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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).

Wilber's strongest reply

Spirit need not be another cause

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

The preceding criticism may, however, underestimate the sophistication of Wilber's postmetaphysical position. Wilber's strongest response would be that the argument has inadvertently retained the very metaphysical picture that postmetaphysics is designed to overcome.

The criticism asks: “Where, in the causal chain, is Spirit?” But that question already assumes that Spirit must occupy a place within the causal chain as one more entity or force alongside neurons, hormones, psychological processes, and social institutions. Wilber could reject the premise. Spirit need not be a supplementary cause. It can be the nondual condition or dimension in which the entire causal chain is enacted.

On this reading, asking whether Spirit is an additional causal mechanism is like asking whether consciousness is an additional mechanism alongside the neural processes through which consciousness is expressed. The question may be legitimate under one ontology, but it is not neutral. It presupposes that reality is fundamentally composed of separate causal objects that can be enumerated independently of the perspectives through which they are disclosed.

Wilber's postmetaphysical move is precisely to challenge that assumption.

The nondual realization does not introduce a new object called Spirit into an otherwise spiritually neutral universe. Rather, it discloses that the conventional subject-object division was itself an enacted perspective. What appears, from one worldspace, as a collection of externally related events may be enacted, from another, as an indivisible field in which subject, object, cognition and action arise together.

If that is correct, then the causal chain

practice → altered attention → altered cognition → altered behavior → social consequences

is not something occurring outside Spirit.

It is Spirit-in-action.

The mistake would be to look for Spirit somewhere inside that sequence as though it were another link.

The category mistake about causality

Wilber could therefore distinguish between two meanings of causality.

The first is conventional or scientific causality: one event or state produces another within a measurable empirical system.

The second concerns the conditions under which a particular world is disclosed and enacted in the first place.

Science operates primarily within the first register. It investigates correlations, mechanisms, structures and transformations within an already constituted field of phenomena. But it does not, by its own methods, settle the question of why reality is disclosed as subject and object, or why there is a world of meaningful phenomena at all.

Nondual realization addresses a different question.

It does not compete with neuroscience by proposing a “Spirit neuron.” Nor does it compete with psychology by proposing a mystical psychological mechanism. Instead, it challenges the assumption that the empirical description exhausts the real.

From this perspective, the demand that Spirit produce a causal effect in addition to all known physical and psychological causes may be asking Spirit to become exactly the kind of object that Wilber's postmetaphysics denies it to be.

The critic says: if Spirit cannot be isolated as a causal variable, it is causally redundant.

Wilber's reply would be: Of course it cannot be isolated in that manner. You are trying to turn a condition of enactment into an object within the enacted field.

The Kosmos as four-quadrant enactment

The integral framework gives Wilber an even stronger answer because Spirit-in-action need not be confined to subjective experience.

A genuinely integral account recognizes at least four irreducible dimensions of any event: interior-individual, exterior-individual, interior-collective, and exterior-collective. A spiritual realization therefore does not have merely an interior consequence.

Suppose a person undergoes a profound nondual realization.

On the interior-individual side, there may be a transformation of identity and perception.

On the exterior-individual side, there may be measurable changes in behavior and physiology.

On the interior-collective side, there may be changes in values, meanings, relationships and shared interpretation.

On the exterior-collective side, those transformations may eventually affect institutions, economics, politics, education or ecological practice.

None of these dimensions has to be reduced to another.

Spirit-in-action is therefore not a mysterious force descending from heaven into matter. It is the integral transformation of all four dimensions as a consequence of a changed mode of enactment.

The important point is that the causal pathways remain perfectly ordinary. What changes is their organization around a transformed center of gravity.

A compassionate institution does not need a supernatural substance called Compassion flowing through its offices. Nevertheless, compassion may genuinely organize its structures, norms and decisions. Likewise, Spirit can be causally consequential without being an additional physical force.

Why the phenomenological argument is not enough

Wilber could nevertheless press the criticism further.

It is not sufficient merely to say that people interpret their experiences as Spirit. That would indeed reduce Spirit to a subjective label.

The postmetaphysical position requires disciplined enactment.

