What is the logical basis for inferring the existence of the subtle body?

From: Praveen

The presence of Consciousness is a good proof for the existence of the soul. For preaching purposes, what logical reasons can we give for the existence of the subtle body? Please help.

Transcript

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Thank you. What logical reasons can we give for the existence of subtle body? Please answer. When we talk about logical reasons, we need to understand that the whole realm of modern science, which is what most people consider as the area where logic works, most of the time, especially in terms of evidence-based logic.
So, that doesn’t extend to anything beyond gross matter much. Beyond gross matter, both subtle matter and spirit are the unknown area for logical extrapolation based on, logical inference based on empirical observation. The empirical observation can go only till gross matter.
So, now, we know that there is something beyond gross matter. What is that, we can’t know just by observing gross matter, but ekshapraman, empirical observation. But we can try to infer.
So, we see that there is consciousness that is beyond, that is radically different from matter in the sense that it has the characteristics of self-awareness, it has the characteristics of emotions and things like that. So, that’s the characteristic of consciousness. Now, subtle matter actually is subtle in the sense that it can’t be perceived by matter across material senses.
But once we understand that there is some reality that is beyond the gross material reality, and then we only perceive what it is. So, where there are material transformations which cannot be explained by material means, there we are referring to subtle matter. So, Dutta Karmaprabhu in his book, Human Devolution, analyzes a wide variety of paranormal phenomena.
And phenomena like, which involve the transfer of consciousness from one body to another, or within the body and outside the body, as in past life memories and near-death experiences. Those phenomena can be best understood by postulating something entirely different from matter, that is the spirit, that is the soul. But there are other phenomena where matter is influenced by some mechanisms that are not comprehensible by the gross material conceptions.
So, Dutta Karmaprabhu, as I mentioned in Chapter 6, the 6th of the book, Human Devolution, which is entitled, What is a Human Being, Matter, Mind and Consciousness, explains how phenomena like mesmerism or hypnotism, mediumship, mystical powers, and miracles, all demonstrate the existence of some subtle material element that interacts with matter in ways that are not explainable by our knowledge of gross matter. So, for example, in hypnotism, there are many well-documented cases, which I won’t go into all the cases. If one was interested, you can read the 6th chapter of the Human Devolution book.
But there are simple examples, like say, some people by the power of their concentration on a particular object can cause a spoon to bend, or they can cause a glass to rise. Now, of course, most people can’t do these things, and because most people don’t even see such things happening. So, they often think that this is just a hearsay.
But there are reasonably well-documented studies of this, and the whole field of ESP, extrasensory phenomena, is again very well documented. Princeton University even had a whole research lab dedicated to the study of such paranormal phenomena. And for example, now, the most well-documented, so you say somebody with a mediumship where somebody acts as a person, acts as a medium, through which ghostly beings speak, or some people have mystic powers by which they are able to do certain things which others cannot do, or certain miracles happen, where things cannot be explained by normal material laws that we know about.
So, these may seem to be unbelievable, but the fact that they have been talked about in various cultures all over the world, and people talk about them even today of science, should at least give us some level of open-mindedness to consider this, as Alfred Wallace writes in his book on this, and which I have put in my article on ghosts on the website. What is asked, required, is not belief in that these phenomena are real, but a doubt in the infallibility of our preconception that these phenomena are false. This is an open-mindedness, that maybe we are wrong, maybe there might be something like this exists.
And one of the most well-documented of such phenomena, of gross matter being affected by ways that we cannot explain by normal material means, is the experiment of random number generators. So, in these random number generators, they will generate any number, R and G, from 0 to 9, and it is observed that if these are left to themselves, then they will generate any number, the numbers, or if they generate these numbers from 0 to 010101, that’s all, like in bits, then whichever way, then the whole thing should be just a uniform probability. If it’s 0101, then the probability should just be 50%.
If it’s 0 to 9, the probability of any one particular number should be 10%. But if there is a person who is focusing his or her mind on the random number generator, and is wishing that if one particular number come more, then it is observed in repeated experiments all over the world, that the frequency of that particular number coming up increases in statistically significant manners. So, the documentation of this experiment of the variation in the pattern of numbers generated in the random number generator, when there is a mind that is focusing on and desiring a particular result, the documentation is undeniable, but the explanation is unavailable.
If we assume that the gross material phenomena is all that exists, but if we posit that there is a subtle material phenomena, material arena, and that can affect gross matter in ways that we don’t normally understand with our laws of physics and with our observation of gross material phenomena, then that explains, that can act as a reasonable explanation for the existence of a mind element. So, to summarize the answer, from gross material phenomena directly, we cannot have protection, we cannot have observation for subtle, for anything beyond gross matter, because nothing beyond gross matter, whether it is subtle matter or it is spirit, it is visible to us through gross sensory perception. Now, by inference, we can conclude that something beyond gross matter exists if we do the proper experiments.
So, something which is entirely different from matter, that is consciousness, we can infer that when we see consciousness manifesting, then we can infer that there has to be a spirit, something which is itself inherently conscious, that is the source of this consciousness. And that’s how we can infer the existence of spirit. And when we see, so the characteristic of phenomena like mesmerism or mysticism or miracles or random number generation, pattern variation, is not that consciousness is manifested over here, but that matter is affected in ways that cannot be explained at the gross material level.
And this points to the existence of something beyond the gross material level, which is also material, because the effect here is not manifesting consciousness, the effect is essentially material. So, that means that from the observation of such phenomena, we can infer that there is some other material level of existence, which affects the gross material level in ways that cannot be understood merely by reducing existence to the gross material level. And because this whole phenomena is material, that’s why what we infer is whatever is affecting this phenomena, which is causing this phenomena, is also material.
And that material thing which is causing this phenomena is the subtle material level. In this way we can infer the existence of subtle matter. Thank you.