The five dimensions of the integral human being
Our innate essence capable of unconditional love and non-dual wisdom; our acquired personality endowed with emotions and intellect; our body, a transitory and wonderful vehicle.
This article is the author’s own translation of the original French version.
Have you ever heard, at the turn of a fleeting silence or during an intense emotion, that inner voice whispering in undertones that there exists within you a more luminous reality than the simple sequence of your days and daily routines?
This intuition, sometimes subtle, sometimes compelling, is that of your spiritual essence. It is the unique and precious seed that forms the very foundation of your real identity. But most often, social influence and the demands of adult life have progressively covered it with a veil of oblivion, leaving it undeveloped and rarely glimpsed behind the mask of your acquired personality.
Classical psychology and personal development generally consider human beings in three dimensions: the body, emotions, and intellect. While useful, this view remains incomplete. The great wisdom traditions invite us to consider the human being in their fullness. They reveal five dimensions, two of which are latent and yearning to be awakened. This awakening can radically transform our experience of life and allow us to access a vaster reality.
A spiritual map of the human being
Our personality has been built through educational and cultural mimicry in reaction to the family, social, and transgenerational universe in which we grow. It is expressed through three dimensions:
the physical dimension encompasses the body, its needs, abilities, and limitations;
the emotional dimension encompasses the vast register of our feelings, from joy to sadness and from love to fear;
the intellectual dimension encompasses thought, logic, and the capacity for analysis and conceptualization.
Beyond these three dimensions accessible to the personality, we can, by developing our intimate essence, awaken two higher spheres. I qualify them as such because they touch on the spiritual level of life and constitute the true driving force of our authentic human fulfillment.
The higher emotional dimension is the seat of unconditional love. It allows us to love without expectation or condition and to welcome the other in his or her totality, beyond any preference or rejection.
The higher intellectual dimension is the seat of authentic wisdom. It transcends duality, embraces the unity of life, and connects the individual to universal intelligence.
Our highest destiny is to awaken these two latent functions, thereby revealing the unique essence we have always carried within us and which forms the basis of our dignity and human uniqueness.
The mechanical sleep of ordinary consciousness
We can live an entire existence without truly understanding what causes in us so many recurring difficulties and unexplained suffering because we remain in total ignorance of our real functioning.
Our personality exerts crushing dominance over our true essence. It struggles with the perpetual agitation of the multiple selves that comprise us and take turns at the helm depending on the circumstances. It suffers from the disharmonious workings of our physical and instinctive, emotional, and mental dimensions, which function without coordination or intelligent hierarchy.
This inner anarchy is explained by the fact that our essence, which alone can allow us to access consciousness and self-control, has remained underdeveloped, to the benefit of a personality that has become hypertrophied due to the need to have an interface with the outside world. But as its name, from the Latin persona meaning mask, indicates so aptly, its accelerated development has masked our essence to the point that we have often lost awareness of its very existence.
A salvific break and the call of the essence
But one day, a strong, unexpected event occurs that shatters our most ingrained habits and solid reference points. Whether it is a painful ordeal, a life-changing encounter, or an existential crisis, this is precisely the opportunity to respond to that little inner voice of the essence that, perhaps since forever, urges us to truly be, to exist beyond social masks and conventional roles.
In this sudden breach opened by life—sometimes at the cost of great suffering—it then becomes possible to undertake this true, patient work on oneself. This arduous awakening process requires total consistency and honesty, but it opens the door to true life.
This demanding process necessarily begins by developing a particular ability: that of observing oneself while continuing to live everyday life, without withdrawing from the world but remaining present in it in a new way: conscious and deliberately attentive to what is at play within us.
Discovering how we really function
By gradually strengthening our ability to observe ourselves and be present to ourselves, not constantly scattered, captured by the outside world, we will begin to glimpse how we really function. However, this requires doing so without complacency but without judgment and with the utmost sincerity toward ourselves.
As we do so, we will gradually cease to identify exclusively with our physical appearance, changing emotions, and proliferating thoughts. This gradual dis-identification, far from being a negation or a rejection of these dimensions, is rather a liberation. We finally recognize these vehicles for what they are: precious but temporary instruments and not our essential being.
Our authentic and strong desire to reveal our spiritual essence in all its original splendor and to put our physical, emotional, and mental dimensions at its service rather than letting them govern us anarchically then begins to grow stronger. This marks the beginning of a fundamental inner reorganization where the natural hierarchy of being is gradually restored.
The progressive awakening of our higher dimensions
The higher emotional and intellectual dimensions can then begin to awaken slowly, as the work of consciousness and presence deepens and as we begin to experience the living reality of our spiritual essence, which regains its rightful place at the heart of our existence.
This awakening allows us to gradually escape the exhausting alternation of opposites and contradictions that characterizes ordinary consciousness: the perpetual swing between attraction and repulsion, agreement and disagreement, and pleasure and displeasure. Within oneself, a still and serene space establishes itself, strong with quiet lucidity, and begins to sustain itself, even amidst difficulties.
This space allows us to not only understand intellectually but also feel in our entire being the fundamental unity of the world and the invisible yet real connection between all things—this universal fabric that links every being, event, and manifestation of life in a cosmic symphony of dizzying beauty.
It is in this inner temple, sheltered from noise, agitation, anger, and fear, that the fragrance of gratitude can rise like pure smoke, and that the song of the soul responding to its Creator can blossom.
Unconditional love as fulfillment
In this new unified perception, we begin to perceive the other as our true fellow, beyond superficial differences, cultural affiliations, or personal preferences. Naturally, without effort or artifice, the capacity to discover and embody unconditional love begins to grow within one. This love depends neither on the qualities of the other, nor on his or her actions, nor on his or her conformity to our expectations. It springs spontaneously from the recognition of our common humanity and our shared participation in the sacred mystery of existence.
It is in this unconditional and unreserved love that the promise, inscribed in our essence from the origin, is fulfilled, thereby revealing the highest dimension of our spiritual nature and finally allowing us to fully live what we are called to be.
The urgency of an inner awakening
In light of the current state of our world, marked by a growing mechanization of existences and a despair that progressively wins over hearts and minds, undertaking this work on oneself is not merely a spiritual luxury reserved for a few isolated seekers, but rather a vital necessity for humanity as a whole.
Prisoners of a withering materialism and an automatic way of functioning that alienates human beings from their deepest nature, our contemporary societies call out with all their silent sufferings for a return to the essential: an authentic reconnection with this true and intimate essence that slumbers within each of us.
This divine part that dwells in our most secret being—this sacred spark that spiritual traditions from all horizons have recognized and honored under a thousand different names—has never ceased waiting patiently for us to turn to it.
Every loving being illuminates the world
Our mechanized world urgently needs to hear its luminous song again—that forgotten melody that alone can guide our civilization toward profound re-spiritualization and restore the meaning it so cruelly lacks. Each individual who embarks on this inner journey and dares to confront their mechanisms to awaken their essence becomes a beacon of light in the darkness of collective ignorance. They are a living witness that another way of being in the world remains possible.
The time for hesitation or indefinite postponement of what constitutes, fundamentally, our most authentic vocation and sacred responsibility is over. It is now, in the present moment of your life, that this work must begin or continue, for it is from the sum of these individual awakenings that the collective surge our era so desperately needs to rediscover the path to its lost dignity and true fulfillment may arise.
Tomorrow, let us bring forth a new dawn for humanity!
© 2025 - Dialogues of the New World by Jérôme Nathanaël