From the book "Gods About Us", Max Rempel
Let us begin with the fundamental concept: the soul. Here the views of the sciences and the religions diverge. Even psychology, the science of the soul, does not acknowledge the existence of the soul as such, redefining it as something insignificant and vague, or even nonexistent altogether.
Parapsychology, that is, the science of the soul that reaches beyond the limits, fortunately dares to study the most interesting and important thing of all: the soul. So too does metaphysics, the science that reaches beyond physics. It casts an even wider net, yet the soul remains its central object of study.
Here you will naturally ask: how can the soul be studied? Is it not something ephemeral, elusive by its very definition? My answer: it is difficult, but it can and must be done. And such studies are being conducted and published. Only one has to look for them not in professional psychology journals, but in books on parapsychology and metaphysics.
Why is that so? Because in the journals the official scientific establishment, by majority vote, bars the freethinking minority from publishing alternative ideas, thereby exercising, in a most democratic fashion, censorship within science. Books, however, especially in our computer age, are quite another matter. In a book a scholar can say everything he thinks, and no one can command him otherwise.
And so, if we set out to ask what the soul is and to what conclusions the research leads, we discover that, astonishingly, the research brings us to the very same conclusions that humanity has known for thousands of years. (I mean real research, where the experimenter looks at the world with open eyes, not through the blinders of official, censored science.) These answers are present in many ancient religions and teachings about the soul. At the same time, modern research helps us look anew and reread what humanity has preserved in the ancient books.
To acquaint yourself with modern research, I would advise beginning with two books by Michael Newton:
Michael Newton. Journey of Souls. 2011. Translated from English.
Michael Newton. Destiny of Souls. 2011. Translated from English.