Soulless Body

Many years ago, I had memorised the famous poem by H.W.Longfellow, "The Psalm of Life", which has these lines, “Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal; Dust thou art, to dust returnest, Was not spoken of the soul.”.
Life is indeed a mystery, but to answer our "basic doubts", do we really need to take recourse to the ethereal spirit, in a "material" body? This spirit, we call the "soul" or "आत्मा atma" ,(described succinctly by Emily Dickinson, in her poem "The Spirit"). And is it true that the soul survives the body? Almost all religions say so! The Bhagwat Gita, has these famous lines in Chapter II
"The soul which resides in every being, is indestructible. Who then can destroy this indestructible soul?
Soul is never born-nor ever dies. It is unborn, permanent, eternal and never dies when the body is killed.
Who can kill the soul and how can one kill the soul when the soul is indestructible, unborn and forever un-destroyable.
Just as humans renounce old dresses and put on a new ones, a soul renounces the old body and takes a new one.
Weapons cannot cut it, fire cannot burn it, water cannot soak it, nor wind can dry it.
Un-cuttable, un-burnable and un-soakable, un-dryable; the eternal soul is omnipresent, permanent and unchanging."
It is indeed superfluous to believe in the soul. In fact disbelieving in a soul, solves many an existential issue. For one, death ends everything. On death we just get recycled into the very same material which formed us . "Dust thou art to dust returnest", indeed rings true. There is a lovely song in Marathi, "माती सांगे कुम्भाराला पायी मज तुडवीसी तुजाच आहे शेवट वेड्या माज्या पायाशी , translated it says "the clay warns the potter, 'you are now kneading me with your feet, but remember, your end is ultimately at my feet' ". What happens to the body after death makes no difference to the dead as the body is entirely sans feelings. Good and Evil are just two different perspectives, which are highly subjective, and time and space relevant. Neither can we have just a "Black" and a "White", there is a lot of "Grey" in between. Believing in a "Ledger" of good deeds (पुण्य) and bad deeds (पाप) , and in divine justice of the "Ledger Keeper", is naive, to say the least. If "Truth" implies "What is", it has to be subjective, as it depends on the perception spectrum of the observer. When neither space nor time can be absolute, the very frame work for defining reality is on shaky grounds.

To sum up, instead of living through life, with the belief of a greater happiness after life, let us try to be happy "now" and "here", and in doing so, try our level best not to make others (which includes everything living) unhappy.