The 5 Levels of Being: Edwards’ Model

In this article, I present my model for the 5 Levels of Being, giving detailed descriptions of the levels as well as methodologies for deepening awareness from the three Surface levels into the two Source levels.

This model and the accompanying techniques are intended for the serious spiritual practitioner. Put in spiritual language, we cover spiritual techniques that enable us to awaken from body, mind, separation and psychology into our own truest, deepest identity.

Even better, we practice these techniques while armed with a concise but powerful model for the very texture of our own consciousness: the very matter we are transforming as we do spiritual work.

It’s wise not to put too much stock in this model. For one thing, “All models are wrong; some are useful”: how could we ever fully capture our own experience in words? How could I ever limit our path to Source to some neat and tidy taxonomy? Don’t believe me, or anyone else. My words are only pointers, whose only function is to point.

More importantly, I’m not primarily a theoretician, but a practitioner. I’m interested not in being a better armchair philosopher, but in psychological, spiritual and emotional transformation. I don’t want a bigger head; I want to chop my head off. Though this article at times is very technical and detailed, the fine points remain pointers nonetheless. Ultimately, this model is useless if we never use it to make the journey from Surface to Source.

That said, these levels are based on research into the great spiritual traditions, the stages of realisation that their practitioners traverse, and the depth of understanding they ultimately come to reach. We ought to trust in their discoveries as we do the work ourselves and take solace in this larger context.

It’s very likely you will experience these levels in one form or another as you continue your contemplative path, and awareness of the destination puts everything else context.

This model is also heavily based on the work of Ken Wilber, and may appear very similar. However, I believe I flesh out the levels more, give concrete, contactable examples, and choose terminology that is more direct.

The 5 Levels of Being: Visual Representation

Let’s begin with a graphic of these five levels. Here you’ll find the names of each, what they encompass, and how they appear in our first-person experience. I also distinguish between Surface levels (the first three) from Source levels (the final two).

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 THIS, RIGHT NOW. It is all right in front of your eyes, and always has been. 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 have 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 and 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. It’s inductive. 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 (and, hopefully, perceive) 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!

However, it’s possible to train ourselves to perceive the subtle side of our Physical and Mental world. The more attuned we become to the subtle, the more we penetrate beyond Surface.

Eventually, we may come to penetrate all the way down from the Surface form through subtle form to the empty substrate of our own experience.

The 5 Levels of Being 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.

There is no stable Physical or Mental world, unlike how science would have you believe. These worlds come into existence and die from existence continually. The world is an ongoing efflux (outward pouring) and influx (inward return): it’s a process of Source-Surface-Source, whether we’re talking about your self-sense, your emotions, your sense of linear time, or the book on the table.

The sense of a stable external world is an inference based on the Physical state of consciousness, overlaid with our Mental projections and concepts. Is it safe to assume that your best friend exists even if you can’t see them? Probably. But can that be directly inferred from your direct experience? No, and your best friend is in this case simply a Mental phenomenon in your own mind.

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. This is known variously as involution, gradation, immanence, manifestation, creation, efflux, The Great Chain of Being, and more.

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.

Ibn ‘Arabi (1165-1240) described the five stages or “presences” in the process of Source becoming Surface:

1. Absolute Unknowableness: absolute being, sheer being, absolute blindness, the unknown of the unknown (True Face/Source);
2. Universe of Omnipotence: first revelation, first jewel (Most Subtle);
3. Angelic Universe: second unveiling, second revelation (Most Subtle);
4. Absolute Observation: all form existing anywhere (Mental/Physical);
5. Perfect Man: human consciousness of Source and all its manifestations (Allness; the collapse of this entire model).

Christianity explicitly describes this chain as God to Soul to Mind to Body to Matter. The Creation Story in Christianity is essentially analogous.

We make a grave mistake by believing that the Creation Story 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, every single moment of your life.

To begin with, IN EVERY MOMENT, there is only pure unmanifest existence, or God. Then, there is a simple division between it and its own objects, or between Source and Surface (“Heaven and Earth”).

On each new level of being (“day”), Allness (God) divides itself and simultaneously creates separation and elaboration, until the Physical world appears (on the “sixth day”), and the outward pouring stops. Then, we’re just left with our experience as it appears to us. Of course, this all happens in an indefinably short period of time, and seems to transcend time, which is why we’re usually unaware of it.

As Plotinus said in his Enneads: “The One is perfect because it seeks for nothing, and possesses nothing, and has need of nothing; and being perfect, it overflows, and thus its superabundance produces an Other.”

An important consequence is that all “lower” Form also exists as “higher” Form, but not the other way around. For example, Level 2 includes Level 1; that is, all Level 1 Form also exists on the Subtle level. Sure, they may not be mental phenomena strictly, but as well as having Physical Form, they have Subtle Form.

