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John Abramson is retired and lives in the Lake District in Cumbria, England. He obtained an MSc in Transpersonal Psychology and Consciousness Studies in 2011 when Les Lancaster and Mike Daniels ran this course at Liverpool John Moores University. In 2015, he received an MA in Buddhist Studies from the University of South Wales. He can be contacted at johnabramson@btinternet.com

A response to Frank Visser's "Ken Wilber's Subtle Energies"

John Abramson / Claude

Frank Visser is right in his review essay "Ken Wilber's Subtle Energies" that Wilber's specific ontology of etheric, astral and psychic energies was not established by the evidence available when he wrote. The three named genera are not demonstrated; the developmental "signatures" he assigns to them are not measured; the reincarnation hypothesis is introduced because the doctrine needs it. All of that stands. But an unestablished ontology is not the same thing as an absent phenomenon, and the distinction is where Frank's essay goes wrong. He shows that Wilber's interpretation fails a scientific standard. He never asks whether the thing Wilber was trying to interpret is real. On that question the biology of the last two decades has quietly returned an answer, and it is not the one Frank assumes.

Frank writes a demolition. He runs each Wilber claim past a checklist—operational definitions, mechanisms, predictions, falsifiability—and finds it wanting, correctly. A checklist will always find a speculative theory wanting; that is what it is for. The harder and fairer task, the one a critic owes an ambitious thinker, is to separate a wrong ontology from a direction that may not be wrong. Frank does not attempt the separation, and so he walks past a result that bears directly on Wilber's first and central move.

Take the moment where he is most confident: Burr. Frank uses Harold Saxton Burr to make his "real measurement plus an extra ontology" point—living tissue has electric fields, granted, but that does not deliver etheric bodies. True as far as it goes. What Frank omits is that Burr is no longer a curiosity to be waved past. In 2020 the developmental biologist Michael Levin published a paper in Biological Theory revisiting Burr and Northrop's 1935 "Electro-Dynamic Theory of Life." Levin's judgment—and it should be attributed to him, not offered as a field-wide consensus—is that Burr was "prescient and visionary," and that his central hypothesis, that bioelectric gradients act as prepatterns guiding morphogenesis, has been confirmed by modern molecular physiology. Frank invokes Burr to close a door. One of the most productive biologists now working reopened it.

And it reopened in a specific, citable shape. Strip Wilber's ladder of its theosophical vocabulary and look at what mainstream biology now describes. Every cell, not only the neuron, maintains a membrane voltage; those voltages form networks through ion channels and gap junctions; and the resulting bioelectric patterns are instructive rather than passive, carrying information about axis, organ identity, regeneration and cancer suppression, and doing so before and beneath any nervous system. This is the field Levin and others call developmental bioelectricity, and it is ordinary biology in first-rank journals. Add the next rung: active neurons generate endogenous electric fields that modulate the firing of other neurons—ephaptic coupling—now modelled quantitatively in the human cortex. Add the last: the brain's large-scale electrical and magnetic activity, and, more marginally, the measurable ultraweak photon emission of neural tissue, whose existence is established even where its function is disputed.

Here is the conceptual point Frank misses and Wilber half-saw. What this literature is uncovering is not a new kind of energy. It is existing electrical phenomena becoming organised into information-bearing, spatially distributed dynamical systems, and becoming more organised as the organism becomes more complex. Wilber's terminology reaches for a new substance at each level. The biology offers something better: one medium, put to progressively higher-order use. Read that way, his first claim—that when living form appears, a field-structure appears with it, and it is not a mere by-product of anatomy—survives translation into this literature almost intact. His weaker second claim, that the structure elaborates with nervous-system complexity, survives it too. Frank's flat verdict that ordinary bioelectricity establishes nothing of interest is the one line in his essay the evidence does not support.

Now the discipline, because charity without it is credulity, and the caveats are where the real work is.

