I've just started reading an interesting book by Peter Novak, The Lost Secret of Death: Our Divided Souls and the Afterlife. As the title indicates, the book claims to have found a common theme of ancient religions: namely, that the human soul is "bipartite," consisting of the personality on one hand and a kind of life force on the other, and that, after death, the two halves typically separate, pursuing different destinies. Novak believes that this "lost secret" can reconcile the apparent contradictions between different spiritual teachings; for instance, one part of the soul undergoes reincarnation while the other part remains in an eternal heavenly environment.
I'm rather skeptical of this theory, though I have yet to read very far in the book. It seems to me that many of these ancient traditions can be explained equally well by the idea that the soul sheds its "astral body" (or "etheric body," "soul body," etc.) after death. The so-called "second death," which Novak takes to mean the separation of the two halves of the bipartite soul, could perhaps refer simply to the sloughing off of the astral body. A Spiritualist interpretation of the "second death" is offered by Michael Tymn here (the link is to a page in Google's cache because the original page no longer exists; you may need to scroll down for the text).
In any event, Novak's theory is at least interesting and worth considering. One passage that I found particularly notable was his description of Hinduism and its attitudes toward the two parts, or aspects, of the human soul. I felt that this brief discussion very neatly summed up the age-old controversy between two opposing mystical camps: those who believe that the one "true" soul is an impersonal witness, and those who believe that the one "true" soul is largely indistinguishable from the personality.
The relevant excerpt from The Lost Secret of Death follows.
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Modern Hinduism still teaches that two different entities coexist in the human body, the atman and the jiva. Deepak Chopra, perhaps the most well-known apologist for Hinduism today, writes "many people might wonder why the soul has to be divided in this way … the distinction between them is absolutely necessary." During life these two are integrated deeply together, but after death they divide, after which the jiva, or astral-emotional body, is thought to deteriorate.
The atman, or inner witness, is the objective conscious self, the part of one's inner being that is eternally unchanging and observant. The jiva, on the other hand, is the more familiar, personal, subjective self which is always changing, but may or may not be eternal. Atman is to jiva as substance is to form. These two are intimate partners in life, and just as Egypt's ka was associated with form, so too the atman needs the jiva in order to take on form and definition, and thereby experience life on Earth. The jiva gives the inner witness the sense or experience of having a subjective self with personal limitations and boundaries; it defines our sense of personal identity, telling us where we stop and the rest of the universe begins. Often thought of as a mirror that reflects the atman back to itself, the jiva is sometimes said to be an illusion, that all one is seeing or experiencing is a partial, limited reflection of the atman itself.
Strongly associated in Hindu thought with subjective awareness, the jiva provides all personal psychological experiences such as feelings, desires, likes, dislikes, and memories, as well as all subjective impressions, perceptions, and interpretations. The atman, on the other hand, is closely associated with an objective perspective; even the empirical subject himself is perceived as an object from the point of view of the atman, which sees everything, even itself, through dispassionate, unattached, objective eyes. When viewed from the perspective of the atman, the jiva seems to be a fraud, nothing more than an impermanent, haphazardly built structure of mental and emotional habits. Similarly, however, the detached, emotionless, disassociated perspective of the atman also seems to be a lie from the personal, subjective, deeply involved, connected-to-everything perspective of the jiva. Each seems false from the perspective of the other, yet each needs the other to experience anything at all. [pp. 15-16]