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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).

When the Seer Becomes the Instrument

A Reply to John Abramson

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

John Abramson's second response is considerably stronger than his first. He has now moved away from the attempt to connect Wilber's subtle-energy ontology with contemporary bioelectricity and has identified the genuinely difficult issue: can contemplative experience, systematically cultivated and communally confirmed, provide knowledge of an objective subtle reality?

His answer is nuanced, and in an important respect it comes remarkably close to mine. He ultimately concedes that contemplative practice does not establish Wilber's subtle energies on terms that are shared by Wilber's critics. Instead, he describes the result as “framework-relative certainty”: genuine knowledge within the Buddhist framework, but unestablished metaphysics outside it.

I agree with the second half of that formulation much more than Abramson perhaps realizes.

The central problem is not simply that science has so far failed to find the right “anchor” for subtle-energy claims. The deeper problem is that Abramson has not shown that there is an independently existing object there to be anchored to in the first place.

Abramson begins by granting Wilber's strongest epistemological argument. A genuine contemplative discipline has an injunction—do this—followed by apprehension—see this—and communal confirmation—others who have followed the procedure report the same thing. There is no reason to deny that contemplative practices can generate highly reproducible experiences. Meditation, sensory deprivation, psychedelics, prayer, breathwork and other techniques can systematically alter perception, attention, emotion, bodily awareness and the sense of self. Nor is there anything intrinsically unscientific about studying such states.

But reproducibility of an experience does not automatically establish the external ontology attributed to that experience.

That distinction is the key to the whole discussion. If thousands of people independently practice a particular meditation technique and report a luminous field surrounding the body, we have established something interesting: the practice reliably produces a particular kind of experience. We have not thereby established that a luminous field exists independently of the practitioners' altered state.

This is not because subjective experience is unreal. The experience is real as an experience. The question concerns its interpretation.

Abramson actually recognizes this distinction when he draws a line between a science of states and a science of energies. That distinction should be retained. But once it is retained, Wilber's original claim is in considerably more trouble than Abramson's formulation suggests.

The mathematics analogy

Abramson compares the trained contemplative community with the mathematical community. The untrained person cannot meaningfully challenge the prime number theorem, he says, because mathematical knowledge requires training. Competent mathematicians can inspect a proof and identify an error.

Absolutely. But the analogy breaks down at precisely the point where it matters.

What makes mathematics special is not simply that mathematicians are trained. Mathematical propositions possess explicit formal structures. Proofs provide publicly inspectable chains of inference. Disagreements can, at least in principle, be localized and adjudicated. There is a mechanism of what Abramson calls “compulsion”: once the relevant premises and rules of inference are accepted, the conclusion follows, and a competent dissenter can be shown exactly where an error has occurred.

Where is the equivalent mechanism in contemplative subtle-energy research?

There is no subtle-energy equivalent of a mathematical proof.

There is no generally accepted procedure by which two accomplished yogis can examine a disagreement over the number, location, structure or properties of subtle-energy centres and identify which practitioner has made a demonstrable error. And Abramson himself supplies the most obvious evidence for this problem: different contemplative traditions report different subtle anatomies.

Different numbers of chakras. Different locations. Different colors. Different functions. Different channels. Different relationships between bodily processes and consciousness. Different accounts of what happens to these structures during advanced practice.

This is not a minor historical inconvenience. It is an epistemological problem.

If different highly trained practitioners can stably disagree about the nature of the alleged object, then we need some independent criterion for deciding which perception is veridical. Otherwise the disagreement cannot be resolved by the very community that supposedly provides the validation.

Abramson says that this is where “compulsion” becomes decisive. I agree. But once that standard is applied consistently, the subtle-energy tradition falls short.

When the framework determines what is seen

Abramson's most revealing concession comes when he describes the Buddhist solution to this problem. Within Tibetan Buddhism, he says, the missing anchor is supplied by the ontology itself. The mind-inseparable body is regarded as elemental; genuine realization is held to be veridical; and apparent divergence is attributed to incomplete practice.

But this is precisely where the argument becomes circular.

The ontology tells us that the subtle body exists. Advanced practitioners are expected eventually to perceive it correctly. If practitioners disagree, some of them are assumed not to have reached the necessary level of realization. When someone does reach the correct realization, the ontology itself guarantees that the resulting cognition is veridical.

This is a coherent system. But coherence is not independent confirmation.

The difficulty can be expressed very simply. The theory determines in advance what a correct experience must reveal, and then uses the occurrence of that experience as confirmation of the theory.

