The path to self-consciousness is a real experience.
It is a perilous, torturous, traumatic path which will require you to abandon what you're used to and what you possess now to retrace your steps back to primordial things. To the essential truths.
Man who becomes self-conscious is a man that is confident, self-actualized, and no longer an ordinary human being.
The self-conscious man does not want to escape from the world to save himself, he wants to gain knowledge of the world in order to expand his own self.
To take this even further, one can go on this road of self-consciousness to better understand God, at least under the Hermetic doctrine.
To the Hermetics, man can actually know God. Our knowledge of God is necessary for his completion or for his ability to *be* God.
God does not ignore mankind. He recognizes man fully and at the same time yearns for his creation to recognize him back, to look onto him. Remember the law of recognition as summarized in the Postulates.
Man wants to know God. God wants to be known by the most glorious of his creations.
Man's knowledge of God becomes God's knowledge of himself.
God is distinct from the world yet part of it and needs the world to complete himself. A maker cannot exist without a creation. A father cannot exist without a son.
The knowledge (or awareness) of God can only be found through the articulation of reality via word.
God is not material things nor is there a god in every physical object, this is paganism. But rather all things are bound together in a unified whole held by a common Logos. Nature can be seen as the "body of God" or his corporeality, but God is more than just his body, but rather the essence and the laws which govern all levels of reality as well, macro and micro.
Hegel:
"Every individual is a blind link in the chain of absolute necessity, along which the world develops. Every individual could raise himself to domination over a great length of this chain only if he realized the goal of this great necessity and, by virtue of this knowledge, learns to speak the magic words to evoke its shape. The knowledge of how to simultaneously absorb and elevate oneself beyond the total energy of suffering and antithesis that has dominated the world and all forms of its development for thousands of years -- this knowledge can only be gathered from philosophy alone."
To Hegel, the (universal) state is God on Earth.
Der Staat ist die Wirklichkeit der konkreten Freiheit
The state is the reality of concrete freedom.
Man can only achieve genuine self-consciousness when he becomes a universal category, as summarized in the Postulates.
Perhaps this could also be viewed as the "apotheosis" of universal man - to learn from the example of God or objectively emulate the monotheistic God to rule over his earthly dominion has a collective steward: omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent.
Marx wrote in an early piece that for the working class to become the hegemon and ruling power of the world, the battlecry of the proletariat must be "I am nothing, but I must become everything."