Explaining the 5 Levels of Being
They Describe Your Direct Experience
I must make it very clear that isn’t a philosophical model describing the origins of some objective, outside world separate from us, hidden away from view, as scientific models tends to be.
Instead, this model describes the very nature of your moment-to-moment experience. It describes everything you experience, have ever experienced, and will ever experience. I wish my own teachers had made this stark to me when I first encountered such models: it would’ve saved a lot of time and confusion.
It includes your sense of who you are. It includes your mental world. It includes the world around you. It even includes all places, people, things, but not considered as abstract entities existing somewhere outside your own experience, but as intrinsic parts of the fullness of your own experience.
What’s more, it’s not a dry, abstract, inert model. It’s a model that invites us to transform our perception to realise the Source in all Surface. Ultimately, it’s a call to a spiritual transformation. It’s a call to train ourselves to taste Source and to come home to our own deepest selves, which is only available at the Source levels.
If we conceive our moment-to-moment experience like a boundless ocean, it’s possible to realise that within this ocean there are several levels of experience. Some of it feels personal, three-dimensional, solid, intractable, and related to consensus reality.
You could call this the Surface of our consciousness. It is the “stuff” of ourselves and the “stuff” of life. This material is what most of humanity pays attention to most of the time. You might say that most of us are “Surface drunk”: totally hypnotised by the Physical and Mental objects of our own experience.
These Levels Form a Chain
I’ve alluded to the fact that Surface and Source, though very different in essence, are inextricably related too. To reiterate, all Surface phenomena have their origin and end in Source, moment to moment to moment.
In fact, a great majority of spiritual traditions possess sophisticated models that describe the process of Source becoming Surface becoming Source, and their levels roughly align to my own. however, they tend to present the model in difficult, theological language and do so in an ancient cultural contexts, meaning often they commit the error of placing Source outside one’s experience.
In fact, the Creation Story in Christianity is essentially analogous. We make a grave mistake by believing it describes how the physical world came into existence, whether we believe this occurred several thousand or several billion years ago. No: it describes how your own Surface originates in your own Source.
All of Being is Your Being
This model makes a bold claim: that all being anywhere is your own being, and it falls somewhere into these five levels of being. There is no being “out there”. There is no being that is hidden from you, or that belongs exclusively to others, or that exists in some other dimension. There is only your being.
There is only your own Physical world, Mental world, Spirit, True Face, and Allness. There is nothing else, and any intimation of something else is also just part of your own experience.
In ultimate instance, ALL form existing anywhere is part of the Surface levels of our very own consciousness, is all transcended by our True Face of pure nothingness, and is all fully embraced by our Allness.
As Ramana Maharshi said, “There are no others” – and he meant this experientially. One’s own consciousness is absolute and includes everybody (read: every-body), everything (every-thing) and everywhere (every-where).
When I mean that everything is within one’s own Allness, I really mean it. Our Allness is so all-inclusive that it includes all intimations of anything outside it. It includes all notions of other, all felt division, all apparent partitions and boundaries. These are simply undigested and unacknowledged Physical and Mental phenomena.
The 5 Levels of Being: Surface Levels
Level 1: Physical/Gross
IS physical body, world, senses, self & other, physicality, three dimensions, linear time
FEELS solid, rigid, permanent, linear, predictable, apersonal
Level 2: Mental/Subtle
IS felt body, self-sense, imagination, psychology, thought, mind, mental time, pleasure, pain
FEELS personal, solid, intractable, real
Level 3: Most Subtle
IS subtlest forms of body, mind, psychology, thought, mind
FEELS semi-real, ghostly, half-formed, translucent, transparent, porous
However, this isn’t the only level. The other broad level of experience is Source. This is the fountain from which the ocean of our experience arises from and falls to, uncountably many times every moment. It turns out that all sights, sounds, touches, emotional sensations and thoughts have their origin and end in Source. Put differently, every possible experience in the Surface levels of awareness have their origin and end in Source.
The 5 Levels of Being: Source Levels
The most basic and fundamental contrast we can make between Surface and Source is that Surface is content, while Source is
Unlike the content of our experience, there are not multiple Sources: there is only one. The same Source is behind every and all experience.
