Traditional Indian and Tibetan tantric anatomy tells us that in the middle of the human torso there are three channels (nādis or “streams”), one each on the left, middle, and right, and that these proceed vertically upward through a number of circular centres (cakras in standard Sanskrit transliteration, chakras in modern English spelling). This account of the “subtle body” (sūkṣma śarīra) has become popular in modern yoga and other forms of alternative medicine or spirituality.

I don’t believe this account of the subtle body – but not primarily for the obvious reason.

The obvious reason is that empirical anatomical studies of the body have never turned up any such channels or chakras. Perhaps the most important such studies were the ones conducted by medieval Tibetans – who, as they began dissecting and observing physical human bodies, did not find anything in them that looked like the tantric anatomy, even though that was what they were specifically looking for. If any empirical observers were to have observed channels or chakras inside physical bodies when they cut them up and opened them, it would have been the Tibetans – and they didn’t.

For many scientifically minded observers, that would be enough. We open up bodies and find there are no chakras there, so there are no chakras, and there’s an end on’t. But that’s not the perspective I have taken.

Janet Gyatso noted three ways that medieval Tibetan writers tried to preserve the tantric anatomy despite not observing it in physical bodies. Two of these (that that anatomy is actually found in an embryo or in the main trunk of the nervous system) I don’t find particularly compelling. But I am drawn to the view of Yangönpa Gyeltsen Pel, who thought that the tantric anatomy was invisible to the naked eye, and could only be seen through contemplative yogic practice.

Yangonpa’s view appeals to me because I think there is a lot we do perceive about our own bodies through inner observation. When you have a stomach ache, you don’t perceive that through the traditional five senses. A decade’s worth of meditation practice has taught me to keenly observe inner feelings throughout my body, like the hot agitation in my stomach associated with anxiety or the forward momentum associated with anger. I think there is a subtle body of some sort because I’ve perceived it myself, and to some extent I think most people have as well.

It just doesn’t have anything to do with the chakras and channels!

I am not skeptical about the idea of a subtle body. Meditation has got me very sensitive to all of these inner feelings of heat and agitation and so on – ones that do not correspond to the traditional five senses, and may very well not correspond to anatomy either. I am primed to believe in a subtle body. I just see no reason to believe in that specific subtle body – the one found in channels within the centre of the torso. What I observe of the subtle body is concentrated in the front of the torso and neck, not in the middle, and without any significant division into left and right, or into vertical centres. It’s at the front where I feel the agitation, the anger, the fear within me. As far as I can tell, that’s where my subtle body is.

This makes a big difference because, as far as I can tell, you’re supposed to be encountering the subtle body through meditation practice! That’s the point of the subtle body, is that you can perceive it directly in yourself – in a way in contrast to the anatomy of cutting someone up.

It is traditional in Tibet to visualize the tantric anatomy – but that is not the same thing, you come in with an agenda where you’re already looking for it. I did not come in with that agenda, and I have not observed the thing. That makes me skeptical of it. Maybe I’d start perceiving it after looking for long enough. But human suggestibility is such that one can see many things after looking for them long enough. In the meditation I’ve practised, by contrast – Headspace and Goenka vipassanā – you are merely supposed to observe your breath and your bodily sensations. There’s nothing you’re supposed to find – except perhaps the bare fact of how hard it is to control your thoughts, which does not seem like the kind of thing one needs to go looking all that hard for. After a decade, it seems to me that if the chakras were really there even subtly, I would have found them.

Basically, it seems to me, there are two ways one could understand the idea of a subtle body. One is that it is full-blown supernatural: that it is something objectively existent whether you perceive it or not, with causal efficacy in the world, but not detectable by any scientific instruments. (The Tibetan surgeons’ surprise at not encountering it is important here.) My general skepticism to the supernatural is enough to give me a strong skepticism of that view. The second – the one that I think could be sustainable in a scientific world – is that it is something inherent in our subjectivity, that it structures our experience, phenomenologically. I’m amenable to that idea. It would have made me a believer in the tantric subtle body if I’d actually encountered it in my ten years’ worth of observing my internal feelings. But I didn’t!