What is awakening or enlightment? It requires explanation and exploring into. And we now have new science-based confirmation of an old spiritual answer to that question. Read on…
I began wondering about that question in the 1990s. And for that reason, I was an avid follower of the What Is Enlightment? magazine that was published in the 90s and early 2000s. It was a good source of information of how the understanding and views on enlightenment were changing back then.
But the understanding and views on enlightenment continue to change, and that has been especially true as our understandings of quantum physics, consciousness, the holographic nature of the universe, and much more have been evolving rapidly. And science has begun to open the doors to consciousness in a big way.
Spirituality itself has also changed in many ways. Today, for example, channeling of non-physical beings has become much more common and accepted. And among spiritual teachers and seekers it is much more common now to hear the term awakening rather than enlightenment, but the word awakening means different things to different people.
To some, awakening means awakening to their spiritual nature… knowing that they really are a spiritual being having a human experience. To others it may mean awakening to their oneness with all human beings, perhaps in a sense of some level of interconnection; but to some that may be a vague and very generalized connection while to others it is a very deep connection that is a sharing of beingness that is profound. And to those who have explored deeply into this whole question, awakening may mean being one with God/the Divine/the Infinite Beingness of the universe.
For truly esoteric philosophers and mystics over at least the last few centuries, enlightenment meant something very close to that last “definition” above in that enlightenment was equated with God-realization, the realization that they are somehow one with God or have God within them and that they carried that active knowing always in everyday life.
My conceptual understanding of God and consciousness has been, for more than 20 years, that there is one universal consciousness that is the source of everything, and it is what religions call God. Individual beings, such as human beings, are individuations within the one consciousness, which means we are one consciousness in essence, part of the whole of one consciousness, but we experience ourselves as individuals. We are individuals but not separate from the whole of one consciousness. We are a part of God.
My understanding of awakening is that it means somehow coming to the fully-realized experience of being one with God – not just understanding it conceptually, but experiencing the divine oneness so deeply and powerfully that I know myself as Godness, the essence of God, but not the whole of God. Therefore, awakening is a shift of consciousness from ego and constant mental chatter to stillness and unitive awareness of your divine beingness.
I had wanted to awaken and “sought after awakening” for many years. I had opened myself to awakening, but I knew, after years of trying, that I was only partially awakened. I had a deep belief, from being raised as a Catholic, that I could not be God in essence; that even attempting to be Godness was wrong. But last year, after I learned how to have telepathic conversations with God, I finally achieved my awakening through an amazing process of interacting directly with God and being guided by God in how to do it. But I found it difficult to stay in the knowing of divine beingness full time. I had to intentionally and consciously shift from the normal limited state of being to the unlimited state of being. To be fully awakened, it must be a steady habit, continuous.
Then God kept reminding me to “Be the light that you are”, “Embody the radiant light that you are”, and “Let your light shine”. For me, it wasn’t really natural in any way to feel myself as light, but I was told to keep feeling into that embodiment, more and more deeply and frequently. Eventually, after several months of practice, I felt a shift take place, which tells me that the one consciousness (God) is light and that all spiritual beings are light. We are spiritual beings having human experiences with physical bodies. In my case, I guess I feel the divine beingness more easily as light than as consciousness (which is more abstract). That may well be true for most people.
Now I know myself as a being of light all of the time. I can let my light just be in the background most of the time, or I can dial up the radiance and the intensity of my light and feel the power of the Light or the Godness as divine beingness within me. But I know myself as creator and partner of God always.
So that is one person’s (my own) awakening story told pretty briefly. And, in a sense, it began with the conceptual understanding of God as one universal consciousness. But a major transformation and permanent shift had to happen. And when it comes to being the light, I know that 1) light is symbolic of consciousness, and 2) I was told by God in a conversation that spiritual beings have “bodies” of light. And that is true for physical beings like us even though we may not be able to see the light.
But in general, I know that awakening happens in many different ways for people. There is no one way to awaken.
Now I want to bring in the context of what science has learned about “God” and consciousness very recently. Why? Because seeing the bigger picture and knowing what it means, including in scientific terms, helps us to understand the universe and where we fit it in. I have been told by noted quantum physicist and cosmologist Jude Currivan that growing numbers of physicists now believe:
- The universe is one holographic whole.
- Consciousness is fundamental in the universe and is, in fact, the creative source of all energy, matter, and life.
- We human beings are part of the consciousness and creative process. We are God beings and co-creators of our existence and our life experiences.
- Consciousness, which physicists at least in some contexts call information, is infinite and eternal.
- Everything we call physical reality is literally made up of information (and I would say consciousness).
- The “quantum” effects of entanglement and non-locality are accessible to us because consciousness and nonlocal connectivity transcend space-time. And entanglement and non-locality are innate to our entire universe, enabling it to evolve as a single coherent entity.
Much of the above has been realized by some of the world’s most brilliant thinkers within the last 10-15 years. In this post I am not going to expand on the above statements because it requires a lot of explanation. But I do recommend that you read The Cosmic Hologram (2017) by Jude Currivan, PhD, if you want to dig into the physics and cosmology, and One Unbounded Ocean of Consciousness (2021) by Dr. Tony Nader if you want a deeper understanding of unified consciousness.
But the above statements absolutely help to clarify some of the key facts about awakening. Awakening is coming to fully realize, not just conceptually but deep within our knowing and beingness, that we part of what is commonly called God or the divine. We are, in our essence, one universal consciousnesss both individually and collectively.
And when we fully realize the truth of that, then we will know We Are All One. We must come fully into alignment with that truth and begin to behave in the knowing that We Are All One. That knowing absolutely must change us in our inner model of the world and way of being – away from ego consciousness (based in belief in separation and resulting fear response) and to unitive awareness (based in wholeness, being the light, and universal love). And we must seek to be in present-moment, unitive awareness even as we carry on with life in the world.
Awakening is the most important change you can pursue in yourself and for yourself. It begins inside you and expands to the world around you.