It is also know as a Religious experience where an individual reports contact with a beyond and outside the ordinary range of human experience or understanding or reality, an encounter or union with God.

Having never had a spiritual awakening (despite 20+ years of working a 12 step program) I am merely speculating, but I suspect that all the self-awareness in the world will not conjure spirits.
I think you are using it as a euphemism for consciousness raising.

Enlightenment is awareness. By focusing on the permanent and not the temporal one gains a Divine perspective; thus one gains enlightenment / Awareness of the true being we are. This is also called a Divine perspective.
A Divine Perspective sees the calls for help, evaluates from a place of being centrist, then makes a decision while in centrist contemplation, introspects on that decision, then takes action of a God Qualified Nature to be of service. This entails Dominion ship of the Higher Spiritual Body or the True Being we are over the lower bodies we have. Proper energy flow for this is Spiritual to the Mental Body then to the Emotional Body then to the physical body. This is where the training comes into play. The Ego or false synthetic self is attached to the mental-emotional-physical form and does what it can to perpetuate identification with such. This is why non identification with the lower bodies is important to obtain; for the more one identifies with the lower bodies the more one forgets and does not know whom and what they truly are.
If a person does not know whom and what one truly is and thinks they are their mental thoughts — emotional feelings — physical form then how can they truly have a complete Divine Perspective? They cannot. They can have glimpses while working a program of growth. However until one has a real paratma experience whereby they have seen the Divine indweller and are able to commune with such they are still mostly caught up in identifying with the temporal instead of the permanent. If one allows the physical to rule over the emotional one will always be in turmoil. If one allows the emotional to rule over the mental one will always be in turmoil. If one allows the mental to rule over the Spiritual being we truly are one will always be in turmoil. All this is an example of backward energy flow. Beings that are practicing spirituality and growing who come more and more from a centrist demeanor do not suppress and repress emotions as what a lot of people think. They feel what they need to feel, but do not allow the feelings to control or dictate their actions into a misqualified reactive state, that perpetuates the creation of misqualified energy. They do however stay more and more centrist as they grow spiritually ultimately becoming the eye in life’s hurricane. Know this is not done all at once but in incremental stages which take patience and perseverance.
Lower body identification is where all fear stems from. Spiritual Identification is where all real growth comes from.
I hope these words aid all who read, internalize, and apply them.

Absolutely! A real paratma experience is a Divine spiritual awakening and a result of true self awareness.

I believe that it's merely acceptance.
Everything simply is, and you've reached a point where you've accepted it for what it is.

it could be imagination...
it could also be an odd way to describe satori, which is self-awareness in spades...

No
It's a result of being aware of your surroundings.
You can never be truly self aware because you can never precept yourself at the fullest(Limitations of perception and limitations of human senses)

I used to think that it was the result of prolonged self awareness. As I grow older I am tending to shake that programming off as too complicated to be correct. I am now thinking that it is much more simple than I would have thought in the past. Maybe it is a necessary step to go through that process to finally arrive, I do not know. Surely there are plenty of distractions out there in the world where I live but at the same time it seems to me to be useless to add more of them. It is a spiritual awakening to me to realize that I do not need to inhabit the lower regions of the emotional scale and to camp out at the higher end of this same scale, in other words choose to enjoy life.
Cheers!

Man may exist, evolve if he must, mutate if that is possible, or get augmented, as in the sense of the modern physical modification. But these are all physical. In the spiritual sense, he has nothing more to improve. Everything has been all there provided for, in its entirety.
If we accept the Christian concept about the spirit "being the breath of the eternal," then we also have to accept, as a corollary to this, the fact that the spirit would have to be perfect right at the start.
Also, those of us who accept the Eastern thought that "the soul is a spark of the Divine," will also have to accede to the consequent deduction that the soul will be as that Divinity is. A chip is similar to the original block.
From all the foregoing, the soul then, will have its inherent divinity, immortality, magnanimity, and all the attributes of the greater entity from which it was derived from.
All the soul has to do is to be aware of these. It is "spiritual awakening" that has to be undergone by the soul that has been lethargic to all his divine nature. And it is to this end that the Christian devotees aspire for in their piety. It could be the proverbial "light at the end of the tunnel" that the Tibetan monks hope to see in their meditations. Or one of the milestones along the path of a self-worthy Yogi, in his quest to "yoke" with the Supreme Consciousness.
Spiritual Awakening could then result from all these awareness. Or it could also be equally true that "awareness" proceeds from Spiritual Awakening.