A Christian mystic can construct a similar epistemology. Christianity says God exists; advanced contemplation can reveal God; apparent contradictions are attributed to inadequate spiritual development or doctrinal error. A Sufi can make a corresponding argument about divine reality. A Vedantin can do the same. A Buddhist can do it with the dharmic or subtle-body ontology.

The existence of profound experiences and sophisticated traditions of interpreting them does not establish that their respective metaphysical interpretations are objectively correct.

Indeed, the existence of multiple competing systems is itself evidence that we need something more than internal confirmation.

This is why Abramson's phrase “framework-relative certainty” is so important. Once the certainty is acknowledged to be framework-relative, the epistemological status of the claim changes. The practitioner may possess very strong reasons, within a particular tradition, for believing in a subtle body. But someone outside that tradition is not compelled by the evidence to accept the ontology.

And that is precisely the point I was making about Wilber.

The trained observer as instrument

Abramson proposes an interesting alternative: perhaps the trained cognition itself is the instrument. Epistemic access to reality need not necessarily run through the ordinary senses or their mechanical extensions. A sufficiently trained contemplative consciousness might itself function as a means of perception.

In principle, why not?

But if the contemplative is an instrument, the question becomes: how is the instrument calibrated?

A thermometer is not trusted because thermometers agree with one another after years of thermometer training. It is trusted because there are independent reasons to believe that its readings track a physical property, and because those readings can be cross-checked, reproduced and connected to successful predictions.

The same applies to scientific instruments more generally. An EEG is meaningful not simply because neuroscientists collectively agree that EEG traces represent brain activity. Its measurements can be related to independently established physiological processes, reproduced across laboratories and connected with interventions and predictions.

If the meditator is the instrument, what calibrates the meditator?

Not merely another meditator.

Not merely a tradition.

And certainly not the ontology that the instrument is supposedly designed to confirm.

We need some independent constraint.

Without it, the instrument risks becoming indistinguishable from the phenomenon it is supposed to detect.

Training can reveal—or construct

There is another possibility that Abramson does not sufficiently consider. Perhaps contemplative training does not merely make people better observers of a pre-existing subtle reality. Perhaps it changes what they experience.

That would not be particularly surprising.

Training changes perception all the time. Musicians hear structures in music that novices do not hear. Wine experts detect distinctions that untrained drinkers miss. Radiologists recognize patterns invisible to laypeople. Athletes develop highly refined proprioception. Birdwatchers can distinguish species through subtle perceptual cues.

But these cases have something crucial in common: the objects and distinctions can be independently checked.

A radiologist's suspicious lesion can be confirmed by imaging or pathology. A birdwatcher's identification can be checked against the bird itself. A musician's analysis can be examined against the score and acoustic signal.

With subtle energies, the direction of explanation remains open.

Training may increase sensitivity to an independently existing phenomenon.

But training may also construct a sophisticated interpretive framework through which bodily sensations and altered states are organized.

These hypotheses are not equivalent.

And nothing Abramson has presented decides between them.

Indeed, the extraordinary correspondence between training and perception should make us cautious. If a practitioner is trained from the beginning to expect channels, chakras, winds, centers, energies and particular states of consciousness, subsequent experience is inevitably interpreted through those conceptual categories. That does not make the experience fake. It makes its ontological interpretation uncertain.

The chakra problem

This brings us back to the chakras.

Abramson is right that simply dismissing chakras as “imaginary” is inadequate. Traditional contemplative practices may encode remarkably sophisticated observations about bodily attention, interoception, breathing, autonomic regulation and altered states of consciousness. Modern research into meditation may well uncover reproducible physiological correlates of practices historically described in energetic language.

But that is not evidence that chakras exist as discrete subtle-energy structures.

In fact, the historical diversity of chakra systems raises exactly the problem Abramson identifies. If the chakras are objective structures in a subtle body, why do traditions disagree so substantially about their number, location and function?

One can answer that different traditions have different symbolic languages. But then the chakra system begins to look much more like a culturally elaborated map of experience than an independently existing anatomy.

That could still be fascinating.

It could even be scientifically fruitful.

But it would be a very different claim from the literal subtle anatomy implied by Wilber's presentation.

Again, the pattern repeats: once the claim is translated into phenomenology, psychology or physiology, it becomes more plausible. But the more plausible it becomes, the less of the original metaphysical claim remains.

Capriles and the problem of ontological altitude

Abramson also invokes Elias Capriles, who has emphasized that the profundity or altitude of a contemplative state does not by itself establish its ontological status. Buddhist cosmology itself distinguishes extremely exalted conditioned states from the unconditioned.

I agree completely.

But the principle should be applied consistently.

If phenomenological altitude does not establish ontological status, then neither does the intensity of an energetic experience. Nor does its reproducibility. Nor does the authority of the practitioner. Nor does agreement within a particular tradition.

