Soul (often referred to as Atman) is a term in Upanishads and Gita that helps generate confusion. The greater the confusion the better - no one knows. Everyone has the right to discover the meaning of soul. Some in search of the nature of soul ask questions and seek answers to them. That is the scientific way. For example:
What happens to a soul when one commits suicide ?
Soul is immortal. Soul does not die. Death is meant for the body and its organs. Death can come due to age, disease, accident, murder, legal punishment, or suicide. Irrespective of how death occurs, soul is unaffected. Suicide is the result of a disease or accident resulting from the interaction of properties/ gunas of objects and forces in the creation. Soul is not concerned with such things.
Attempt to suicide need not always result in death. Even if it does, the soul is not involved. It is only an illusion to think of soul suferring: suffering is possible for those things that have appropriate gunas to experience suffering. Soul does not have such property or guna and hence cannot experience sufferring. Sufferring is experiened by one or more of this: body, mind, intellect and ego.
Then who gets rebirth? Body or mind or intellect or ego? That question has no meaning and irrelevant. Every thing transforms over time. Nothing remains the same. There is nothing that needs to take birth or rebirth. Day and night takes rebirth roughly every 12 hours? That is silly, we know. These are phenomena resulting from interaction of certain forces in the creation. So is life and any particular life form. Just as 25th March night does not get reborn after 365 or 366 orbits of the Earth around the Sun, nothing gets reborn. Soul does not.
But any life that is born have soul/ atman. The soul being indestructible, infinite and indivisible, it is inconsistent with the defnition of soul to identify as soul of this person or that person.
Gita's soul is Atman or paramatman or God. It is not the term that is used to praise John because he is/ was a great soul. It has nothing to do with the term soulmate.
Terms like Soul, Atman, Pramatman, Self and God may have different connotations and meaning depending on usage. But for Gita all these are one and the same. It is waste of time to differentiate them for any analytical or spiritual purposes.
Gita's theory of God is consistent if one accepts these terms as Synonyms or exact equivalents.
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