For instance, a plant is fundamentally a Physical object, but it also exists as a Subtle object and a Most Subtle object. If this seems strange, with awareness training will you come to appreciate why the world around you isn’t merely Physical, but also Subtle, Most Subtle, and Source all at once. Without such training, you will only be aware of the “lowest” appearance of any phenomenon. The world appears only Physical, your thoughts appear as only Subtle, and so on.

It must be this way, because all Form is an emanation of Source, and it passes through all levels until reaching its “Home” level, which may be at Level 3, Level 2, or Level 1.

On the other hand, not all Subtle phenomena are counterparts of Physical phenomena. For example, thoughts never become Physical objects: they are fundamentally Subtle phenomena. That is, a thought is a Subtle Object and a Most Subtle object. You could certainly argue that thoughts shape our Physical life, but the thought itself never takes on a Physical characteristic: you can’t pick up your thoughts or point to them.

So, when I say a “Subtle phenomenon”, I’m using shorthand. For example, our imagination is a Subtle phenomenon in that it does not have a Physical existence, but only Subtle and Most Subtle. And, when we refer to imagination, we’re usually referring to its Subtle

Likewise, when we refer to the world around us, we refer to its Physical form, rather than its Subtle or Most Subtle form. I’ll continue with this shorthand for ease of communication, but always remember that all Form also exists on the Surface levels “above” it, and that all Form emanates from 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, right now, right here, exactly as it appears to you.

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. We may call this Absolute Solipsism.

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 Ibn ‘Arabi put it, “God is, and nothing is with Him. And He is now as He has always been.“

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, which are simply undigested and unacknowledged Physical and Mental phenomena.

The 5 Levels of Being: Surface Levels

Levels 1-3 constitute a meta-level of their own, called Surface. For convenience I often refer to Surface and Source whenever it’s unnecessary to specify the level a certain perception or phenomenon belongs to.

In simple terms, we can consider the Surface levels as our everyday consciousness, the perceptions that most of us access most of the time.

They include all the “stuff” of our direct perception, including our mind, our body, the world around us, sights, sounds, thoughts, personality, psychology, physicality, imagination, ideas, visions, other people, and so on. Anything you can possibly perceive as a thing (in the ordinary sense of the word perceive) lies somewhere in the Surface levels.

Level 1 contains the most physical, (apparently) permanent, separate and dense phenomena that we perceive. Each Surface levels contains phenomena that are in turn less permanent, separate, physical and dense, until we reach the phenomena-less True Face, then the Allness that collapses all Form into its formless Source.

As I mentioned, by and large we are “Surface drunk”, in that our perception is dominated by Surface material, and we have very little left for the Source levels. We spend much of our lives feeding the Surface levels of our own being, unaware of their Source.

The good news is that there is a larger context that engulfs Surface. In fact, it is the origin of the Surface levels as they take form moment to moment to moment. That is Source.

Level 1: Physical/Gross

IS physical body, world, senses, self & other, physicality, three dimensions, linear time

FEELS solid, rigid, permanent, linear, predictable, apersonal

The Physical level of our consciousness is the most dense, physical, solid, rigid and seemingly apersonal aspect of our awareness. It includes the entire sensory world and the five senses that modern biology typically defines. It includes all sights, all sounds, all touch sensations, all physical objects, all people.

Are you reading this on a screen? This screen is within the Physical level of your very own being. Notice that it certainly feels solid, real, rigid, separate, objective, tangible, permanent, and reliable. It appears to be subject to linear time. It seems to remain constantly present through the course of time.

Does the screen actually possess those qualities? That’s a loaded question. In any case, this is how the Physical level appears to us: solid, real, tangible, permanent, linear, constant. Are you in a room? This room is a Physical phenomenon. Look out at the street. That too is a Physical phenomenon.

More precisely, the appearance of these objects as having Physical qualities is the Physical level of your consciousness.

However, it’s possible to realise that these objects are not only Physical, Surface-level phenomena, but are all emanations of Source. That’s because all Form that you can possibly become aware of is an emanation of Source.

That is, your phone or laptop screen as you know it most certainly exists on the Physical level, but it is ultimately Source. The same goes for any phenomenon in any of the Surface levels.

Level 2: Mental/Subtle

IS felt body, self-sense, imagination, psychology, thought, mind, mental time, emotion, sensation, dreams, visions

FEELS personal, solid, intractable, real

Level 2 is called the Mental/Subtle level. I use the label Mental to capture the fact that many strictly Level 2 phenomena are in our subjective world. However, always remember that all Level 1 objects also exist as Level 2 objects as well.

Mental/Subtle is one step removed from the Physical level of our perception. It’s dense, but not so dense as to appear to have an external Physical appearance. Instead, they have internal physicality. Let’s explain this term.

