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.

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.