These things can establish that an experience is real, powerful and perhaps highly reproducible.

They cannot, by themselves, establish the metaphysical interpretation attached to it.

This is one of the most persistent problems in Wilber's epistemology. He wants to overcome the simplistic opposition between subjective experience and objective science by proposing an expanded model of inquiry. But the expanded model still needs to distinguish between what is experienced and what exists independently of the experience.

Without that distinction, phenomenology can become ontology by default.

What has actually been established?

By the end of Abramson's essay, the argument has therefore arrived at a remarkably modest conclusion.

Contemplative practices can systematically produce particular states. Practitioners can become highly trained in recognizing and describing those states. Communities can develop sophisticated vocabularies and practices around them. Those communities can achieve considerable intersubjective agreement. And some contemplative experiences may correspond to measurable physiological changes.

I accept all of this.

But none of it establishes etheric, astral or psychic energies as independent entities.

And this is precisely why my original criticism of Wilber remains intact.

The issue was never whether contemplative states are real. The issue was whether Wilber had established the external subtle-energy ontology he attached to them.

He had not.

Abramson now effectively agrees.

“Not yet” is doing a lot of work

The title of Abramson's essay therefore contains the most important conclusion: “A Science of States, Not Yet a Science of Energies.”

Exactly.

But “not yet” is doing a great deal of work.

It implies that the missing science may eventually arrive. Perhaps it will. Science should remain open to unexpected discoveries.

But openness to a possibility is not evidence for that possibility.

Until there is a method capable of distinguishing subtle-energy objects from alternative explanations involving physiology, interoception, expectation, suggestion, cultural conditioning, imagery and altered neural dynamics, the responsible position is suspension of judgment.

And there is an important asymmetry here.

We already possess increasingly sophisticated scientific methods for investigating contemplative states: subjective reports, behavioral experiments, psychophysiology, autonomic measurements, neuroimaging, electrophysiology and controlled interventions.

What we do not possess is a validated method for detecting Wilber's etheric, astral and psychic energies.

That is not a minor gap.

It is the entire gap between a science of contemplative experience and a science of subtle energies.

Abramson has actually strengthened my case

There is an irony here.

Abramson set out to show that my critique is too restrictive because it overlooks alternative ways of knowing. But his second essay has actually clarified why the distinction I drew in the original review is necessary.

He has shown that a rigorous science of contemplative states is entirely conceivable. He has shown that first-person methods need not be dismissed as mere subjectivism. He has shown that trained observers can develop extraordinary sensitivity to their own experience. And he has shown that communities of practitioners can develop sophisticated systems of intersubjective verification.

All of that is worth taking seriously.

But he has not shown that these achievements establish an external subtle-energy ontology.

Indeed, his own analysis demonstrates the problem. The moment he asks what distinguishes a trained cognition that tracks an object from a trained cognition that constitutes one, he arrives at the missing piece of evidence.

And the proposed Buddhist solution does not provide an external answer. It supplies an answer from within the framework.

That may be enough for Buddhist certainty.

It is not enough for scientific confirmation.

This is why I would modify Abramson's title only slightly.

It is not simply “a science of states, not yet a science of energies.”

It is a potentially rigorous science of contemplative states, with no established science of Wilberian subtle energies.

That is already a fascinating field of inquiry. It does not need etheric, astral or psychic substances to make it interesting.

And if one day a reproducible method is developed that demonstrates such entities independently of the metaphysical frameworks that currently posit them, I will happily revise my position.

Until then, however, the burden of proof remains where it belongs: with the person who claims that beyond the experience there is an independently existing subtle object.

Abramson has not supplied that proof.

He has supplied a sophisticated account of why the proof is still missing.

Appendix: What About Clairvoyants?

There is one important group of alleged observers that deserves explicit consideration: clairvoyants.

If subtle bodies, chakras, energy fields and other "subtle objects" are genuinely perceptible by a trained form of cognition, then clairvoyants would seem to provide an obvious test case. Clairvoyants traditionally claim precisely this ability. They report seeing or otherwise directly perceiving energetic structures surrounding and penetrating the physical body, often describing auras, chakras, colors, thought-forms, entities and other features that are invisible to ordinary perception.

This is potentially much more interesting for Abramson's argument than ordinary reports of meditation.

The meditator can say, "I experienced an energy moving through my body." That establishes an experience. The clairvoyant makes a stronger claim: "I saw an energetic structure that exists independently of my experience." That is an ontological claim, and therefore one that should in principle be testable.

