Lukas Widmer

Thank you for this thoughtful piece. The core claim – that aphantasia is no barrier to meditation – is worth making. But I'd suggest the argument runs deeper than the framing here allows. The article opens with Tibetan visualization practice: Avalokiteśvara on a lotus cushion, spheres of radiant light. These are presented as representative of what meditation typically asks for, making aphantasia appear as a deviation from the norm. But historically, this gets things backwards. The oldest surviving Buddhist meditation instructions – satipaṭṭhāna, ānāpānasati – require no mental imagery at all. Breath, bodily sensation, feeling-tone (vedanā), states of mind: none of these presuppose a mind's eye. Systematic visualization practices entered Buddhism significantly later, embedded in Vajrayāna contexts with their own initiatory logic. They are a historically younger layer, not the baseline. If we take Theravāda practice as the oldest available reference point, then aphantasia was never a problem to begin with. There is nothing to work around. The meditator with no inner imagery is not adapting an essentially visual practice – they are, in a sense, closer to the original instructions. The article's framing inadvertently constructs the obstacle it then generously removes. That is worth noting – not to diminish the experience the authors describe, which is real and carefully observed, but because people with aphantasia deserve an accurate picture of what the tradition actually offers them.