I may be a descendent of Jacob but I have always tried to understand Esau.  Why would a man sell his birthright for a bowl of soup?  I realize that Esau represents an approach to life common today - call it the secular, materialist approach.  All that exists is this material world of stuff.  As long as we are alive we might as well fulfill our appetites.  For when we die, we are gone and there is nothing more.  So given a choice between an enjoyable bowl of soup today and some unknown spiritual future, grab the soup.
              This is precisely how many people live.  "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die."  Life is about fulfilling our appetites in this world.  According to the materialistic view of reality, our soul is simply neural activity in the brain.  When our brain dies, our soul dies.  There is nothing more.  So we might as well enjoy that bowl of soup, that money, that sexual gratification, whatever pleasure life sends our way, now.   There is no greater spiritual reality.
              Jacob on the other hand does represent a greater spiritual reality.   Tradition teaches that while Esau was out hunting, Jacob was in the tent learning.  Perhaps Jacob believed that the soul comes into this world with a greater mission than simply enjoying whatever the appetite places before it.  Perhaps, as the Rabbis would someday teach, the soul must one day give an accounting.  Did it accomplish in this world what God sent it into this world to do?  Is the soul more than a material reality?   Does it have some spiritual purpose?   And does the soul survive death?
              I have been doing research on this question for a literature class.  I see three possibilities.  Possibility #1) the soul is merely brain activity, and when the brain dies, the soul dies.  We can call this the classical materialistic point of view. Possibility #2) the soul has an existence beyond the brain, and when the soul dies it returns to God intact.  Individual identity and personality survive after death.   We can call this the classic Western religious point of view.   Possibility #3) the soul does survive but not as a particular identity.  There is no self.  Our souls are like waves of the sea; when the wave breaks onto the shore it loses its individual identity, but is still part of the greater sea.  This reflects the mystical ideas of Hinduism and Buddhism.  We can call this the classic Eastern religious point of view.  
              So which is true?   Does the soul die when we die?  Does the soul maintain its individual identity after we are gone?  Or does the soul return to some eternal soul of the universe?  For my literature class, the popular answer is possibility #2.  The soul survives and maintains its identity.  I read the book The Lovely Bones about a murdered fourteen year old girl who sits in heaven watching her family cope with her death.  She lives in a heaven of her own choosing but is frustrated by her inability to really help her family.  The novel was a bestseller and the movie version will come out in January.  I can think of countless other works of literature on the same theme, from the classical musical Carousel to the movie Ghost to the television show Ghost Whisperer.     In the popular Western mind, the soul survives in some kind of world to come, and seeks to communicate and help those still in this world.          
           Countering this point of view is the atheistic materialist view of many militant thinkers - Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett among the most famous.   All that exists is a material world.   What we call the soul is merely part of that material world.   The fancy word materialists use for the soul is epiphenomenon.  This is something that exists because of the way our brains are hardwired, similar to the picture on a television.  The picture has no reality beyond the wiring of the television; and when the television breaks, the picture is disappears.  According to Dawkins, Dennet et. al,  so when we die, the soul disappears.
           My plan is to explore the third possibility.  Perhaps the soul is not located in the brain at all, in fact is not located in any particular space at all.  Modern physics speaks of non-locality.  This is the reason many of the greatest quantum physicists such as Erwin Schrodinger and David Bohm also become mystics.  Our soul is part of some greater reality, with the illusion that it is located behind our eyes.  But each of us is part of something much more; our soul exists beyond space and time.  This is something worth considering before we trade our soul for a bowl of soup.