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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

Are Subtle and Causal States Available to Everyone?

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

Wilber frequently argues that higher spiritual states are universally available because every human being already cycles through waking, dreaming, and deep sleep. Meditation, he suggests, simply enables conscious awareness within these naturally occurring states.

This argument has an appealing simplicity, but it rests upon a series of questionable assumptions.

The first concerns dreaming. Ordinary dreaming is equated with what contemplative traditions call the subtle realm. Likewise, dreamless sleep is identified with the causal realm of pure formless awareness. Since everyone dreams and everyone sleeps deeply, Wilber concludes that everyone already enters subtle and causal dimensions every night.

The difficulty is that neither equivalence has been empirically demonstrated.

Dreaming is a well-studied neurophysiological process associated primarily with REM sleep. Deep dreamless sleep has distinct electrophysiological characteristics involving slow-wave activity. Nothing in contemporary sleep research suggests that dreamless sleep is identical with an experience of pure consciousness or absolute Spirit.

Meditation practitioners sometimes report awareness during deep sleep. Such reports deserve investigation. But they remain anecdotal and controversial. They cannot simply be generalized to all human beings.

The second assumption concerns memory. Most people have no recollection whatsoever of dreamless sleep. Wilber interprets this not as absence of consciousness but as absence of memory. Yet this is precisely the point under dispute. Without independent evidence, one cannot conclude that unremembered awareness occurred.

Finally, Wilber treats traditional contemplative maps as if they describe universal structures of consciousness rather than culturally specific interpretive systems. Alternative explanations remain equally possible. Meditation may produce unusual states through attentional training, altered brain dynamics, predictive processing, or changes in self-modeling without requiring the existence of subtle or causal ontological realms.

Thus the claim that everyone already experiences subtle and causal states each night remains a metaphysical interpretation rather than an empirical discovery.