If a contemplative claims access to a nondual realization, then there should be a reproducible practice through which others can investigate the claim. The relevant question becomes not “Can you prove Spirit exists independently of consciousness?” but something closer to:

What happens when competent practitioners undertake the injunction, reproduce the practice, and report what they discover?

This is the logic of an integral empiricism.

The injunction is the practice.

The apprehension is the experience or realization.

The confirmation is intersubjective agreement among competent practitioners, supplemented where possible by third-person investigation.

On this account, spiritual claims are not protected from criticism simply because they belong to a special worldspace. They are subject to the same general discipline of enactment that operates elsewhere in human knowledge.

A microscope requires certain procedures before microorganisms become visible. A telescope requires an appropriate observational system before distant galaxies appear. A contemplative realization likewise requires an appropriate transformation of attention and consciousness.

The fact that different instruments disclose different features of reality does not make all disclosures arbitrary.

That, at least, would be Wilber's strongest epistemological defense.

Spirit may be constitutive rather than additive

This also changes the meaning of the phrase “Spirit-in-action.”

The critic imagines two possibilities:

Spirit is an additional causal force, in which case we should be able to identify its causal contribution. Spirit is not an additional causal force, in which case it appears redundant.

Wilber could reject this dichotomy.

Spirit is neither additive nor redundant. It is constitutive.

The analogy might be language. Language is not an additional physical force that pushes bodies around, yet it radically structures what human beings can perceive, coordinate, intend and accomplish. An institution does not have to contain a separate “language-cause” in order for language to be causally indispensable to its existence.

Similarly, Spirit could be understood as a fundamental dimension of reality that becomes causally consequential through the structures that enact it.

The spiritual does not interrupt causality.

It transforms what causality means for the beings participating in it.

The developmental objection

There is still an important difficulty for Wilber.

If Spirit is enacted differently according to stages and worldspaces, then not every claim made in the name of Spirit deserves equal epistemic status. A mythic vision, a rational ethical ideal, an existential insight and a nondual realization cannot simply be placed on one flat spiritual plane.

Wilber's developmentalism gives him a response: higher or more encompassing structures of consciousness can include and transcend earlier ones.

The mature spiritual subject therefore does not merely possess a more intense experience. The person may possess a qualitatively different capacity to coordinate perspectives, tolerate paradox, decenter from ego and integrate previously opposed dimensions of experience.

Spirit-in-action would consequently be measurable partly through how much reality a person can include without reducing it.

This is where Wilber's developmental theory becomes crucial. A nondual realization without psychological maturity can coexist with narcissism, authoritarianism or interpersonal dysfunction. The realization alone does not guarantee an ethically integrated person.

Wilber could therefore agree with the essay's demand to examine downstream consequences while arguing that such consequences must be understood developmentally rather than merely behaviorally.

The question is not simply whether someone does good things.

It is whether the person's entire mode of functioning has become more inclusive, differentiated, integrated and capable of serving the whole.

The strongest version of Spirit-in-action

The most powerful Wilberian position would therefore be neither supernaturalism nor reductionism.

It would say:

Spirit is not a thing that acts upon the world.

Spirit is the world becoming consciously available to itself through particular forms of enactment.

When a human being realizes nonduality and that realization becomes embodied in cognition, behavior, relationship and culture, Spirit has not been added to the causal universe. The causal universe has become an expression of a more adequate mode of participation in reality.

This is a much stronger thesis than simply saying that meditation makes people nicer.

It also makes the stakes considerably higher.

If Spirit is genuinely enacted through human beings, then spiritual realization should eventually manifest as transformations in the way people construct knowledge, exercise power, organize institutions, relate to other beings and inhabit the planet.

The decisive evidence would therefore not be mystical experience by itself.

It would be the emergence of a different form of human being—and, eventually, a different form of world.

That is where Wilber can turn the criticism back upon itself. The demand for a measurable “Spirit variable” may be asking the wrong question. The real empirical question is whether sustained access to spiritual and nondual worldspaces produces distinctive, reproducible transformations across the four quadrants of human existence.

If it does, then Spirit-in-action has passed from metaphysical speculation into an observable developmental phenomenon.

If it does not, then the postmetaphysical account has a serious problem.

Either way, the issue is finally testable where it matters: in what human beings become, and in what their becoming does to the world.