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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 Order Is Not Evidence

A Reply to John Abramson

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

John Abramson's latest contribution marks a welcome change in the conversation. He begins by conceding, quite explicitly, what I regard as the central point of my previous critique: reproducibility of an experience does not establish the external ontology attributed to that experience. Agreement among trained contemplatives cannot by itself calibrate their perceptions, because the community doing the observing may already share the conceptual framework through which the observations are interpreted. As Abramson now puts it, “framework-relative certainty” remains knowledge within a framework, not established metaphysics outside it. He also concedes the more specific point that nothing in his argument, or in Ken Wilber's, establishes etheric, astral, or psychic energies as independent entities.

That is an important concession, and it substantially narrows the disagreement. Indeed, Abramson now says something very close to what I have been arguing all along: we may have a science of contemplative states without having a science of subtle energies. He even acknowledges that the “not yet” in the title of his earlier essay expressed more hope than evidence.

But having conceded the argument about proof, Abramson attempts to save something from the chakra hypothesis. His strategy is ingenious. Instead of demanding that different traditions agree on the exact number, location and function of chakras, he proposes that what matters is preservation of structural relations. Perhaps, he suggests, the various chakra systems are different resolutions of a common underlying structure. One tradition divides the structure more finely, another more coarsely, but the ordering remains intact.

This is an interesting hypothesis. The difficulty is that Abramson has not yet shown that the observed order is evidence for anything beyond the ordinary human body and the way human beings conventionally organize bodily experience.

The invariant is already in the coding scheme

Abramson's central empirical claim is that nine historically identifiable chakra systems differ considerably in the number of centres they recognize, but preserve the same basic bottom-to-top ordering. He reduces them to five broad anatomical regions: lower body, navel, heart, throat and head. All nine systems turn out to be “order-compatible” under this scheme.

At first sight, this sounds impressive. Four, five, six, seven, eleven and eighteen centres may seem like wildly different answers to the question “How many chakras are there?”, while the persistence of a lower-to-upper sequence looks like a remarkable invariant.

But there is an obvious problem: Abramson has chosen the invariant before demonstrating that it is an independently existing feature of the systems being studied. His reference sequence consists of five very broad bodily regions—lower body, navel, heart, throat and head—and every system under investigation is then translated into these same five regions.

The result is almost guaranteed to find order.

If a tradition describes a series of bodily or experiential centres extending from the lower part of the body toward the head, it will naturally be order-compatible with a sequence defined as “lower body ? navel ? heart ? throat ? head.” The coding scheme has not discovered an unexpected structure so much as compressed diverse systems into a coarse anatomical template that was constructed to capture precisely their common vertical organization.

The real question is therefore not whether one can find an order-preserving map after reducing all the systems to five broad regions. One plainly can. The question is whether that ordering contains information that could not reasonably have been generated by ordinary embodied experience, cultural transmission, anatomical landmarks, or the very procedure by which the systems were selected and coded.

Abramson himself admits that the embodied interpretation makes the same prediction. The conserved ordering, he says, is “exactly what the embodiment reading predicts,” since the landmarks are simply the landmarks of the physical trunk and head.

That admission is devastating for the subtle-body interpretation unless some additional evidence can distinguish the two models. At present, none has been supplied.

Why the music analogy doesn't work

Abramson's most appealing analogy is music. The octave has an objective physical basis in the 2:1 frequency relationship, he observes, while cultures divide the octave into different numbers of notes. Five-note, seven-note, twelve-note and twenty-two-shruti systems therefore do not imply that pitch or the octave is imaginary.

But this analogy quietly smuggles in the very thing that is missing from the chakra argument.

The physical reality of the octave is independently measurable. Its 2:1 frequency relationship can be detected with instruments that have nothing whatsoever to do with musicians, musical traditions, or subjective experience. We do not establish the reality of the octave because musicians from different cultures agree that it exists. We establish it because there is an independently measurable acoustic relationship in physical reality.

The cultural diversity of musical scales is therefore perfectly compatible with the objective reality of pitch because the latter has already been independently established.

The chakra case is precisely the opposite. We have a variety of traditional descriptions of bodily locations and experiences. We do not have an independently detected subtle axis corresponding to them. We do not have a physical measurement of chakra number, position, energy, frequency, field strength, or causal interaction. We do not have an instrument that detects the same chakra independently of the human observer.

So the music analogy actually reinforces my original point. Diverse descriptions do not disprove an underlying reality. But neither do they establish one. The crucial question is what independent measurement could distinguish the objective-referent hypothesis from the culturally mediated-experience hypothesis.