Indeed, clairvoyance provides almost exactly the kind of experiment Abramson says is needed. If the clairvoyant is genuinely functioning as an instrument for detecting an external subtle reality, different competent clairvoyants should be able to inspect the same object and independently report its characteristics. Their observations should converge sufficiently to establish that they are tracking something rather than merely experiencing internally generated imagery.

This is where the history of clairvoyance becomes problematic.

Different clairvoyants have described remarkably different subtle anatomies. Aura systems vary in the number and meaning of colors. Chakra descriptions vary in number, location and function. Theosophical clairvoyants developed elaborate accounts of etheric, astral and mental bodies that do not simply reproduce the traditional Indian systems. Later New Age practitioners added still further structures, frequencies and energetic distinctions.

One can always respond that some clairvoyants are more advanced than others, that some traditions possess better maps, or that the subtle domain is enormously more complicated than any single tradition has recognized. But these responses reproduce exactly the epistemological problem Abramson identified. How do we determine which clairvoyant is actually seeing the object correctly?

The answer cannot simply be: the correct clairvoyant is the one whose vision agrees with the correct ontology.

That would make the argument circular.

Nor can it be that disagreement merely reflects different levels of attainment. That explanation would be plausible only if we had an independent way of measuring attainment and determining what the advanced practitioner is actually seeing.

This is where clairvoyance potentially provides a particularly sharp empirical test of Wilber's claims. Suppose several experienced clairvoyants were presented with the same person, without being given any information about that person's history or about one another's observations. Suppose they independently mapped the alleged subtle bodies, chakras and energy patterns. If their descriptions converged to a statistically significant degree, and if those descriptions subsequently generated successful predictions about independently measurable physiological or psychological characteristics, the case would become considerably more interesting.

One could then begin asking whether the clairvoyants were detecting something external.

But if their descriptions systematically track their respective training traditions, expectations and conceptual vocabularies, the alternative explanation becomes much stronger: the "instrument" is partly constructing what it reports.

This possibility cannot simply be dismissed by saying that clairvoyance is a higher form of perception. That is precisely the claim that requires demonstration.

There is also an important historical irony here. Wilber's subtle-energy model was not simply derived from a single, stable contemplative tradition. His account draws on a broad mixture of Vedantic, Buddhist, yogic, Theosophical and modern psychological sources. Theosophical clairvoyance in particular played an important role in twentieth-century Western accounts of subtle bodies. Yet the various clairvoyant systems do not converge on a single experimentally established subtle anatomy.

If anything, the diversity of clairvoyant testimony provides a warning against treating visionary experience as an automatic window onto objective reality.

This does not mean that clairvoyants are necessarily dishonest. Nor does it mean that their experiences are uninteresting. A person can have a vivid and compelling perception of an aura without consciously fabricating it. The perception may be entirely genuine as a psychological event.

But sincerity and phenomenological vividness do not establish the independent existence of the perceived object.

That distinction is crucial.

A clairvoyant who says, "I see a blue field around you," is making two claims at once. The first is phenomenological: I am having a perception of a blue field. The second is ontological: there is a blue field around you that exists independently of my perception.

The first claim may be perfectly true while the second remains unestablished.

And this brings us directly back to Abramson's distinction between a science of states and a science of energies. Clairvoyance, if genuine, might constitute a fascinating science of unusual perceptual states. But to establish a science of subtle energies, the clairvoyant's perceptions must demonstrably track independently existing objects.

That is the missing step.

Interestingly, this is also where Wilber's own appeal to "direct apprehension" becomes vulnerable. Directness is not the same as veridicality. We experience ordinary perception as direct, yet perceptual science has demonstrated repeatedly that perception is an active process of construction and inference. The fact that something appears immediately present to consciousness does not establish that consciousness has encountered it exactly as it exists independently.

The same epistemological caution must therefore apply to contemplative and clairvoyant perception.

Perhaps clairvoyants really are detecting subtle structures that current science has not learned to measure. That possibility cannot be logically excluded.

But the appropriate response to an unexcluded possibility is not belief. It is investigation.

And clairvoyance offers a particularly straightforward opportunity for such investigation. If the subtle object is real, different competent observers should eventually be able to converge upon it independently of the doctrines through which they were trained. If they cannot, then the possibility that the training itself helps constitute the perceived reality becomes increasingly difficult to ignore.

In this respect, clairvoyants represent not an escape from the evidential problem but perhaps its clearest formulation.

If the subtle body is real, someone should be able to see the same thing twice—preferably by different observers, under controlled conditions, with the result independently checkable.

Until that happens, clairvoyant testimony remains evidence for the existence of clairvoyant experiences, not evidence sufficient to establish the existence of the subtle objects allegedly perceived.