Is the Source also an experience? This is where language becomes tricky. In my view, Source is an experience because we can perceive it. However, to say Source is an experience is similar to saying that black is a colour. Just as black is not a colour per se, but an absence of it, source is not an experience but an absence of experience. However, since we can become aware of it, I’ll call it an experience.
While I consider Source an experience, I consider it to be fundamentally different in essence to the content of our experience, that is, the Surface of our consciousness. Source has no content. That said, only when we’re able to realise Level 5 awareness do we realise that Surface and Source are inextricably intertwined.
I call Levels 4&5 “source” levels because both of them rely on the awareness of Source. This doesn’t mean there are two sources: there is only one. What it does mean, however, is that there are several levels to the awareness of Source’s role. In fact, one of the main factors that distinguishes one spiritual tradition or school from the next is their depth of understanding of Source.
Level 4: The True Face
IS emptiness, nothingness, pure being, empty consciousness, sheer awareness, light, God
FEELS empty, clear, open, liberated, pure, transcendent, ocean-deep
Level 5: Allness
IS absolute consciousness, oneness, the essence of all upper levels, unity of Source and Surface, God manifest
FEELS supreme, all-encompassing, headless, endless, panoramic, Isness, all is me, oceanic
True Face is Utterly Transcendent / Allness is Utterly Imminent
There is one crucial point I want to discuss: the nature of the True Face and Allness. This is an enormously important topic for a variety of reasons.
Most of the time, we confuse and conflate terms such as “non-duality”, “God”, “Source”, “Buddha mind”, “Christ consciousness” and so on. I believe much of this confusion can be resolved by carefully defining two levels of Source awareness and showing how they relate to one another.
The True Face has a feeling of utter transcendence, of utter “beyondness”, of sheer emptiness, openness and clarity. It transcends all mind, all body, all identity of any kind, almost in a standoffish manner.
This is a main reason why early Buddhist traditions are built on renunciation, denial of life and chastity (in its various forms), and why this always tends to play some role in the spiritual path, whatever our tradition. The feeling of the True Face is one of separation from all the prior levels, including our identity, our self-sense, our psychology, our life, our attachments, our entire world as a self living in a world.
In True Face awareness, one sits at the side of the river of consciousness and witnesses all Surface material floating by: detached, even cold.
This is still a fractured awareness, however. Sure, the Witness mind can feel open, pure and empty, but often one has simply built a dam in their awareness, with a “Witness” on one side and all the Surface material on the other. That Witness is actually composed of unliberated Subtle/Casual material.
Allness is a radically different experience altogether. In Allness, we even objectify the sense of a Witnesser, of a meditator. “The bottom of the bucket breaks”, “the big blue pancake falls over our head”, and we are left with a pure, open, all-embracing.
Accompanying this is the realisation that Surface comes from and returns to Source, while also never separate from it. One’s sense of witnessing the process of Creator and Creation collapses, and one simply is the process of Creator and Creation.
Meditation & The 5 States of Being
Practicing pure Witness awareness doesn’t necessarily dissolve the Physical and Subtle levels. It doesn’t necessarily mean one trains Causal awareness. And, therefore, it doesn’t guarantee one is aware of consciousness’s descent from Source to Surface and back.
Working progressively, one becomes aware of the full depth of experience, its Source and Surface and everything in between, and eventually becomes sensitive to Spirit (Causal), Godhead (True Face) and Omnipotent God (Allness).
Meditation is a process of liberating one’s awareness from the Surface material and gradually discovering one’s True Face, then allowing that True Face to collapse into the boundless, panoramic sea of the All.
When we train our attention of moment-to-moment experience (through certain forms of meditation, for example), we come to realise that this solid Surface material isn’t all it seemed: we may realise that it does come and go, that it distorts our perspective on reality, and even that it isn’t so personal after all. We see underneath the Surface.
Clarifications and FAQs
- Are objects strictly from one level or the other? For example, is a bird a strictly Physical phenomenon?
A bird is by necessity both a Surface and a Source phenomenon. It has aspects that are based in Allness, True Face, Spirit, Mental and Physical levels.
2. How do these levels differ from Wilber’s taxonomy?
Follow Deep Psychology and join tens of thousands
of like-minded people today.