Abramson agrees that such a distinction is ultimately required. He simply has not supplied it yet.

The strange achievement of finding order everywhere

There is another problem with Abramson's preliminary test. He reports that all nine systems preserve the same order, and therefore concludes that the first prediction of his model receives support.

But what exactly would constitute failure?

Suppose a tradition described a centre in the lower body, another in the heart, another in the throat, and another in the head. That is compatible with the reference sequence.

Suppose another tradition inserted two additional centres between the lower body and navel. Still compatible.

Suppose another divided the head into forehead, brow and crown. Still compatible.

Suppose another added centres at the joints. Still compatible, because those are simply classified as “off-axis.”

And if a system contains additional centres that don't fit the one-dimensional model, Abramson modifies the hypothesis to accommodate them as “additional structure” or a higher-resolution representation.

This makes the hypothesis increasingly difficult to falsify.

The danger is not that Abramson is deliberately moving the goalposts. On the contrary, he is commendably transparent about the limitations of his first pass. He acknowledges that the sample was selected for textual identifiability rather than according to a sampling rule, that the predictions were formulated after the broad pattern of the literature was already visible, and that the coding is coarse. He explicitly says that this is not a preregistered study.

That intellectual honesty is welcome. But it also tells us why the apparent result should not yet be treated as evidence for the hypothesis.

The nine systems were not sampled independently of the hypothesis. The coding scheme was devised by someone already familiar with the broad pattern. The reference sequence consists of broad anatomical landmarks. And the test asks whether the systems can be embedded in that sequence without reversals. Given the nature of the material, this is a remarkably permissive criterion.

Order is not the same thing as ontology

The deeper philosophical problem is that Abramson is moving from relational similarity to common referent without sufficient justification.

Two maps can preserve the same geographical order without being maps of the same hidden object. Two theories can organize phenomena according to the same sequence without referring to the same underlying entity. Two psychological systems can divide human experience into increasingly refined levels without those levels constituting discrete structures in an additional ontological realm.

Indeed, the more obvious explanation here is that humans experience their bodies vertically.

Our bodies have a lower and an upper region. The pelvis and genitals are associated with reproduction and elimination; the abdomen with visceral sensations and breathing; the heart and chest with emotion and arousal; the throat and mouth with speech and expression; and the head and brain with perception, cognition and imagery. A contemplative system that directs attention through the body is therefore not starting from a random collection of locations. It is operating on an already highly structured experiential object.

The fact that different traditions repeatedly organize this experiential field from bottom to top is therefore hardly surprising.

What would be surprising is something else: convergence on a structure that is not already supplied by ordinary anatomy or interoception.

If Tibetan, Hindu, Theosophical and other clairvoyant traditions independently reported an invisible organ located in some anatomically obscure region, with the same measurable properties, the same causal effects and the same boundaries, that would be much more interesting. If blind observers could detect its activation and their reports could be correlated with an independently measurable physical variable, the case would become stronger still.

But “lower to upper” does not get us there.

Leadbeater is actually a useful warning

Abramson discusses Charles Leadbeater because his system is particularly interesting: Leadbeater claimed clairvoyant perception and nevertheless introduced a spleen centre while omitting the genital centre found in other systems. Abramson notes that this is not a straightforward counterexample to ordering, because the spleen is off-axis and the remaining axial centres retain their sequence.

But I think Leadbeater should make us more cautious, not less.

Here we have a self-described clairvoyant producing a subtle-body anatomy that differs from other subtle-body anatomies. The traditional response is to say that he is describing another level of resolution, another aspect of the system, or another legitimate partition.

But that is precisely what a culturally mediated perceptual system would also predict.

The crucial experiment would therefore not be to determine whether Leadbeater's spleen chakra can be accommodated within a flexible model. It would be to determine whether independent clairvoyants, operating without knowledge of one another and without access to the subject's medical or biographical information, can reliably detect the same purported structure.

Abramson agrees that such a test is worth doing, but argues that identical descriptions are the wrong invariant.

I would turn this around. Before deciding that identical descriptions are the wrong invariant, we should first ask whether they are the most straightforward invariant. If there really is an independently existing subtle structure, some degree of convergence in its location, boundaries, properties and causal behavior is exactly what we should expect.

It need not be perfect. Science rarely demands perfect agreement. But the more freedom we allow observers to disagree about the structure while still declaring their reports structurally equivalent, the less informative the test becomes.

