Awakening is not remembering... It's becoming
Why awakening isn’t about remembering divine perfection, but participating in creation itself.
Note: This piece draws from my original ideas, research, hooks, and metaphors. For editing and some wording, I’ve used AI tools trained on my own books and style, always blending technology with my hands-on curation and oversight. Thank you for being here—Jade.
You’ve heard the lines.
“Just wake up to who you really are.”
“Remember your true self.”
“Come home to the real you.”
It’s all over Instagram quotes and retreat pages… this idea that you’re already perfect, that life just made you forget.
This message sounds harmless, even holy. But it hides a deeper assumption… that your soul was already perfect, and life’s job is simply to help you remember that perfection.
The truth is more alive than that. You didn’t come here to remember your divinity. You came here to develop it.
But what if that’s not awakening at all?
What if remembering isn’t the point… becoming is?
Here’s what most people miss: there was never a flawless version of you buried somewhere in the past. The person you were before the pain wasn’t your true self waiting to be found. That version was still forming, still learning, still unfinished. The pain didn’t hide who you are… it’s part of what shaped you.
You were never lost. You were in progress.
The Big Idea
The popular idea in modern spirituality says you’re already whole and complete… that you just need to peel back the layers and remember your original light. It sounds comforting, but it quietly removes the purpose of being alive.
If we were already perfect, why come here at all?
We aren’t born enlightened beings who forgot ourselves. We’re born open, curious, and highly programmable. As children, we take on the beliefs, fears, and coping strategies of our parents and our culture. We build a personality designed to keep us safe, not necessarily to keep us free. That early version of you wasn’t wrong—it was just your first draft.
The goal of growth isn’t to return to that draft. It’s to consciously edit it.
To participate in your own evolution and become the person your past was preparing you to be.
More than that, it’s to participate in the creative process that made you possible in the first place—to take up your role as a co-creator in the evolution of consciousness itself.
The Breakdown
The Myth of the Lost Perfect Self
The story we’ve been sold goes like this: you were born radiant and pure, then life happened, you got wounded, and now you just need to remember your essence.
But you can’t “remember” what never fully existed. You weren’t a finished masterpiece before the pain… you were the raw material. Every experience, good or bad, has been sculpting the shape of your becoming.
Your early conditioning wasn’t a cosmic error. It was part of the design. It gave you contrast. It showed you what limits feel like so you could eventually choose something different. Without that structure, you’d have nothing to grow beyond. Pain doesn’t erase your essence; it develops it.
The Two Phases: Conditioning and Awakening
In the Next Level Human model, life unfolds in two broad movements.
1. The Conditioning Phase
This is where you learn how to survive. You pick up behaviors that help you belong or stay safe. You mimic your parents, adopt your culture’s values, and internalize the messages of your early environment. You make decisions… most of them unconscious… that start to shape your sense of identity.
This isn’t failure. It’s a necessary stage of human development. You need to build some kind of self before you can choose who that self will become.
2. The Awakening Phase
Eventually, something shakes that identity. A loss, a heartbreak, a deep dissatisfaction that refuses to go away. That disruption isn’t punishment… it’s an invitation. It pulls your attention to what’s no longer true, what no longer fits.
From there, you begin the real work: understanding your patterns, redefining the meaning of your story, and consciously designing who you want to be. Awakening isn’t about going back to innocence… it’s about building maturity.
This is what evolution looks like from the inside out.
The Three Lenses of Being
The Spiritual Lens:
You are consciousness expanding itself. Each lifetime, each challenge, is a chance for the universe to refine its own intelligence through you.
The Human Lens:
You are biology, psychology, and story intertwined. Your brain learns, your body remembers, and every experience leaves its mark. Nothing is permanent, but everything contributes.
The Next Level Human Lens:
You start as a set of inherited programs. Through pain and awareness, you begin to reprogram. You evolve by choosing… moment after moment… to live as a conscious co-creator rather than an unconscious participant.
From any lens, the insight is the same: you’re not here to return to a past version of yourself. You’re here to expand what life and consciousness can become through you.
Practical Takeaway
Stop trying to recover some “authentic self” that existed before things went wrong. There’s nothing to go back to.
Instead, ask what your pain has been trying to teach you about who you could become.
What part of me did this experience demand to grow?
What belief or behavior did it finally make visible?
What new possibility is trying to be born through this challenge?
You’re not here to reclaim who you were. You’re here to shape who you’re becoming.
Closing Thought
Growth doesn’t come from digging into the past for purity. It comes from engaging with the present as raw material. Every moment… every heartbreak, failure, and joy… is another chance to sculpt consciousness into something new.
You didn’t come here to remember perfection. You came to participate in creation. Your healing isn’t personal… it’s how the universe learns to know itself in new ways through you. Every act of awareness, every choice toward growth, is the universe evolving through human hands.
PS: If you’re done chasing a mythical “whole self” and ready to evolve into the version of you that helps consciousness itself expand, explore my Next Level Human coaching. It’s for people who want grounded spirituality, embodied growth, and real transformation. Spots are limited—don’t wait. 👉 http://www.nextlevelhuman.com/human-coaching
"You weren’t lost. You were in progress.”
That line reframes everything — Maybe it’s both — remembering the light and learning how to carry it. Divinity remembered is potential; divinity practiced is evolution
I liked without reading fully when I saw the substitle!yes,yes,yes!