Continuing on my cheery theme of death (I'm really in quite a happy place right now so I don't know why this theme keeps coming up - maybe the Tao is trying to tell me something?????), a while back the question came up of whether there is a separate "Soul" which survives after death and whether science can tell us anything about it. The following is my take on this - YMMV....What we know is that nature is part of the Tao & that by observing nature we can gain some understanding of the Tao.
Nature is unsentimental. Once things have finished their "usefulness" they die. Our science and technology can postpone this for us but only for a while. If we have a soul separate to our physical existence it seems reasonable to assume that it dies too unless it has some "usefulness" separate to physical existence.
Nature is efficient. It doesn't repeatedly create new energy from which to form matter. When we die, everything that we are is not destroyed - just recycled into new forms. Presumably the same would be true for a separate soul.
The Tao is more than Nature so it is possible to conceive that the essence of a soul falls outside of Nature, but if it does there's nothing that science will be able to tell us about it.
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