The null hypothesis is the real challenge

Abramson's most promising proposal is his suggestion that the hypothesis eventually be tested against a null model. He proposes extending the sample to twelve or fifteen systems, coding position, spatial extent, function, principal versus secondary status, and axial versus non-axial location, and then comparing order preservation against a model in which the systems are independently generated categorical schemes.

That would indeed be an improvement.

But even here, the crucial issue will be the choice of null model.

It is not enough to ask whether independently generated chakra systems preserve bodily order more than randomly shuffled chakra systems. Human beings do not randomly assign concepts to bodily locations. Any system concerned with meditation, vitality, sexuality, emotion, breathing, speech and cognition will be strongly constrained by ordinary human anatomy and experience.

The appropriate null hypothesis therefore cannot be “randomly ordered categories.” It should be something like: What degree of order would we expect if human cultures independently constructed systems for organizing embodied experience, using ordinary anatomical landmarks, interoception, metaphor, developmental symbolism and cultural transmission—but without any subtle body?

That is a much harder null hypothesis to defeat.

And it is precisely the hypothesis Abramson himself acknowledges: the embodied interpretation predicts the same pattern.

Until his proposed test can discriminate between these two possibilities, it is not a test of the subtle-body hypothesis. It is merely a test of whether different traditions organize bodily experience in related ways.

I would be unsurprised if they do.

From “wrong inference” to an unanswered question

Abramson is therefore right about one thing that deserves emphasis: my earlier argument should not be formulated as the simplistic claim that disagreement about chakra number proves that chakras are unreal. Objective systems can indeed be represented at different levels of granularity.

But that correction does not rescue the subtle-energy hypothesis. It merely establishes a logical possibility.

There is a difference between saying “divergence does not logically entail non-objectivity” and saying “therefore there is positive evidence for a common subtle structure.” The first is true. The second does not follow.

Abramson's new position is actually much closer to this than his rhetoric occasionally suggests. He concludes that the conserved ordering “needs explaining as much as” the variation in number.

I agree that it needs explaining. But we already have an explanation that requires no subtle energy whatsoever: human beings have bodies, bodies have a vertical organization, bodily sensations are structured along that axis, and cultural systems that turn bodily experience into symbolic maps will tend to preserve some of that structure.

The burden of proof therefore remains exactly where it was.

The welcome disappearance of Wilber's subtle energies

There is, however, a larger consequence of Abramson's concessions that should not be overlooked.

Ken Wilber has often treated subtle realities as though they occupy an ontological position somewhere between ordinary physical reality and the ultimate ground of being. His discussions of etheric, astral and psychic energies have tended to give these concepts the rhetorical status of discoveries awaiting fuller scientific confirmation.

Abramson now explicitly rejects that move. Nothing in his analysis establishes those energies as independent entities, and he agrees that a science of contemplative states is not yet a science of subtle energies.

That is already a substantial result.

It means that the scientifically defensible portion of the integral/contemplative project is the study of altered states, meditation, attention, embodiment, phenomenology and their physiological and psychological correlates. The metaphysical interpretation of these phenomena remains open.

That distinction should have been maintained from the beginning.

From a standoff to a genuinely testable question

Abramson says that he has “replaced a standoff with a test.”

I would phrase it somewhat differently. He has replaced an ontological claim with a research question.

That is progress.

But the interesting question is no longer “Are chakras real?” Nor is it even “Do different traditions agree about chakras?” The interesting question is whether the apparent structural regularities among chakra systems exceed what we would expect from ordinary embodiment, cultural inheritance and conceptual reconstruction.

If they do, we have something genuinely interesting to investigate.

If they do not, then we have learned something equally interesting: that apparently esoteric systems can converge because they are elaborate cultural interpretations of a common human body and a common repertoire of human experience.

Either result would be valuable.

What would not be valuable is treating the discovery of a coarse anatomical ordering as evidence for subtle energy simply because it survives a flexible coding scheme. The proposed invariant may turn out to be real. But before we ask what invisible anatomy it reveals, we should first ask the more prosaic question: how much of it was already present in the anatomy we can see?

That, ultimately, is where Abramson's new argument leaves us. He has successfully abandoned the claim that contemplative consensus establishes subtle-energy ontology. He has also weakened the traditional seven-chakra picture by acknowledging that the historical evidence does not support a fixed discrete anatomy.

What remains is an intriguing pattern in the organization of embodied experience.

It may be worth studying.

But we should resist the temptation to call the pattern a subtle body before we have found anything that distinguishes a subtle body from a human one.