Skip to main content

What is Spiritual Awakening and Enlightenment?

Here is Gina Lake channeling Jesus from her book, Jesus Speaking: On Awakening to Love, with a message about what awakening is and what enlightenment is and what happens to a soul after enlightenment. A transcript of this video message can be read below.

I want to talk a little about other dimensions. This may not seem relevant to awakening, but it is, and I will explain how. Other beings who are serving you by guiding you and arranging various events and opportunities on earth are doing so ultimately for your awakening. Everything is for your spiritual evolution, and the goal of your evolution is awakening and eventual enlightenment.

As you may realize, awakening and enlightenment are not the same, at least not as we are defining them here. Others may define these differently. Awakening is waking up out of identification with the ego and realizing yourself as something other than the false self, which most people believe they are. Awakening is not merely an intellectual understanding, however, but a realization, a shift in perspective. Awakening is the most dramatic shift of consciousness that a human being can experience. Just as going from the dream state to the waking state is a major shift of identity and perception, awakening to your true nature is another way of being and perceiving.

Waking up out of the ego usually happens gradually over time, as a person becomes accustom to the awake state, or Presence, by experiencing it in meditation and while doing other very focused activities or even walking in nature. But as long as the ego remains at the center of consciousness, one cannot be deemed awakened.

This word, as we are using it, refers to a new way of being, where the ego is no longer at the center and the true self, or Self with a capital S, has taken its place, taken the reins, so to speak. You now see through the true self’s eyes. The ego’s eyes produced a false reality—an illusion—where you believed things about life that were not true. Through the true self’s eyes, your perception changes dramatically, as you look upon life with love and see its beauty and perfection. An awakening that doesn’t include this sense of love and wonder is not a complete awakening.

People can awaken out of the ego but not land in love. Usually this is due to debris that remains: conditioning that interferes with a truer perception, like dirt on a lens. The true self is looking out at life, but the lens is still a bit dirty, obscured by remaining distorted beliefs.

And then, there is the very common experience of awakening out of the ego for a time and then falling back into the ego, where it takes the center once again. This can happen several times before the true self comes to the center and remains there. Until the true self remains at the center, except for brief moments of ego identification, the awakening is not complete. So, most are in a process of awakening, and this process can look quite different from one person to another.

Once the awake state is established and the true self is firmly at the center, a process of clearing away remaining conditioning is set in motion. Of course, this clearing of conditioning is happening all the time, but it happens at a particularly rapid rate for most after awakening. The lenses of perception must be purified. As this conditioning is cleared, you are able to experience what you realized at awakening more deeply and fully.

This process eventually leads, in the same lifetime or in another, to full enlightenment. Before this, you could say that one is becoming enlightened, but that would be true, of course, also before awakening.

Enlightenment is the endpoint for the soul in relation to the third dimension, but it is by no means the endpoint of your evolution. In third dimension, you are at the very beginning of your evolution as a spiritual being. Once you become enlightened, it will no longer be necessary for you to return to the third dimension. You have graduated from the physical plane and will not return again unless you choose to, to serve humanity on earth or to serve on some other third dimensional planet. I was one, for instance, who chose to return to earth to play the role I played and bring the teachings I brought. There have been many such individuals, many more than you realize.

Once you graduate from the third dimension, there is much to learn about the fourth and fifth dimensions, where you will reside as a nonphysical being for eons of earthly time. There, you will learn to be a guide for people on earth or for other third dimensional beings until you graduate and move to the next dimension.

Every dimension guides and serves the dimensions “beneath” it. In this way, the work of creation is accomplished. We are all the hands, eyes, and mouths of God, so to speak, doing God’s work in God’s creation. All of these dimensions are part of the grand Illusion, as they are all taking place within the Oneness. However, those of us beyond the third dimension are able to experience the Oneness more truly than those in the third dimension.

We sense the Oneness intimately and we know what it wants. It is as if we were part of its brain—and we could be thought of as such. We are all part of one body, you could say, all part of the Oneness, operating as a whole, except some are more conscious of that than others. We, on other dimensions, are at one with the Oneness in a way that you do not yet experience, even those of you who are awakened or enlightened.

I can say that it is an indescribably beautiful experience and one you can look forward to. It is easy for us on this dimension to know that love is behind all life. Love is our ongoing experience, although there are nonphysical beings who still do not believe in love, but who live in fear and hunger for power. But that is another story. These are not beings who have ever incarnated on third dimension, but they do involve themselves with human beings and cause them great suffering.

My point in telling you about us and about other dimensions is to help you realize that you are not alone and that you are no different than we are. You are in a different grade, metaphorically speaking, and we have graduated that grade, and so we can be your teachers. But you are not less than us, just as a younger child is not less than an older child or a grownup. The same essence is in everyone and everything. We see this more clearly than you do, but this will become clearer if it isn’t already.

How can I say this in a way that will truly penetrate? It is my intention to convey to you that you are divine, not just divine creations. When you create, those creations are a reflection or expression of you or a product of your imagination. When God creates, those creations do not merely reflect God, nor are they mere products of God’s imagination—they are God made manifest in form!

What a difference this is. The closest thing you have to creating in this way is having children. You could say, biologically at least, that your children are a manifestation of you. But as identified as you may be with your children, you would never say that they are you or you are them. But this is so with God: God is you, and you are God, although you are not the totality of God.

This is where the idea of creation as a hologram comes in. Every piece of a hologram contains the whole. That is what you are like: You are a piece, but you contain the whole. What a marvelous design this is! You are always connected to God—you are always God—and yet you have your own unique existence or part to play in the Whole. You are whole within yourselves and you are also a part within the Whole. You are both. You are both an individual and divine. The description of me as “the Son of God” expresses this quite nicely.

You are Sons or Daughters of God as well. You and I come from the Father, and we are all heirs to the Father’s gifts and bounty. And eventually, the Sons and Daughters become the Father, or merge with the Father, as will also be the case someday. Everyone eventually returns home to the Oneness, merges into the Oneness from which they came. But that is an exceedingly long—and joyous—journey!

So, evolution is built into this hologram. The hologram—the Oneness—evolves, and all of creation evolves. The Oneness evolves as a result of the evolution of its creations. That is the plan, and if that isn’t the plan, that is at least what is happening—planned or not!

It is difficult to see the goodness, the perfection, the love behind it all in the third dimension, and that is as it is meant to be. Awakening gives you back the eyes that see the perfection. It returns you to your natural state, which was only temporarily lost, obscured by the machination that is the ego.

What fun it was to discover that it was all an illusion! What good news that is! Life is good after all. Once you discover this, you inevitably go out and teach this, share this from the rooftops. We are here to elevate you, to open your eyes to the Truth and to the bounty and love that is, in fact, right in front of you. Ask for this new perception, and it will be granted. I wish you all great peace and love. Thank you for being here. We are with you always.


More about Jesus Speaking: On Awakening to Love and the other books in the Jesus Speaking series...

This channeled message was shared in weekly online gatherings where Christ Consciousness Transmissions (CCTs) are offered by Gina Lake and her husband, Nirmala. These transmissions of higher consciousness will assist you in your spiritual awakening, in awakening to your true nature.