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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 Science of States, Not Yet a Science of Energies

A Reply to Frank Visser

John Abramson / Claude

Let me start by granting Wilber his strongest ground, because the argument only becomes interesting once the weak objections are cleared away. It is a category error to demand that a voltmeter or an EEG detect the etheric or astral body, and Wilber has a principled answer to anyone who makes that demand. A science, he holds—following Charles Tart's "state-specific sciences"—is defined by its method, not by its object; and every genuine method has three strands: an injunction (if you would know this, do this), a direct apprehension of what the injunction discloses, and a communal confirmation by others who have carried out the same injunction and can reject the result. I grant all of it. And I grant more than Frank might: that this confirmation is properly internal to the competent. No one asks the mathematically untrained to check a proof of the prime number theorem; the community that confirms it is the trained one. So "outsiders cannot verify it" is not an objection I will make. It is not even coherent.

Carried out to the letter, then, the three strands can establish real things: that a practitioner performing practice P reliably apprehends Q, and that a community competent in P confirms it. That is reproducible knowledge, and it is more than the "mere subjectivism" Wilber rightly wants to escape. Grant it in full.

But the claim the paper is actually making is not a claim about the experience. It is that the experience is the interior face of an exterior reality—a subtle mass-energy field, an "it" with signature patterns, enveloping the body in the shells of the Burr diagram. And here Wilber's own words matter. He insists, in this very paper, that consciousness is not energy and energy is not consciousness; that felt energy is "intention, not extension," an "I," while the field itself belongs to the "it" dimension; and he warns explicitly against the "subtle materialism" that would collapse the two. On his own account, then, what the practitioner apprehends and the community confirms sits on the Left-Hand, interior side. Interior reproducibility is not, by his own distinction, exterior correspondence.

There is a strong reply available here, and it deserves to be stated at full strength, because it is the best the tradition can do and it is more than "meditators feel something." The reply is that advanced contemplative cognition is not a mere felt "I" but a genuine perception of its object—yogipratyak?a, which Dharmakirti's tradition theorized as a means of valid cognition in its own right; and, at the limit, the all-aspect omniscience a Buddha is said to possess, a cognition that knows all knowable objects. If the body inseparable from mind is elemental, as Tibetan Buddhism holds—no construction, but a foundational feature of what mind is—then the exterior subtle body is among the objects such a cognition directly knows. The injunction becomes: complete the path, and know. This honours a real point that Frank's side too readily dismisses. Epistemic access to an exterior reality need not run through the unaided senses or their mechanical extensions; the trained cognition can itself be the instrument, and its confirmation among adepts is proper, exactly as a proof's confirmation among mathematicians is proper.

Grant all of that, and the whole question narrows to a single hinge. What makes a community of the trained agreeing amount to knowledge of an object, rather than a shared and stable trained disposition? In mathematics the answer is compulsion. A proof forces assent: a competent dissenter can be shown a locatable error, and so two competent parties cannot stably disagree. That is what makes their agreement objective—not the mere fact that they agree, but that a tracked object leaves them no room to diverge without one of them being demonstrably wrong. Where such compulsion is present, agreement among the trained is knowledge of an object. Where it is absent, agreement among the trained is compatible with something quite different: an injunction that constitutes what it discloses, so that everyone who performs it converges precisely because the practice shapes the apprehension.

Measured against that hinge, the yogic case has the injunction and the competent community but has not been shown to have the compulsion. Where different lineages report different subtle anatomies—different numbers, sites and functions of the centres—there is no error-localizing procedure that forces a resolution, as there is for a faulty proof. The competent can, it seems, stably disagree; and stable disagreement among the trained is the signature of an injunction that constitutes rather than one that tracks. Tellingly, the tradition's own most sophisticated epistemology saw the problem: Dharmakirti does not rest yogic perception on the bare fact that yogis agree, but on avisamvada—non-deceptiveness, reliability—an appeal to an anchor beyond convergence itself. The best defender of yogic perception already concedes that agreement among the adept is not, by itself, enough.

There is an answer to this, and it is the honest place to end, because it is neither the failure Frank alleges nor the vindication Wilber claims. Within Tibetan Buddhism the missing anchor is supplied by the ontology itself: the mind-inseparable body is elemental, "construction" is refused not as a tested hypothesis but as a foundational commitment, and genuine realization is held to compel the veridical apprehension while divergence merely marks incomplete practice. Grant that, and the apprehension is veridical by the structure of the system, and the whole argument is internally valid. But notice what has happened. The anchor is now internal to the framework—the object is guaranteed to exist because the framework holds that minds necessarily have such bodies, and the compulsion is guaranteed because the framework holds that true completion cannot diverge. That makes the subtle-energy claim a coherent total ontology, self-confirming from within, of a kind that cannot compel assent from anyone standing outside it. And that is exactly the standoff with Frank. Offered to him, the claim is not a failed science and not a confirmed one. It is a framework-relative certainty: real knowledge inside the Buddhist frame, an unestablished metaphysics from outside it. That is more than Frank grants and less than Wilber claims, and I think it is the truth of the matter.

There is a second caution, from the contemplative side itself, and it cuts in the same direction. As Elias Capriles has long pressed, the profundity or altitude of a state does not certify its ontological reach; Buddhist cosmology names bhavagra, the summit of conditioned existence, precisely to warn against mistaking phenomenological altitude for the unconditioned. The parallel error here would be to let the reproducibility or depth of an energetic experience stand in for the reality of whatever is taken to accompany it. Two independent cautions, then—one from AQAL's own quadrants, one from Buddhist phenomenology—and neither requires denying that subtle energies might exist.

So I am not claiming that a science of subtle energies is impossible, nor that Wilber's ontology is metaphysics by decree. The claim is more exact. Wilber has a plausible principle for a science of contemplative states, and confirmation among the competent is a genuine part of it. Whether that becomes a science of the exterior energies he sets beside those states turns on a single thing: an anchor that distinguishes a trained cognition tracking an object from a trained cognition constituting one—the anchor that compulsion supplies in mathematics. Within the Buddhist frame that anchor is furnished by the ontology itself, which is why the claim is certain there and unpersuasive here. On ground that Frank and Wilber share, it has not been exhibited. Frank asked whether these energies can be measured. The deeper question is what would bind the seer's cognition to the seen on ground the two frames hold in common—and that, on Wilber's own principles, is what is still owed.