

all things as contemplations,
not only people and animals but plants,
the earth, and rocks.

These are not ideas
that we contemtplate through concepts
but the elements of matter
that we contemplate through sensation.

The plant contemplates by contracting
the elements from which it originates,
—light, carbon, and salts—
and it fills itself with colors and odors
that in each case qualify its variety, its composition:
it is sensation in itself.
It is as if flowers smell themselves
by smelling what composes them,
first attempts at vision or of a sense of smell,
before being perceived or even smelled by an agent
with a nervous system and a brain.

—excerpt What Is Philosophy
By Deleuze and Guattari p. 212

*Granted my description of religious commitment is uncharitable.  I continue to react as a former true believer.  On the other hand one has to start somewhere.  Each is born into a particular zeitgeist, a tradition that we absorb by default as we learn language.  From this inherited, inarticulate framework, we explore/understand “the world.” We are each a recipient of a range of ideas and valuations common to our place and time.  These are authoritative and opaque, — qualifying the questions one is permitted to ask, and what counts as an answer.