When you feel an emotion, even though you can’t physically pick it up or point to it, it still feels very real, solid, overbearing, even painful. It can be so powerful that it feels as though it were actually physical! It never becomes a Physical object, but it still overtakes our attention and feels dense. That is internal physicality, and that is why Subtle is just one step removed from Physical.

The same goes with thoughts, including all memories, imaginations, plans, fantasies, and so forth. When you are locked in to the mind, it certainly seems to be real, almost as though your mental phenomena were Physical, at least while you’re lost in them.

Similarly, our personality has a very hypnotising effect on us. We actually believe that we are this personality, that it is the be-all-end-all of us. It feels like we are an amalgamation of our Subtle world, that we exist as some permanent object, that we’re on one side of our head and the world is on the other. This is all the effect of the Subtle level of our awareness, which creates internal physicality.

This level also includes spiritual-type visions of lifelike beings: seeing a light-infused Jesus, Mary, Buddha or Vishnu in your Mental world is indeed a powerful experience that may indeed point one to Source levels, but it remains in essence an experience of Form. And as serious spiritual practitioners, we should carefully distinguish powerful Mental experiences from the empty Source.

Level 3: Most Subtle

IS subtlest forms of body, mind, psychology, thought, mind, all form

FEELS semi-real, ghostly, half-formed, translucent, transparent, porous, flowing

Level 3 is the subtlest level of all form. In the Surface-Source direction, this is where form begins to break down and dissolve into emptiness. It becomes largely devoid of its defining characteristics and substance. Remember: all Physical and Subtle phenomena exist on the Most Subtle too, but not necessarily the contrary.

In the Source-Surface direction, this is where form begins to take on the characteristics it displays in the Mental and Physical levels. It is, as Wilber has it, “the first state in finite manifestation out of the creative, infinite abyss.”

This is the beginning of thought, the beginning of emotion, the beginning of the seemingly external world, the beginning of all objects. The primitive version of all these Forms lies here. From this level, it is then “hammered” into place during further efflux, until it appears as a Mental or Physical form.

While the Physical and Subtle appear physically solid and internally solid respectively, the Most Subtle appears semi-solid, semi-real, transparent, light, porous, moving. We may even describe it as liquid-like.

This level is often described in the traditions (at very least in Hinduism, Christianity and Buddhism) as a trinity of forces that govern all manifestation, each with an archetypal name and image. For example, in Hinduism, we have creation in the form of Brahma and Saraswati, sustenance in the form of Vishnua and Lakshmi, and destruction in the form of Shiva and Kali.

In Mythic religions, these archetypal pointers are interpreted as real entities, while people at higher structures may recognise them as simply placeholder names and images for the fundamental forces of creation.

The 5 Levels of Being: Source Levels

Surface 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 most basic and fundamental contrast we can make between Surface and Source is that Surface is content, while Source is contentless.

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

As I said, while the three Surface levels contain all Form, i.e. everything you have ever experienced, the True Face of our direct perception contains absolutely nothing. Absolutely no-thing.

It is not a thought. It is not a sound. It is not a feeling. It is not a sensation. It is not any combination of any of those.

Likewise, it has none of the qualities that we associate with Form, such as shape, size, colour, intensity or location.

Instead, it is absolutely colourless, beyond any notion of colour. It is shapeless, beyond any notion of shape. It is impossible to envelop in a boundary. It is not located anywhere per se.

Instead, the True Face is the substrate or container or background of all possible Form, of all three levels of Surface perception, and surrounds or engulfs it.

A metaphor is to think of all Form as images on the True Face, which is like a screen. Except, unlike a typical screen, it has no dimensions, no colour, no shape, no size. It is just pure substrate, sheer lucency. And – another tiny little difference – you ARE it.

Once more, this is no philosophy, and the True Face isn’t just a construct used to flesh out this model.

When you become aware of the True Face, you realise that this is who you have always been! This is the fundamental substrate of your entire being. Since it is absolutely Form-less (no shape, no size, no colour, no location), YOU have been IT… forever. It has no age. It has no personality. It has no body. You have been It as you experienced all your personalities, all your bodies, all your ages, all your life experiences.

Another name for the True Face is the Empty Witness. We can say that it has witnessed all form that you have perceived (and, therefore, that has ever existed), while never being that form. It has witnessed your entire life.

Let me rephrase that: you as your True Face have witnessed your entire life. You have watched everything unfold, not as a distant observer split off from experience, but as the substrate of everything. You are absolutely unmoving, beyond movement or stillness.

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 embrace.

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.

The ultimate nondual State or Suchness is what is now reading this page in all its immediate Thusness, but it also wrote this page as well. You, the one and only you, the one and only Divine in each and every sentient being in the Kosmos at large, you, your own deepest you, as your own core I AMness, which you can feel, and are feeling, right now is the true and ultimate Author of this book, and the entire universe at large, top to bottom.

KEN WILBER

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

1. 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.