First, and most important: this is field organisation, not new energy. Nothing here is a fifth force, and etheric-, astral-, psychic-as-substances find no counterpart. If Wilber's ladder is read literally—three distinct physical energies switched on in sequence—the biology weakens it. If it is read as one bioelectrical medium acquiring new levels of differentiation and functional significance, the biology strengthens it. The second reading is the defensible one, and it is not a rescue by charity; it is the reading the evidence actually supports.

Second, the evolutionary order is partly reversed, and this cuts against Wilber's wording even as it confirms there was a real field-story to get wrong. In Levin's account bioelectric signalling is ancestral: it predates neurons, which are a later specialisation of a medium already running in embryos, plants and non-neural tissue. "New energy at life, then a different one at nerves" therefore has the sequence wrong at the level of substances. What it has right, once restated as organisation rather than kinds, is the direction: richer field-mediated coordination tracking rising complexity.

Third, none of this bears on reincarnation—and it is worth being exact about why, because the obvious objection misfires. What the bioelectric literature confirms are gross fields: the L-fields and neural fields that die with the tissue whose ion gradients sustain them. But those are precisely the energies Wilber's scheme does not have transmigrating. He works with three bodyminds—gross, subtle and causal—and is explicit that the gross one dissolves at death while a subtler mass-energy carries the soul across. So the fields we have now corroborated are the ones his own doctrine already concedes are mortal. Two things follow. You cannot ride Burr and Levin to a surviving soul, since their fields are the wrong kind. And the tempting physics rebuttal—that a soul-field would already have shown up in our instruments—is aimed at the wrong body: the field that couples detectably to ordinary matter is the gross one, which no one here claims survives, whereas the transmigrating vehicle is by definition non-gross and, on Wilber's own hypothesis, engages gross matter only through sufficiently complex form. Transmigration is a separate claim about a separate body, and it stands or falls on evidence of its own—none of which is on the table here.

So the reading that emerges is neither Frank's nor Wilber's. It suggests that "subtlety," Wilber's most slippery word, is not a thinning-out toward some ethereal stuff but organisation becoming more distributed, more relational, and more globally constraining as complexity rises: increasing complexity, increasing field organisation, increasing constraint on the parts beneath. That is a claim about structure, continuous with the biology, needing neither a new force nor a surviving soul.

The same distinction rescues the part of Wilber that Frank treats as beyond saving: the chakras. There is no evidence that chakras are discrete energy centres in the literal traditional sense, and the multiplicity of incompatible chakra maps is a fair point against reading them as one objective anatomy. But dismissal is not the only alternative to literalism. Loizzo's 2016 review in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences treats the traditional subtle-body model—the chakra system—as an interoceptive map of central-nervous-system function, cross-referencing it with modern CNS maps and reading it as an embodied network model of contemplative practice. And a 2025 review in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews (Sezer and Sacchet) finds systematic autonomic signatures associated with advanced and long-term meditation—in heart-rate variability, respiration and cardiorespiratory coupling—though they vary substantially with practice type and expertise. The reasonable claim is not that seven chakras have been detected. It is that the traditional map may encode recurring relationships among bodily sensation, autonomic regulation, neural organisation and altered states—a phenomenological and embodied map, not a crude inventory of undiscovered forces. That is a more interesting hypothesis than the one Frank allows, and it is the kind of hypothesis his checklist cannot generate.

None of which resurrects the theory Frank buried. The three named substances remain unvindicated, the signatures unmeasured, the transmigration claim untouched. What the biology has supplied is an unexpectedly strong substrate for the phenomenon Wilber was groping toward: living systems held together, top to bottom, by distributed fields that organise and constrain their parts, growing richer as complexity rises. Frank's method is superb at demolition and blind to residue, because "what real pattern was this wrong theory tracking?" is a question the checklist cannot ask. He is right about the map and never looks at the corner of the territory the mapmaker actually stumbled onto. That corner is not prana. But it is a good deal more than Frank's essay allows Wilber even the possibility of having seen.